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New Years

 

Proudly displayed war wounds, bright rubbed red on knees and elbows with neck unturning and jaw clenched.  Back of head throbbing from scalp hair pulled at roots, side stretched now stretches not no more.  Eyes dried as from seeing but eyes were closed then opened but closed.  Nose impacted, bright red too, no sleep from the clinch and fidget, too much up and hands wander up again and again up.

            “Maybe it’s good you’re leaving.  If we did this for a week straight…I’d give out and die.”

            And so barely was, so barely improbably wonderfully was. So by chance, so by fortune, so by barely coinciding coincidence and watchclock running with minutes to run run stream down-wash away potential but no: stayed, stayed its course, stayed but must be going must be off, waited once: must be caught, collared and captured.  New year, new beginning same old time continued but not, not: portioned, sectioned, severed at cycle-point and swung again: new year.  And new.  And first.  And brought to it, love and lovely, sense dark and full, devotional, ritual initiate.

 

            We’d just finished a game of Big Buck Hunter Pro.

            “I’m going to give you a chance to smack me,” I said, and kissed her.  Everyone had cleared out of the lower level of the bar, but the bathroom was at the bottom of the stairs and we were trying to ignore both the traffic and the sickly sweet urinal cake smell.

            We kissed slowly, searchingly, then hungrily but broke off.  I bounced away, not pushing my luck.  She listened for people coming down the stairs and I started putting on my coat.  Then she grabbed me and pulled me between Buck Hunter and Silver Streak Bowling so her ass was on a barrel used to set drinks on.  Her legs wrapped around me, my hands traced her back.  She hesitated again, hearing footsteps.

            “Forget about them,” I said, “to them we’re just another couple making out; they’re not here.”

            She pulled me back down.

 

            Lizzie Abramson, Lizzie Abramson, I’m reading about cooking and listening to funk.  I’m trying marrow and tripe and ligament.  The Culinary Institute of America is an evil empire and hotels in Poughkeepsie are expensive, yet I shall endure.  As I feel this I’m looking back at it from somewhere in the future where it has ended and it makes me sad.  Future me, come back to here in your mind.

 

            Snack Dragon is a taco shack in the East Village.  Started going there in July while living on the L.E.S. for a month.  I was living in a different neighborhood every month at that point: one in Lefferts Gardens, one in Williamsburg, settled in Kensington.  Wandered by drunk and fell in love with their fish tacos, a habit I picked up in Los Angeles; they use sole, instead of whitefish, and add chipotle coleslaw.  Wound up befriending Ella, the girl who works there Saturday nights, a bunny enthusiast, and hanging out with her for hours on end when she’s stuck on slow nights.  One day a blonde girl is working there instead; we get along well and talk about several things but she has a boyfriend, and when I come back a few weeks later she’s quit to start a business in custom furniture and I felt pretty stupid I didn’t get her info. 

            As the months go by I still bring music for Ella but I am moving to neighborhoods where it’s harder and harder to get to the Dragon and the weather is getting worse.  One day when I’m waiting to pick a friend up from JFK I go there and a different girl, young, rail thin, pale as parchment, with a cool, unusually shaggy hairstyle (I later find is patterned on Mick Mars’), a softly sharp chin and dark eyes, is working the counter.  She had a book with pictures of hundreds of different varieties of chickens, “A Pocketful of Poultry,” an abridged version of “Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds.”  Later someone would steal it and I’d get her the long version for her birthday.  We spoke for several hours, I even brought her up to my friend later but then didn’t make it back to the Shack for over a month.

            When I did get back, December 18, Ella told me the next day was Lizzie’s last day.  Oh shit, I thought.  So under the pretext of bringing a new mix I make sure to go get her number.  I planned to get there late so she’d be there for certain but couldn’t keep away; I figured if she wasn’t there I could go kill time.  I walk in and see that she was on the early shift and is about to head out; 10 more minutes and I would have missed her entirely, end of story. 

            We talk, I tell her about the audition to teach the LSAT I had at Kaplan the day before, how I didn’t have anything non-academic to teach so I turned my story of how 1 in 100 Caucasians of Western European descent are immune to HIV into “How to Cure AIDS,” starting with, “So…how many of you have cured AIDS before?” and one girl who wasn’t paying attention raised her hand.

