Excerpt: "You Might Not Make It After All" (Charlotte)
I wake up to the sound of Xavier violently hitting the canvas with a paintbrush. Time for another masterpiece, I suppose. I’ve given up on asking him to keep the noise down while I’m sleeping. He never listens to me anyway. Fucking artists. I mean, I get it. When inspiration hits, the creative juices, the muse, whatever the fuck, you can’t get in the way. And if you do, there’s a distinct possibility you might get injured. Emotionally, physically, it’s not worth it. And Xavier has a violent temperament. Not, like, slap you, punch you, throw-you-up-against-a-wall violent, but throwing-shit-around-the-room violent. So we came to a compromise. If you’re gonna throw something around the apartment, it might as well be paint.
That’s why this apartment (this shitty, cold apartment) would make an amazing photograph. Somehow Xavier managed to find what seems like the last crumbling, decrepit, condemned, untouched-by-gentrification building left in the Meatpacking District, and the plumbing only works properly about three days out of the week, and the ceiling leaks, and the floors groan, and forget about any actual heat source other than blankets, hot plates and each other. But the paint-splattered walls are breathtaking. Mixtures of red, yellow, orange, black, dripping down the walls as if by design. I once joked to Xavier that this was what the inside of his brain must look like, but he just kind of grunted and went back to his canvas. I meant it as a compliment, but I’m not sure he understood that. He’s not the kind of person who takes compliments well. Some artists do their work for money or fame or whatever, but Xavier does it to clear up his head. “Get the nonsense out,” he says. I’m not sure what he means, but I nod anyway. I like him because of his nonsense.
That, and he fulfills me. I could try to beat around the bush and say that that’s a euphemism for something nice, pretty, flowery, but why bother? He’s a good lover. Whatever his flaws (and there are many), he came at the exact right time that I needed somebody to take me, embrace me, excite me, explore me, satisfy me. Socially selfish? Obnoxiously monosyllabic? I don’t give a shit. As my friend Leah would so eloquently put it, he knows how to “get all up in that junk.” A penis to me is usually just a means to an end, untrustworthy and clumsy, and if I’m keeping count, has a severely high disappointment-to-success ratio. Not Xavier. For whatever reason (confidence, a refusal to masturbate, an intake of a completely dangerous cocktail of drugs, being three years younger than my tired-ass late-20s self), whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
You’ve come a long way, penis. Pun intended. And completely against everything I’ve ever believed in, it’s amazing how many times I’ve gone down on him. Because that’s not me. Every time it came up (pun, again, intended) in my personal life, I always had Leah’s voice bouncing through my brain: “I love penis, don’t get me wrong, but I ain’t putting that shit in my mouth.” It’s extremely distracting. This sentence popped up during intimate moments with at least three guys. But with Xavier, that voice never emerges.
It’s best doing it when he’s painting. As long as I could make some room among the paint cans, it feels like I’m part of the creative process. Tell me that’s not the case, and I’ll spit in your face and call you a liar. One time, he finished on the canvas, and I laughed for three hours. Because when that load hits paint, that’s where it’s staying. And so he left it. He told people who came by and admired the painting that he meant to do it. Bullshit. I was there.
And no, I don’t spend every waking moment thinking about Leah’s take on my sex life. Just this waking moment. Before I woke up, I was dreaming about the smoothie place where we both worked back home in Seattle. That’s where I’d met her. Like any of my dreams (and I have to assume everybody else’s dream), it didn’t actually look like the real smoothie place, but like something you’ve never seen before (existing outside of time, space and physical possibility), but you still recognize it with no questions asked. In the dream, we weren’t making smoothies. Nobody was in line. I think we were closed. We went to the backroom, next to the big refrigerator coolers where they keep the juices and the frozen yogurt and the syrups, talking about childhood memories (mine based mostly in the north end of Seattle, hers 30 miles south in Federal Way). Leah said something about being scared by a completely benign Saturday morning cartoon. Then I said something about the black eye I got in first grade when I stood too close behind a kid swinging a baseball bat. Then, in the dream, the same bat appeared in my hands. And just to show how much it can fucking hurt to get a black eye thanks to a baseball bat, I pulled it back and swung it at Leah, hitting her in the chest, knocking her out the back door and into the alley.
