“Do I have to fucking spell it out?”
I had rented an apartment on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, and Emily moved in the first week of that April and tried living with me. She’d just graduated from college with honors and she was beautiful and golden so whatever: I really fucking tried. I bought some stupid furniture. I thought, This is what people do when they settle down. I took Emily to the theater, and I bought her a dress to wear. She went and returned it for another dress and she put that one on and I put on the one suit that I had and we took some 1mg Xanaxes and went to the theater. It was a one-woman show about Ella Fitzgerald. I’d bought the tickets way in advance. Emily liked Ella Fitzgerald a lot. Anyway we got there and we were the only ones dressed up. It was a lot of middle-aged and older people from the suburbs there, and they were all wearing L.L.Bean and shit. Middle-aged people with money, couldn’t wear a fucking sport coat or nothing. They deserved vomit. This was the life we fought for. The show was alright. Then Emily and I went home and took some more Xanax and blacked out and went to sleep and James Lightfoot tried to call me but I couldn’t hear the phone ringing and that was the night he got arrested trying to break into my apartment building except it wasn’t my apartment building; he’d tried to break into the wrong building. The cops found a knife on him. Drugs were involved.
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MY FIRST Guard meeting wasn’t a smash hit. Everybody thought I was a prick because I was bad at hiding that I thought everybody was an asshole. I showed up high on OxyContin, and I’d forgotten to wear an undershirt. I don’t know, I just hated this fucking Guard unit because it wasn’t Echo Company and half of them were off-duty sheriff’s deputies and shit like that and the way they talked made me sick.
I was starting up going back to school again. I was going to a state school downtown, and I’d go to school and Emily would snort all my cocaine and leave a note in the drawer saying she wanted me to stop doing cocaine. She was a real first-class bitch; this is why I love her to death.
It didn’t work out. It was 70% my fault. I’d been getting into the OxyContin pretty hard, and it made me feel a type of way so as I wasn’t about taking any shit from her. Also I was pretty fucked in the head, and I was being a sad crazy fuck about some horrors I’d been through. It’s true that you go through some horrors and it fucks you up. I don’t care what violent motherfuckers say; if it doesn’t fuck you up then it’s only cuz you’re just too fucking stupid. Still there’s no use being a sad crazy fuck about it because you kill yourself like that. And I was seeing ghosts. And I was talking too goddamn much. And I was making her miserable. I guess I wanted her to feel like shit.
But what killed it was when I fell in love with an 18-year-old girl from Barcelona. Zo?. Technically she was 17 and 350 days. But I didn’t do anything. I just took her out for pancakes. And Emily found out about it. Roy of all fucking people told Emily about how I’d taken Zo? out for pancakes. Plus he left most of the story out and made it sound like I’d been a real fuck about it. The thing was: I’d been drinking at Roy’s and I had asked several people if they’d like to have pancakes with me at the Severance IHOP, and all but one of them I asked were dudes. All but one of them weren’t this girl Zo?.
I’d said, “Roy, you wanna go to IHOP?”
He’d said no.
I’d said, “Joe, you wanna go to IHOP?”
The same.
“What about you, James Lightfoot?”
They’d all said they were good on pancakes. Only Zo? had said she wanted to go. So I went with her and we were just going to have pancakes and maybe I was in love with Zo? but that had nothing to do with it. And maybe I was glad that it was just her who had gone, but I hadn’t fixed it that way on purpose. Roy though, he didn’t tell Emily anything like that. He made it sound like it had been some kind of clandestine pancakes date, and Emily got super fucking pissed at me. I came home and she threw a glass against the wall and said, “How’d you like your fucking pancakes?”
No shit. That was the end. A few days later Emily was gone. She took her stuff with her: the accent pillows, the Crock-Pot, all of it. I didn’t try to stop her; she was better off the way she was going, and I was sick of her.
Zo? turned 18 but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t fuck for anything. I’d been gutted. I thought a lot about Emily and her lovers: the Puerto Rican with the Valiums, the wildlife photographer from France, Dave from the Giant Eagle. Those were just the ones I knew about. I wondered what they’d done with her, if they’d made her come. Had they cared about her or had they just fucked her? Had she done stuff for them that she wouldn’t do with me? Had she talked about me? Had she told them I deserved it?
I more or less stopped going to school. School was too goddamn much. I felt like I knew too much already. I’d seen the end of the movie. The only thing school was good for was it got me out of two weeks of summer training with the National Guard. I’d said, I can’t go. I’m signed up for school. I’m paying for it out of pocket. They’d said, We do this every summer. I’d said I hadn’t known. They’d said, Everyone knows. I’d said, You should have said something. And goddamn if I hadn’t known what I was doing but there was no way in hell I was going to hang out in the woods for two weeks and play soldiers with a lot of off-duty sheriff’s deputies. I had more important things to do.
I’d stay up by myself in the early morning and snort cocaine and snort Oxy. A gram here. 40mg there. Another 40mg. I’d steal Wi-Fi from my neighbors and watch porn on the Internet. I’d write poetry. I’d drink vodka. Vodka was good because I could drink it all day and I didn’t shit blood. I imagined all the porno girls were war widows and it made me sad. I’d get on the vodka and snort some powder at my little table and write five or six poems between three o’clock and nine in the morning—poems mainly about true love being impossible, poems mainly about what drugs I liked to do, poems mainly about barely legal girls getting down on some cocks, poems mainly about what a piece of shit death was. Then I’d go to bed. I sent a few poems to The New Yorker, but they didn’t make it in. Then my laptop crashed and I lost my poems.
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