            The girl from the next shift was there and we didn’t have a moment alone, so I couldn’t ask her number until we stepped outside.  I asked her immediately and she said yes and gave it to me, but I couldn’t tell if she was thrilled about it or not.  Then I asked why it was her last day and she told me she’s moving to Poughkeepsie/Hyde Park to begin at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) on January 2nd.  This was December 18, 2007.  And more, she was about to go to Vermont the next day until after Christmas. 

            It was a Wednesday, I know because my friend at The Gate bar in Park Slope was putting on vintage Christmas Ales from 2003 and 2005.  The best were the 2005 Seriously Bad Elf from Ridgeway and the 2006 Ayinger Celebrator Dopplebock.

            We were walking back and I was making her laugh through the time-honored tradition of recounting old articles from The Onion as if they’re your own jokes (from sports: “Steaming Black Guy Heads Occurring Later Each Year”’ from history: “Government Invents Bomb Proof Desk”).  She was telling me about her love of funk and the genealogy of Parliament through the Bootsy Collins and Junie Morrison eras (Junie, Bootsy and Roger Clinton together wrote “Let’s Play House,” which was the sample for “The Humpty Dance”).  At one point she stepped into the street and I pulled her back onto the curb.  It was at the corner of Great Jones Street, across from where the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan picture was taken long long ago.  Later, she would tell me this was the first moment she actually considered me.

            I walked her to her house in the West Village where she lived with her parents.  I asked her if she wanted to come to the beer tasting but she hesitated and said she had to pack for the morning.  Later I found out it’s because she was only 19.

 

            I figured that was that; we had two nice talks and a walk but I couldn’t tell if she had any interest in me; not to mention the 28-19 age difference.  I’d rang her with my number so she had it on callback, but she left the phone at Snack Dragon, so it wouldn’t even be obviously my number.  I honestly had no hope about it.

            Then on Monday, December 24, she called me and asked me out on a date for the 30th to go to a hookah bar in Queens.  I don’t smoke so I suggested we get drunk and go see “Alien Vs. Predator: Resurrection.” 

            We met in front of the IFC Center (they were playing the full-length “Fanny and Alexander” and Greg Araki’s “Smiley Face) and went to the Blind Tiger beforehand.  She got a Banh Mi and I got a Cuban.  I get her a Bruges Zöt, meaning “Bruges Fools,” named for the inhabitants of that strange medieval Belgium city, and I get a “Groundskeeper Spilly Scottish Ale” from Sixpoint on gravity (basically just a tilted cask, tapped directly).  Next I get her a Maredsous 8 and I have some Blue Point Old Howling Bastard barleywine.

            We walked across to Union Square and saw AVP:R, which was pleasingly terrible.  She knew some of the mythology so the last scene made her happy, with the head of the corporation that started it all getting the Predator’s weapon.  It was chill and raining but instead of going to a restaurant or bar we decided to walk to the meatpacking district, get beers in paper bags, and go out to a pier on the Hudson.  We were on one of the cobblestone streets at a corner just near the Gaslight when I kissed her first, my hand lightly pulled at the sleeve of her raincoat.  We walked on, and got two cans, a Bud for her and I had a Tetley’s English Ale.  We walked out across the West Side Highway, passing Gansevoort Street, which I used to think was named for Herman Melville’s brother, the acclaimed political orator, but have since found out I was mistaken.  Out along the water we passed the Christopher Street pier and kept going south. 

When we got to Pier 40 we found it was locked for the night.  It was next to a dotted half-submerged field of decaying wooden piles, marking where Pier 42 used to be.  Even in the cold and light rain the odd gull was perched here and there.  There is a water treatment plant with strange, vaguely Egyptian rose-marble structures and benches nearby, but they’re all too cold and wet to sit upon.  We drink our beers and talk about our families.  She begins to shiver and I envelop her, her ice-cold cheek against my neck.  She was standing a step above me and I kissed her.  She said, “You’re a sweetheart.”