I remind myself to never tell Leah about this dream. She’s been around me at some major transitional life moments and knows way too much about me, but I doubt she’d want to know that I was dreaming about bludgeoning her.
I roll over on the decrepit mattress, floor level, reach out, and grab my phone. 8:19 a.m. Motherfucker. I’ve only been asleep for three hours. But Xavier doesn’t care what time it is. I run my hand through my hair, ratty and dirty from days of not showering (save for all the rain outside), rub my eyes, and look over at Xavier. He’s switched over to using his hands as his tools. He isn’t always one to use a brush for very long, but usually he uses something between his skin and the canvas. Not this time. He’s reaching into the buckets, two at a time, one with each hand, grabbing up globs of color and throwing it onto the white. Each time, he steps forward, furrows his brow, then passes his fingers through, over, underneath, around, until it’s to his liking. And he’s doing it fast, like a hopped-up rodent. Whatever he’s doing, I don’t understand it, but it’s not my job to understand. I do notice that he’s letting the acrylic paint drip over the sides of the buckets (a big no-no), because if he puts the lids back on without cleaning the rim, those cans are gonna seal themselves shut forever.
Fucking artists.
We met at a party. Not really a party, actually. When somebody says party, that tends to indicate that some form of actual planning was put into it. It does to me, at least. This was more of an ongoing affair, a gathering, a Hey, come on over, pick up a handle of something strong on your way, maybe grab one of your hot, skinny friends, too, Mama needs some eye candy thing. Mama is like that. She likes to say that hers is a place where the despondent youth of America can gather, feel safe, have a hot meal, feel free to express themselves however they see fit. Really, she’s just a horny old chick, mid-40s, ugly, probably barren, who has a four-story warehouse in Chelsea and likes to pretend that she’s the guardian of the downtrodden twentysomethings. And if she convinces somebody to join her on her gigantic bed and “get all up in that junk,” then each gathering is a success. And those who visit her boudoir repeatedly get to stay longer, between the soirees, when she isn’t drunk and/or stoned. It’s not prostituting yourself out if there’s no exchange of money, right?
I don’t like to call her Mama, and she has to realize that if we were the kind of person who ended up in her orbit in the first place, we very likely had issues with our own actual parents. But that’s the name she chose for herself, and it’s not a point worth arguing.
Xavier (she calls him “X,” which I fucking hate, like he was some kind of mutant or drug or something) is one of the ones who “gets to stay longer,” and it’s not like I was gonna get mad about that, because she had him first, and I’m not interested in being a usurper or owning anybody, and it’s not like that anyway with Xavier. I wouldn’t want him saying he had me, because there’s nothing to be had. What is this, the 1950s?
Also, Mama really likes his paintings. Whenever I feel the bullshit teenage pangs of jealousy, which I know are absolutely irrelevant to our situation, I just remember that. She has more mainstream works in her bedroom (Hockney, Basquiat, Warhol, Kandinsky, if you want to call that mainstream), but the rest of the warehouse is taken up by whatever her army of young’uns feel at the moment and express artistically. So there are chalk portraits of beat poets, rows of disproportionate breasts with erect nipples drawn in crayon, phallic sculptures made of scorched copper wiring, piles of sheet music wired together with untwisted hangers, smashed guitars and drum sets with “life/death” written on them in magic marker, spraypainted caricatures of historical figures, massive collages of rock ‘n roll flyers (I helped a little with that one), and an entire wall of empty liquor bottles stuccoed together. And Xavier’s paintings.
