revisiting the beasties...

(Beastie Boys that is. Pauls' Boutique and Sounds of Science. Loud.)

I should probably be thinking about any number of things other than the thing that I find myself thinking about this morning. I should be thinking about where I'm going with the job. I should be thinking about figuring out how I'm going to pay the two bills that I *have* to pay today... I should be making a plan that is like this:
A Plan

You know, for Life.

Instead I'm thinking about fucking Tim in the basement on a dusty old lazy boy that some college kid likely shoved down there & forgot, moved out, moved on. There were cobwebs everywhere & dust motes in the air and the proverbial swinging, lonely lightbulb. I was really fucking stoned. I tell myself we both wanted to fuck, because seriously that is exactly what we did. There was no love, no tenderness. We were both connected furiously at the hips but we both went far, far away to our own personal hells while we fucked.

With Tim, the tender parts always came in the connections we made when we weren't fucking. The fucking, for us, was about something else altogether. And I look back on that and him and our experience a lot. I think about it a lot.

We never even planned to hook up, we just somehow wound up together at odd and disjointed moments. Random party, bumping into someone in the hall. I look up and see Tim. "Hey. God, I am so fucking drunk." I sigh. He looks back at me with those fucking EYES he has and says, "Hey. I'm sorry." You know, like being that drunk might not be so good... but you know, he had at least 2 and probably 3 or 4 illicit drugs wandering about inside his body. I fell into those enormous pupils and I fell HARD.
He sold his high-end ski jacket once, along with some shit his friends threw in, for an eight ball. Because that was how he rolled. I knew fucking him was not the best decision I could have made for my own safety, my own health. I also didn't give a flying fuck. And we never, ever used a condom. I also suspected that in addition to the many MANY women I KNEW he was fucking, that every so often he likely had sex with men too.
Because I could sense that about him. He liked sex. Pussy, cock... whatever. He was chasing his own demons.
So we fucked. We met at parties and I watched him hook up with some random cute girl and I saw them go somewhere and they likely had sex and then he came back and we got stoned and we sat in the dark and we talked and then we'd rip off the face of the world and push it as far away as we could, fucking the sun up. And then he'd walk me home. Sometimes he'd be so jacked on coke that he'd just go like that, like he could go like that forever... and I know that on those times he didn't even cum.
...because it so totally wasn't even about that...
And then I told him no more. That I couldn't keep doing whatever the fuck it was we were doing because it was starting to change into something else. The fucking was starting to bleed into the tender talking in the dark. When we hooked up early one evening and wound up on the roof of his frat boy house and it was freezing and I was in shorts, he took my hand & led me to his room. He pawed through a pile of clothes (clean) in a hamper and he pulled out a pair of his jeans and a sweatshirt. I changed and we went back up to the roof and we stayed there for almost ever.
And later... later I would wear that sweatshirt and strive to NOT get anything on it ever because I didn't want to wash it. It smelled like him.
That's when I knew I couldn't DO it anymore.
I avoided parties that I thought he might attend. If he showed up at some other type of party, I'd leave. Eventually I just quit seeking out parties altogether. I focused on other things. I never saw him.
Months passed and I answered a knock on the door one afternoon. It was him. He sought me out. He wanted me to let him love me. He put his hands on my face. He begged me to let him try.
He looked like Johnny Depp. I swear. He was my weakness. His eyes slayed me. But physically, that resemblance... It was so fucking hard to deny him ANYTHING.

But I did.

In the end I did. I don't doubt the sincerity of his desire to try. I also knew he couldn't quite get there. I also knew I had to quit trying to fuck my demons away. That was part of what changed for me. It wasn't just that this had started out as furious and physical and that the real truth of it was... for awhile that so totally worked. ...it just did... No. In the end, there was a connection that was sweeter than any sex we'd ever hope to have.
...ever...
And that was the real bitch. Neither of us, at that time, had enough of anything to sustain and respect THAT.
I couldn't even SAY it. I could only look at him and shake my head, "no." He couldn't say anything either. He just held my face and looked at me with those fucking eyes of his. And we stayed like that for a long, long time. Then he kissed my forehead and he turned around and left. I watched him walk away, down the hall. His black trench coat. His black hair. His small, wiry body moving away from me. I watched him until he turned and disappeared down the stairs.
He never looked back.

...sometimes my memory plays this out differently. Sometimes I'm the one walking away and not looking back. The truth is, both things happened. It happened both ways. THAT is the truth. And the memory is mutable. The whole story is mutable. That is the truth.
There are also huge gaps.
I mean, enormous. There are also parts where I did things with him that I don't even think about (much) let alone try to say even pretend out loud.

Some time later, during the summer, I got a letter from him. It was a sweet, chatty letter and in the end he stopped and said he had just wanted to tell me that he thought I was the "grooviest woman he'd ever known." Yes. He actually said GROOVY. And he'd put stickers on the letter and the envelope. I wonder often, if he was really gay and that's the vibe I was picking up on... the cock vibe I mean. Because the stickers... a grown man sending me a letter with stickers on it... flower stickers. Anyway. Maybe that's what his fucking demon was all about.
Mine was a death wish. That's the truth. But that's also not the point.

The point is. The letter and the "groovy." I still fucking smile to think of that.
Still. Today. Just randomly it pops into my head that I'm GROOVY. And I just... I just smile.
And still today, I wonder...
I wonder if he sometimes closes his eyes and thinks of me like this. I wonder if it's around the same time that *I* think of him like this. Because that's how WE rolled. We were connected in this strange way. We lost time together. We shoved it away. We opened the veil and we fucked our way through it.

And so, today, I'm thinking of Tim. And I'm smiling.