We start walking back and get stopped by traffic; I grab her jacket greedily to kiss her again by she demurs.  I say, “You parried.” She says, “Let’s go warm up.”  We go to the Barrow Street Ale House and get a Chicken Quesadilla.  I drink a Chimay Grande Reserve and I get her a Lindeman’s Framboise Lambic, super-fruity dessert beer, then we go downstairs to look for Big Buck Hunter and kill virtual Big Horn Sheep and Antelope. 

 

            On the barrel, she grinded against me, I wrapped my right arm under her left, around her back, and pulled her to me by her shoulder.  She breathed against my neck, her teeth brushing lightly, my hand slid under her shirt and across her belly, never going so high as her breasts.  Her stomach was firm, almost muscular, I lay my palm flat, inverted, my wrist at her navel, fingers just within the belt of her jeans, then grasped their front and pulled them up taut, her mouth opened against mine, hand a fist in my hair pulling me into her, my hands skimmed around her sides and nails drew long red lines on her pale back, it bowed upwards as she writhed and I drew her up to standing where we clasped together, arms around, pulling on cloth for purchase, eyes tight, tracing cheeks and jawbones and soft throats.  The sounds of the world swam back and we held hands up the stairs.

            We returned to the West 4th Street Station where the evening began seven hours before.  She lives blocks away, a West Village girl who never needed to learn how to drive (I begin teaching her, later, in supermarket parking lots in Hyde Park, only a few lessons).  I pull her roughly by the collar and we kiss, then again, then I release and run down the subway stairs. 

The F train didn’t come for ages.

 

            Due to my job I was working New Year’s Eve Day, so I canceled plans to visit relatives.  I figured my roommates might drag me somewhere, and no great loss if not; I have bad luck with holidays, especially ones where something special is supposed to happen.  I don’t even leave the house on Valentine’s Day.

            On Valentine’s Day 2001 I brought the girl I was seeing out to a beautiful, secluded Thai restaurant where she told me the entire time we’d been together she had been seeing someone else and now she wanted to be with him.

            On New Year’s Eve 2004 my friend Marc brought Zima Blue for some reason for us to drink before we went out to a party.  I began vomiting at 10:30pm and did not stop until an hour into the New Year.

            On New Year’s Eve 2006 in Denver, Marc and I were meeting his girlfriend at a club party she talked us into, with U2 cover bands and an open bar, instead of going to see DeVotchKa play a huge gypsy-burlesque party at the Bluebird.  The band sucked and played the newer stuff, the bar was watered-down bottom-shelf, his girlfriend picked a fight with him and they broke up by 11pm.  On the upside, I wound up sleeping with the now-ex-girlfriend’s lesbian friend a few days later after kissing her at midnight.

            New Year’s Eve 2007 began with Lizzie calling to ask if I wanted to come out with her and her friends.  I hadn’t even known if I was going to see her before she left town on the 2nd so I said yes but she had to give me an hour to get into the city from Kensington.  I sit on the couch and watch a special of SNL commercials and try not to drink too much.  It occurs to me vaguely that she might come over.  Nah.  Ten o’clock and I’m a touch worried.  I call her to say if I don’t leave before eleven I won’t make it anywhere before midnight.  She says, “We’re all going separate ways, and I have to spend a little more time with a friend, but why don’t I come over there?”  I tell her to hurry because it would suck to be stuck on the F train at midnight.  Time passes.  Midnight approaches.  Midnight passes.  It is now 2008.  Some awful band is playing behind awful Ryan Seacrest.  I have a playlist set up to suit her taste for Jeff Beck, Small Faces, etc., pushing my own baroque-pop obsessions aside for the moment, I turn it on and resist the urge to text.  My roommates could come home at any time.  I go outside in just a T-shirt and stand in the cold watching my breath and looking down the deserted street.  Back inside, pacing, pick up cellphone, open, close, sit stand breathe.  Calm.  Breathe.  Open a beer.  Breathe.  12:15am, 1/1/2008.  Outside in my T-shirt again, watching my breath.  Looking down the street, I see her in the distance.