It’d seem more ugly and stupid if it weren’t also so fucking amazing to look at, to sit in a corner and just stare. What I’ve learned in my 27 years is that art isn’t always about beauty. It’s about the experience. And the more people that are at Mama’s wandering about, doing illicit things, eating all the food and generally being wild fucktards, the better chance you have at taking in the whole damn thing without having to deal with Mama’s brandy breath. It’s like one giant, interactive art gallery run by a drunk dragon, or a heroin-addicted troll. And that’s something I can get behind. She never tries to fuck me, though. Only into the boys. She says she’ll share a boy with somebody if it comes to that, but I’ve never seen it happen. I also think she knows not to mess with me. I made sure of that the first day I met her, when some asshole beanie-wearing motherfucker grabbed my tit and I beat him with an unopened tall can. Steel Reserve. There are worse ways to make a point.
When I met Xavier, it was some kind of pseudo-special night at Mama’s (hence me saying “party”), so maybe it was a tad more organized than normal, but all that really means was that there was a general theme to the night. Remote Attraction. Mama, presumably to spread whatever kind of neo-hippie bullshit she had just heard about, wanted everybody who showed up to meet somebody new, more specifically somebody they would never otherwise approach. For whatever reason. Stupid clothes. Obvious hygiene issues. I had heard about Remote Attraction and Mama’s place when I found the handwritten flyer (only one of 50, I learned later) sticking out of a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind at some shitty independent bookstore. I was in a blah kind of mood, and it’s not like I had a job or anything, so I gave it a shot. After showing up at the warehouse and getting a bear hug introduction from Mama, she gave me the theme prompt. I rolled my eyes, but I was already there, and thought, might as well. I’ve done stupider things, believe me.
I approached Xavier, not the other way around. He would never do that. Not even if Mama forced him. And I didn’t approach him because he appeared awful or looked like a psychopath, but after walking up two floors of the building, I saw that he was the only one not engaged in any kind of conversation or physical activity. So I guess I cheated. Whatever. Like I care what Mama thinks. I got to meet Xavier, and that’s all that really matters.
He was quiet. I like quiet guys. Guys who talk my ear off bug the hell out of me. Just shut up for a goddamn minute and maybe you’ll hear me not giving a shit. With Xavier, we can be silent for days and not have it be some kind of relationship red flag. Because it’s not a relationship. We hang out, we fuck a lot, I stay over but don’t live here, and neither one of us says anything about our goddamn feelings.
So I’m not gonna yell at Xavier for waking me up. I can’t threaten him with leaving him (even though this recent stay has lasted almost two weeks now, which is mildly domestic), because he’d just continue to exist.
I stand up, just barely managing to keep my balance, and walk over to the bathroom, making sure not to knock into the tossed-off paintings leaning against the wall along the way. I see myself in the mirror and curse my dark brown roots. I make a mental note to buy more bleach and blue color corrector to get that icy platinum blonde shine, then open up the medicine cabinet. There are the expired antidepressants Xavier still hasn’t opened, a reminder of his family “trying to meddle in his life.” There are the birth control pills Xavier doesn’t care if I take. (Xavier, being terrified of disease, is one of the few guys I know who actually likes using condoms.) There are the little scissors we both use to trim our pubic hair. There’s the cherry lip gloss Xavier likes, says it’s the only thing in his life he’s ever enjoyed tasting. I don’t like lip gloss, so it’s only for special occasions. And at the top, I see our iPod. When I say “our iPod,” I don’t mean it to sound goofy or cutesy or whatever the fuck. I just mean that we both chipped in to buy it used from my cousin Grace, and the playlists are split completely down the middle, 50% Xavier and 50% me. Every so often they bleed into each other, sometimes with obvious choices (Kraftwerk, Joy Division, the Stooges, Depeche Mode), sometimes something that surprises one or both of us (the Cars, Eddie Money, Richard Marx, Gary Numan).
