The Truth Is Far From Here

‘I don’t think I believe in any of this anymore’ I say, looking out the window, as we pass a cluster of three fast food restaurants, an oil change place, a check cashing center, a grocery store and a Wal-Mart.

‘Don’t believe in what?’ she asks, shifting into second.

‘Any of it. I don’t want to be a part of our society anymore. I’d rather go insane living outside of it than go insane living in it…look at them…they all look so miserable.’

‘Maybe you’re just miserable. You sound like a teenager.’

‘Good…that’s about when it started going downhill, anyway. I didn’t want to be a so-called ‘responsible member of society’ then and I sure as hell don’t want to now.’

‘So what do you want?’

This empire to meet it’s fate and collapse on itself, weighed down by it’s decadence and false idols, like the Egyptians and Romans before us. To go backwards, so far back that we’re operating under a barter system and waiting weeks and months to hear back from drifting lovers, so far devolved and detached that our society actually fosters the discovery of the self, if that’s possible. To run off into the woods before their jaws get any more of my soul’s marrow. Everyone to strip naked in the streets and fuck indiscriminately like the dogs that we are. To fall in love every single day with someone new who will eventually fade into oblivion, a myth passed down from lie to lie, selected pieces of their fabled soul swirling with my own for the rest of whatever existence I envision next. Something enduring.

‘A slice and a beer sounds good right about now.’

‘This place hasn’t changed since high school,’ she says, shaking cheese onto her sweating golden pizza. The slick tablecloths are checkered red-and-white. The same short-haired Italian woman wearing an apron looks on from behind the counter, smiling whenever our eyes meet. ‘So you never answered my question.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What do you want to do…in life?’

‘I told you…living the dream as we speak.’ I hoist up my limping slice and flash a smile.

‘Be serious for just one second.’

‘I don’t know…does it really matter?’

‘Listen to yourself.’

‘Seriously…what happens when your tits start to sag? What if the Fed went broke tomorrow and money became nothing but kindling and toilet paper? Who would you be and what would you want then?’

‘That’s a cop out.’

‘So is letting the world make a whore out of me’ I say, tipping back the last foamy remnants, twirling the empty and looking at her through it with one eye, her face warped and green through its lens.

I want to kick back my chair and run. Run from everything — her, the old Italian woman, the banks, the cops, the phone lines, the houses, the cars, the shopping plazas, the corporations, the mom-and pop shops, the debts, the credits, the network news, the clothes, the make-up, the perfume, the bad acting, the good acting, the notions of romance and lust, the cartoon hearts, the aspirations to be sitcom characters, the adjective ‘hot’, the office parks, the penthouses, the crack dens, the cannibalism, the greed, the envy, the hatred, the whole fucking charade. I’ll take my chances out in the wild, thank you very much. At least out there they flash their teeth and growl before they jump for the throat. Just run, man, run.

Instead, I slide my only wrinkled dollar into the jukebox and play Katrina & The Waves, like I used to back in high school, and coax her into dancing about the empty place, gyrating and and leaping around as if we felt like Katrina sang, as if the Italian woman weren’t rolling her eyes, as if we were in love, as if nothing else mattered but right here, in this very moment. As if everything we knew about the world could end right now, and it would be alright.

As the manic song tails off, she draws herself so close that I can taste her breath, butting her forehead to mine.

‘Don’t let them do this to you.’

Glossy magazines litter the coffeetable, all of them plastered with promises of tips on how to be thin and beautiful and fake a way into someone’s affection. The pale yellow walls are adorned with all sorts of photos and knick-knacks promoting an appreciation of wine, sex, countries they’ve never been to, eras they’ve never lived in, etc. This is where it all happens, where they lay around in sweats rubbing lotion on their legs and warping each other’s minds, further reinforcing all of the manufactured wants and desires. This is where the little pigtailed girls with chipped teeth in faded family photos go to die. I gaze off at a Marilyn Monroe poster and wonder if they’ve ever stopped to think they’re idolizing the beauty of a woman who killed herself because she was only idolized for her beauty.

We watch the lives of others on T.V. – dating shows, entertainment news shows, romantic comedies – and I can’t help but think that the entire design of the apartment, every decoration, everything about the way these girls talk to each other and present themselves to each other, is an attempt to represent a lifestyle that they don’t possess. When I am alone with them, none of them speak the way they do here in the living room. They are putting on a show for their friends, for the people they live with, for anyone who may be watching. One can be truly content with themselves and their lives, so long as they don’t have to gaze at other people’s.

They take turns in the bathroom, preparing their war-paint for the evening’s battle, flicking their hair with their fingertips and staring at themselves far more intently and deeply than they ever will at the one they’re trying to look nice for. Text messages are sent to the friends they want to see, the ones they don’t want to see, the boys they want to meet at night’s end, the back-ups, the ones they don’t want to run into, their thumbs pecking away like the beak of a pigeon.

It always seems one of them has a pressing issue with a flavor-of-the-month tryst, and they talk about it coldly, candidly, as if they are in charge. The ‘boy’ in question is static – he merely wants to sleep with her, and deep down she knows that. He plays flirtation games and makes comments to act disinterested as he slowly reels her in. No more and no less. The complications she is asserting are in her own mind, created because we can only be passionate about that which we don’t possess. She is passionate about something inside of her, something she can’t quite reach, not the well-built boy who makes lame jokes.