 

I’m drinking Chelsea’s Frosty’s Winter Wheat, a 10% alcohol wheat wine.  I give her an Avery Old Jubilation from Boulder, CO.  She warms up and we talk, about what I have no memory at all.  We kiss.  We run our hands over each others’ backs, down arms, through hair, brush the backs of cheeks with backs of hands, up under shirts skimming across skin.  We make our way to the bedroom where Jeff Beck’s “Blow by Blow” is playing and tumble onto the bed.  Some clothes are removed quickly until our chests are pressed together, wrists kissed, palms creeping confidently but with a sense of moment toward inner thighs.  There is a shift.  All the clothes come off.  I kiss across her chest, then down her stomach, my knee pressed hard in, twisting, her writhing.  I go down, one hand pressing her to the bed the other with fingers in her mouth.  I push her legs back, my hands behind her knees, back and apart, she shakes beneath; her fist in my hair, pulling pressing me in.

            “I want you to fuck me,” she says, “but…I’ve never done this before.”

Apparently people actually say that. 

I pause.  She mistakes it for hesitation.  “Is this what you want?” I ask.

            “I mean,” she says, “I’m leaving in two days, we shouldn’t start anything serious, but, yes, I want you now.”

            “Pardon, just, take a second.  Are you absolutely certain?”

            “Yes.  Does it bother you?”

            “I think it’s great.  I think it’s incredible.”

            Should I not tell this part?  What can you say to tell?  No technical description.  No records of moaning.  It is in the moaning, yes, but more in stifled moans; it’s in the breathing, held breath, but more in caught breath, forced out; it’s in the impulse to pull back for relief being stopped, controlled; in the eyes closed, squeezed shut, dull unfocused opened.

            Patti Smith plays “Gloria,” The Faces play “Stay with Me,” Bootsy plays “Vanish in Our Sleep,” Jeff Beck plays “You Know What I Mean,” The Ohio Players play “Ecstasy,” Junie Morrison plays “Super Spirit.”

            Looking at one another, clasping together, in the eyes, measuring each movement; then closing our eyes and retreating deep within our separate selves, finding the atom at the center of the sensation where we are joined and bringing it back to the surface, expanding it outward until it fills the room and the house and the street and Brooklyn and New York City and on, joined in the same vibration, held, suspended in the imperceptible tremor and held; and breathe breathe together scrambling for traction, insensible to slips and scrapes and burns, clambering over silly limbs and blankets to keep the vibration ringing out, chasing it across the space you inhabit together, missing, losing, locating, finding it, holding it, pinning it, restraining it; it deepens and tectonic plates shift inside of us and realign, burn and melt into one another from the shifting, the pressing, burn and crumble and melt and meld together and resettle differently.

            Collapse; both struggle for breath, inner elbows and knees rubbed raw bright red, scrapes and sprains, joints twisted, cottonmouth, sweat-angels beneath on the sheets.  Flat on backs, chests rise and fall, my arm draped crooked across her chest, hers under crooks up to brush the hairs on the back of my neck with the backs of her fingers.  Then twist together and entwine, nestle and burrow and clutch, huddle together, wrap and pull harder, try to compact to a ball of clay, then a point, then an atom, to fuse now.  But time swims back.  The world swims back.  In the perfect clay ball, the fused atom, the cracks appear; a hand, a leg, are discernible from the mass, peel away, become distinct and separate.  Dull eyes focus, a hand wipes the forehead, a torn lip is tasted, a strained muscle cramps, is stretched, the hot sweat cools.

            Then looking at one another again.  Touching again, tentatively.  Looking at oneself.  Feeling to see where the difference is.  Not being able to quantify it, but feeling it is there, feeling change, feeling other somewhere inside you.  Turning back outside to one another.  And again, beginning again, different this time. Beginning from a different place, as different people.

            I took a picture of her then, tousled hair, beauty, looking out of the frame or not anywhere outside at all.

 

            On the 2nd she moved to Hyde Park, on the 5th I drove up for the weekend. 

            What if I never stumbled drunkenly into the Snack Dragon back in July?  Never befriended Ella?  What if I never lived on the West Coast before and became enamored of the fish tacos that brought me back to the Dragon again and again?  What if she hadn’t had those two days for us before she moved?  What if I came by late on Lizzie’s last day?  What if I hadn’t pulled her back from the street?  Such a thin line leading from her life to mine.

            A day’s difference; a ten-minute difference; my hand on the back of her jacket, grasping it, pulling her back onto the curb, a moment of difference.