This time there’s something new. A note: “Hit play. Song is cued.” I take the iPod into my hands, put the earbuds in, and hit play. I don’t know the song. The readout doesn’t help either. He had retitled the track. “For Charlotte.” No artist. It’s dream pop. An instrumental track. Entirely. Whatever he wants to tell me, he’s not gonna make it easy with anything like lyrics or a message. I have to feel it. Goddamn it.
I walk out of the bathroom. “What is this?” Xavier remains silent, grabs another two handfuls of paint, and lobs it onto the canvas. I’m surprised he doesn’t seem to care that with each dip of his hands he’s letting errant colors bleed into the wrong paint cans. “It’s good. I don’t know why, but it’s good.” I lie. The music is meaningless as far as I can tell. The guitars (too many of them) strum nicely but not with any real oomph, and the violins in the background sound like they’re hiding. “Are they gonna be playing here soon? Some band I should know but have never heard of, and are therefore cool because nobody has heard of them?” Xavier takes a step back, looks at the canvas, then gives it a one-two punch, making an image I’ve never seen before. It excites me. “Who is this?” Nothing. Just grunts.
I walk behind him, making sure to keep my distance. He hates it when I hover while he’s working. After a lot of trial and error, I learned that four feet was the minimum amount of distance I could stand from him and not disturb him. Unless I’m blowing him. But the note, the music, this is something new, and I slowly approach him.
“Is this the soundtrack to this? Do I see this, hear this, and understand everything?” I step into the four-foot zone. I take out the right earbud and raise it to his ear. “Let’s listen to it together.” As I make contact, he flinches and pushes my hand aside. Still looking forward. “Okay, okay. Got it. Don’t want to disrupt the process.”
As I walk over to the dirty window, I let the earbud fall to my side but keep the other one in. I like doing this. It makes me feel like I’m in a movie. I can carry on a conversation and have a backing soundtrack. Everybody should do this.
“Looks like the rain has finally stopped,” I say. “It’s been an entire week. Goddamn deluge. I almost thought we were gonna have to build an ark.” I wait for some kind of chuckle from Xavier, but get nothing.
I put my hands up against the glass and lean in, taking in the awesome view from Xavier’s third-story home. Manhattan is finally under sunny skies. The neighborhood looks clean, even though I know that would never completely be the case. But like my mother always says, “Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.” Well, my mother says that she said it, but she doesn’t know that I know that it’s from Taxi Driver. I think that after you’re an English teacher for long enough, you lose the ability to create your own aphorisms.
The window feels warm on my forehead. “It’s a nice day. Let’s wander. Let’s walk east through Brooklyn until our legs fall out from under us. Let’s sneer at old ladies and laugh at children. Let’s kick signposts and jump over parking meters. Let’s hand out cheap wine to the homeless and pot to the disgruntled teenagers. Let’s talk in rhymes and riddles. Let’s walk through cemeteries and pretend we’re the recently deceased. Let’s walk into the yards and tag graffiti onto the trains like we lived in the 1980s. Let’s drink bad coffee from vending machines and scream at passing buses. Let’s get out of here. Whaddya think?”
Behind me, the noise of Xavier’s art ceases. He wouldn’t want to admit this, but this is always the moment where he wants some reassurance from me about what he’s doing. He never listens to my opinion, but I think he at least likes that somebody else is present.
I turn. “Is it finished? You want a lowly civilian’s opinion?”
Xavier looks at me and smirks. He never smirks. His eyes. I’ve never seen them less troubled. His eyes are always troubled. That was part of the attraction. But now he looks like an excited child having just discovered something wonderful. And he wants to share it with the world. All I can do is smile in return.
The music hits its crescendo, and Xavier takes his left hand, covered in a rainbow of color, and reaches behind him.
“It’s not my birthday for another four months,” I say, “so I don’t know what you’re so jovial about.” Silence. “Say something. Explain. Just put me out of my misery.”
Xavier nods. He brings his left hand back into view. He’s holding a gun, I don’t know what kind, brings it to his temple, and pulls the trigger. With a sickening blast, his brain matter sprays onto the canvas and sticks to the drying paint.
I don’t scream. I don’t shriek. I don’t cry. All I can think is…
I’m never giving another blowjob as long as I live.
That’s why this apartment (this shitty, cold apartment) would make an amazing photograph. Somehow Xavier managed to find what seems like the last crumbling, decrepit, condemned, untouched-by-gentrification building left in the Meatpacking District, and the plumbing only works properly about three days out of the week, and the ceiling leaks, and the floors groan, and forget about any actual heat source other than blankets, hot plates and each other. But the paint-splattered walls are breathtaking. Mixtures of red, yellow, orange, black, dripping down the walls as if by design. I once joked to Xavier that this was what the inside of his brain must look like, but he just kind of grunted and went back to his canvas. I meant it as a compliment, but I’m not sure he understood that. He’s not the kind of person who takes compliments well. Some artists do their work for money or fame or whatever, but Xavier does it to clear up his head. “Get the nonsense out,” he says. I’m not sure what he means, but I nod anyway. I like him because of his nonsense.
That, and he fulfills me. I could try to beat around the bush and say that that’s a euphemism for something nice, pretty, flowery, but why bother? He’s a good lover. Whatever his flaws (and there are many), he came at the exact right time that I needed somebody to take me, embrace me, excite me, explore me, satisfy me. Socially selfish? Obnoxiously monosyllabic? I don’t give a shit. As my friend Leah would so eloquently put it, he knows how to “get all up in that junk.” A penis to me is usually just a means to an end, untrustworthy and clumsy, and if I’m keeping count, has a severely high disappointment-to-success ratio. Not Xavier. For whatever reason (confidence, a refusal to masturbate, an intake of a completely dangerous cocktail of drugs, being three years younger than my tired-ass late-20s self), whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
You’ve come a long way, penis. Pun intended. And completely against everything I’ve ever believed in, it’s amazing how many times I’ve gone down on him. Because that’s not me. Every time it came up (pun, again, intended) in my personal life, I always had Leah’s voice bouncing through my brain: “I love penis, don’t get me wrong, but I ain’t putting that shit in my mouth.” It’s extremely distracting. This sentence popped up during intimate moments with at least three guys. But with Xavier, that voice never emerges.
It’s best doing it when he’s painting. As long as I could make some room among the paint cans, it feels like I’m part of the creative process. Tell me that’s not the case, and I’ll spit in your face and call you a liar. One time, he finished on the canvas, and I laughed for three hours. Because when that load hits paint, that’s where it’s staying. And so he left it. He told people who came by and admired the painting that he meant to do it. Bullshit. I was there.
And no, I don’t spend every waking moment thinking about Leah’s take on my sex life. Just this waking moment. Before I woke up, I was dreaming about the smoothie place where we both worked back home in Seattle. That’s where I’d met her. Like any of my dreams (and I have to assume everybody else’s dream), it didn’t actually look like the real smoothie place, but like something you’ve never seen before (existing outside of time, space and physical possibility), but you still recognize it with no questions asked. In the dream, we weren’t making smoothies. Nobody was in line. I think we were closed. We went to the backroom, next to the big refrigerator coolers where they keep the juices and the frozen yogurt and the syrups, talking about childhood memories (mine based mostly in the north end of Seattle, hers 30 miles south in Federal Way). Leah said something about being scared by a completely benign Saturday morning cartoon. Then I said something about the black eye I got in first grade when I stood too close behind a kid swinging a baseball bat. Then, in the dream, the same bat appeared in my hands. And just to show how much it can fucking hurt to get a black eye thanks to a baseball bat, I pulled it back and swung it at Leah, hitting her in the chest, knocking her out the back door and into the alley.
I remind myself to never tell Leah about this dream. She’s been around me at some major transitional life moments and knows way too much about me, but I doubt she’d want to know that I was dreaming about bludgeoning her.
I roll over on the decrepit mattress, floor level, reach out, and grab my phone. 8:19 a.m. Motherfucker. I’ve only been asleep for three hours. But Xavier doesn’t care what time it is. I run my hand through my hair, ratty and dirty from days of not showering (save for all the rain outside), rub my eyes, and look over at Xavier. He’s switched over to using his hands as his tools. He isn’t always one to use a brush for very long, but usually he uses something between his skin and the canvas. Not this time. He’s reaching into the buckets, two at a time, one with each hand, grabbing up globs of color and throwing it onto the white. Each time, he steps forward, furrows his brow, then passes his fingers through, over, underneath, around, until it’s to his liking. And he’s doing it fast, like a hopped-up rodent. Whatever he’s doing, I don’t understand it, but it’s not my job to understand. I do notice that he’s letting the acrylic paint drip over the sides of the buckets (a big no-no), because if he puts the lids back on without cleaning the rim, those cans are gonna seal themselves shut forever.
Fucking artists.
We met at a party. Not really a party, actually. When somebody says party, that tends to indicate that some form of actual planning was put into it. It does to me, at least. This was more of an ongoing affair, a gathering, a Hey, come on over, pick up a handle of something strong on your way, maybe grab one of your hot, skinny friends, too, Mama needs some eye candy thing. Mama is like that. She likes to say that hers is a place where the despondent youth of America can gather, feel safe, have a hot meal, feel free to express themselves however they see fit. Really, she’s just a horny old chick, mid-40s, ugly, probably barren, who has a four-story warehouse in Chelsea and likes to pretend that she’s the guardian of the downtrodden twentysomethings. And if she convinces somebody to join her on her gigantic bed and “get all up in that junk,” then each gathering is a success. And those who visit her boudoir repeatedly get to stay longer, between the soirees, when she isn’t drunk and/or stoned. It’s not prostituting yourself out if there’s no exchange of money, right?
I don’t like to call her Mama, and she has to realize that if we were the kind of person who ended up in her orbit in the first place, we very likely had issues with our own actual parents. But that’s the name she chose for herself, and it’s not a point worth arguing.
Xavier (she calls him “X,” which I fucking hate, like he was some kind of mutant or drug or something) is one of the ones who “gets to stay longer,” and it’s not like I was gonna get mad about that, because she had him first, and I’m not interested in being a usurper or owning anybody, and it’s not like that anyway with Xavier. I wouldn’t want him saying he had me, because there’s nothing to be had. What is this, the 1950s?
Also, Mama really likes his paintings. Whenever I feel the bullshit teenage pangs of jealousy, which I know are absolutely irrelevant to our situation, I just remember that. She has more mainstream works in her bedroom (Hockney, Basquiat, Warhol, Kandinsky, if you want to call that mainstream), but the rest of the warehouse is taken up by whatever her army of young’uns feel at the moment and express artistically. So there are chalk portraits of beat poets, rows of disproportionate breasts with erect nipples drawn in crayon, phallic sculptures made of scorched copper wiring, piles of sheet music wired together with untwisted hangers, smashed guitars and drum sets with “life/death” written on them in magic marker, spraypainted caricatures of historical figures, massive collages of rock ‘n roll flyers (I helped a little with that one), and an entire wall of empty liquor bottles stuccoed together. And Xavier’s paintings.
It’d seem more ugly and stupid if it weren’t also so fucking amazing to look at, to sit in a corner and just stare. What I’ve learned in my 27 years is that art isn’t always about beauty. It’s about the experience. And the more people that are at Mama’s wandering about, doing illicit things, eating all the food and generally being wild fucktards, the better chance you have at taking in the whole damn thing without having to deal with Mama’s brandy breath. It’s like one giant, interactive art gallery run by a drunk dragon, or a heroin-addicted troll. And that’s something I can get behind. She never tries to fuck me, though. Only into the boys. She says she’ll share a boy with somebody if it comes to that, but I’ve never seen it happen. I also think she knows not to mess with me. I made sure of that the first day I met her, when some asshole beanie-wearing motherfucker grabbed my tit and I beat him with an unopened tall can. Steel Reserve. There are worse ways to make a point.
When I met Xavier, it was some kind of pseudo-special night at Mama’s (hence me saying “party”), so maybe it was a tad more organized than normal, but all that really means was that there was a general theme to the night. Remote Attraction. Mama, presumably to spread whatever kind of neo-hippie bullshit she had just heard about, wanted everybody who showed up to meet somebody new, more specifically somebody they would never otherwise approach. For whatever reason. Stupid clothes. Obvious hygiene issues. I had heard about Remote Attraction and Mama’s place when I found the handwritten flyer (only one of 50, I learned later) sticking out of a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind at some shitty independent bookstore. I was in a blah kind of mood, and it’s not like I had a job or anything, so I gave it a shot. After showing up at the warehouse and getting a bear hug introduction from Mama, she gave me the theme prompt. I rolled my eyes, but I was already there, and thought, might as well. I’ve done stupider things, believe me.
I approached Xavier, not the other way around. He would never do that. Not even if Mama forced him. And I didn’t approach him because he appeared awful or looked like a psychopath, but after walking up two floors of the building, I saw that he was the only one not engaged in any kind of conversation or physical activity. So I guess I cheated. Whatever. Like I care what Mama thinks. I got to meet Xavier, and that’s all that really matters.
He was quiet. I like quiet guys. Guys who talk my ear off bug the hell out of me. Just shut up for a goddamn minute and maybe you’ll hear me not giving a shit. With Xavier, we can be silent for days and not have it be some kind of relationship red flag. Because it’s not a relationship. We hang out, we fuck a lot, I stay over but don’t live here, and neither one of us says anything about our goddamn feelings.
So I’m not gonna yell at Xavier for waking me up. I can’t threaten him with leaving him (even though this recent stay has lasted almost two weeks now, which is mildly domestic), because he’d just continue to exist.
I stand up, just barely managing to keep my balance, and walk over to the bathroom, making sure not to knock into the tossed-off paintings leaning against the wall along the way. I see myself in the mirror and curse my dark brown roots. I make a mental note to buy more bleach and blue color corrector to get that icy platinum blonde shine, then open up the medicine cabinet. There are the expired antidepressants Xavier still hasn’t opened, a reminder of his family “trying to meddle in his life.” There are the birth control pills Xavier doesn’t care if I take. (Xavier, being terrified of disease, is one of the few guys I know who actually likes using condoms.) There are the little scissors we both use to trim our pubic hair. There’s the cherry lip gloss Xavier likes, says it’s the only thing in his life he’s ever enjoyed tasting. I don’t like lip gloss, so it’s only for special occasions. And at the top, I see our iPod. When I say “our iPod,” I don’t mean it to sound goofy or cutesy or whatever the fuck. I just mean that we both chipped in to buy it used from my cousin Grace, and the playlists are split completely down the middle, 50% Xavier and 50% me. Every so often they bleed into each other, sometimes with obvious choices (Kraftwerk, Joy Division, the Stooges, Depeche Mode), sometimes something that surprises one or both of us (the Cars, Eddie Money, Richard Marx, Gary Numan).
This time there’s something new. A note: “Hit play. Song is cued.” I take the iPod into my hands, put the earbuds in, and hit play. I don’t know the song. The readout doesn’t help either. He had retitled the track. “For Charlotte.” No artist. It’s dream pop. An instrumental track. Entirely. Whatever he wants to tell me, he’s not gonna make it easy with anything like lyrics or a message. I have to feel it. Goddamn it.
I walk out of the bathroom. “What is this?” Xavier remains silent, grabs another two handfuls of paint, and lobs it onto the canvas. I’m surprised he doesn’t seem to care that with each dip of his hands he’s letting errant colors bleed into the wrong paint cans. “It’s good. I don’t know why, but it’s good.” I lie. The music is meaningless as far as I can tell. The guitars (too many of them) strum nicely but not with any real oomph, and the violins in the background sound like they’re hiding. “Are they gonna be playing here soon? Some band I should know but have never heard of, and are therefore cool because nobody has heard of them?” Xavier takes a step back, looks at the canvas, then gives it a one-two punch, making an image I’ve never seen before. It excites me. “Who is this?” Nothing. Just grunts.
I walk behind him, making sure to keep my distance. He hates it when I hover while he’s working. After a lot of trial and error, I learned that four feet was the minimum amount of distance I could stand from him and not disturb him. Unless I’m blowing him. But the note, the music, this is something new, and I slowly approach him.
“Is this the soundtrack to this? Do I see this, hear this, and understand everything?” I step into the four-foot zone. I take out the right earbud and raise it to his ear. “Let’s listen to it together.” As I make contact, he flinches and pushes my hand aside. Still looking forward. “Okay, okay. Got it. Don’t want to disrupt the process.”
As I walk over to the dirty window, I let the earbud fall to my side but keep the other one in. I like doing this. It makes me feel like I’m in a movie. I can carry on a conversation and have a backing soundtrack. Everybody should do this.
“Looks like the rain has finally stopped,” I say. “It’s been an entire week. Goddamn deluge. I almost thought we were gonna have to build an ark.” I wait for some kind of chuckle from Xavier, but get nothing.
I put my hands up against the glass and lean in, taking in the awesome view from Xavier’s third-story home. Manhattan is finally under sunny skies. The neighborhood looks clean, even though I know that would never completely be the case. But like my mother always says, “Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.” Well, my mother says that she said it, but she doesn’t know that I know that it’s from Taxi Driver. I think that after you’re an English teacher for long enough, you lose the ability to create your own aphorisms.
The window feels warm on my forehead. “It’s a nice day. Let’s wander. Let’s walk east through Brooklyn until our legs fall out from under us. Let’s sneer at old ladies and laugh at children. Let’s kick signposts and jump over parking meters. Let’s hand out cheap wine to the homeless and pot to the disgruntled teenagers. Let’s talk in rhymes and riddles. Let’s walk through cemeteries and pretend we’re the recently deceased. Let’s walk into the yards and tag graffiti onto the trains like we lived in the 1980s. Let’s drink bad coffee from vending machines and scream at passing buses. Let’s get out of here. Whaddya think?”
Behind me, the noise of Xavier’s art ceases. He wouldn’t want to admit this, but this is always the moment where he wants some reassurance from me about what he’s doing. He never listens to my opinion, but I think he at least likes that somebody else is present.
I turn. “Is it finished? You want a lowly civilian’s opinion?”
Xavier looks at me and smirks. He never smirks. His eyes. I’ve never seen them less troubled. His eyes are always troubled. That was part of the attraction. But now he looks like an excited child having just discovered something wonderful. And he wants to share it with the world. All I can do is smile in return.
The music hits its crescendo, and Xavier takes his left hand, covered in a rainbow of color, and reaches behind him.
“It’s not my birthday for another four months,” I say, “so I don’t know what you’re so jovial about.” Silence. “Say something. Explain. Just put me out of my misery.”
Xavier nods. He brings his left hand back into view. He’s holding a gun, I don’t know what kind, brings it to his temple, and pulls the trigger. With a sickening blast, his brain matter sprays onto the canvas and sticks to the drying paint.
I don’t scream. I don’t shriek. I don’t cry. All I can think is…
I’m never giving another blowjob as long as I live.