As purses are collected and we gulp down the last drinks needed to get out there and take the stage, I can’t help but be impatient to escape from the madness of the living room and the bar. I want to get past the shows that tell us who we should want to be, the anticipation of something that isn’t coming because we won’t allow it, the yelling over the crowd, the flirtations, the lights being turned up at last call, the stop at the late night bagel joint and the idle chatter with the vanilla fraternity member one of her roommates has brought back while they chat in the bathroom. I want the comfort of her bedroom, where I can count her eyelashes as she sleeps and wonder if that was really her out there.

Tim slips a dollar into the jukebox and puts on James Brown as we scrub and mop, grooving across the soapy tile floors with energy brought on by the prospect of the shift’s end. He counts the tips while I collect the trash and take it out around the corner, where I run into Mary, who I haven’t seen in two years. She’s wearing a matching blazer and skirt that makes her look like a flight attendant, and her haircut is one color now and looks a little more expensive. A plastic I.D. card is clipped to her coat and she’s holding a leather briefcase. I am unshaven, wearing an apron stained with mustard and barbecue sauce, and carrying two trash bags that are dripping an orange liquid.

She explains that she is in town recruiting for her company, and is on her way back to the hotel to change. I explain that I’m still living here and about to get off work, and it’s the first time I can ever remember being ashamed of this job. What scares me is how quickly I am able to shake it off. We make plans for a drink in the hotel bar, and I head back in to finish up the shift change.

I don’t know why we do this to ourselves. So rarely do we sit down with an old lover from a past life and not find ourselves wistful for older times or alarmed at their change in demeanor, appearance, friends, attitude. You aren’t sitting across from them, but rather what they have become, and once one dives into the chaos of this world, the change is rarely for the better.

Her eyes are as green as a fairway, and it seems they might be the only thing that hasn’t changed. She sounds more cynical, less warm; she smokes cigarettes now, and fake laughs at her boring co-workers’ jokes, and she no longer smells like a Blow Pop tastes. The cheap, chunky rings are missing from her fingers, and her shoes look uncomfortable to be in.

‘I wish I was still here,’ she says with a sigh, and I know she doesn’t mean that. She’s either trying to soften the fact that I’m still pouring drinks in this town, or she’s mistaking ‘here’ for ‘myself’. She probably enjoys drinking wine while she sits on Ikea furniture at parties where there are cheese cubes and no beer pong tables. I stifle the urge to say ‘me, too’.

‘You really shouldn’t smoke,’ I say, taking a drag from my cigarette.

‘It relaxes me,’ she says with a weariness that implies a stressful life, despite the fact that she’s spent the last twenty minutes telling me about how her days are compromised of sitting at a desk checking her e-mail, amazed that she’s getting paid eye-popping amounts of money to do so. My mind drifts off to the carefree girl flitting from table to table on a Saturday night, the one who would drunkenly pirouette down the sidewalk in front of me on our way home. I don’t see that girl in front of me anymore.

‘You really like how all of the instruments come in one at a time,’ she says as The Cure begins to play on the jukebox. She raises her eyebrows as if I’m expected to be impressed by her knowledge of me. At the moment, I kind of am.

‘I do,’ I say with a nod. She sighs and rests her chin on her palm, gazing at me in a ‘what are we going to do about you?’ sort of way, the kind of look she used to give me right before we kissed. I always felt like a naive child who’d done something so adorably stupid that she couldn’t help but squeal and embrace me.

‘You seem sad.’

‘Haven’t I always?’

‘Not like this.’ She traces a manicured finger around the lip of her glass. “How long do you plan to stay here?”

‘I don’t know…haven’t really thought about it.’

Her eyes are searching me for something, and I wonder if it’s the same thing I’m searching her for. On the surface, I haven’t changed much – I still have detailed opinions about “Just Like Heaven” and I still live here and work a service job, and I’m pretty sure I’ve worn this shirt back when we were together. But I’m certain that she notices the spirit missing from my eyes. Perhaps while I’m searching her for remnants of her old self, she is conversely searching for any noticeable change in me. I get the feeling that the both of us will be disappointed.

‘You know,’ she begins, taking a pull from her drink and pursing her lips. ‘I always thought that you would be the first person I knew here to leave and do something really great. I really did. I can remember looking at you some nights and thinking ‘in ten years, I’m going to be able to tell people that I dated this guy’.’

This may be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and yet it makes me feel nauseous. Not only does it contain the pangs of guilt, but it contains the notion that doing something great involves making a lot of money or being famous. It contains the idea that if I never left this town, she wouldn’t find herself proud of the fact that at one time in our lives we shared a connection. It implies that she’s reconsidered her idea of me, and I don’t blame her. I want to explain all of this to her, but I think she’s too far gone for it to make any sense. Or perhaps I am.

Thankfully before I have to respond a co-worker of her’s wearing a pale blue shirt with a white collar approaches, greeting me offhandedly in a manner that feels no different than if he were to pat my head or give me a quarter to go get some candy. He probably sees me as just what I am – an old acquaintance she’s left for bigger and better things. The only thing I’m unsure of is how much bigger or better those things are.

‘I told my friends I’d take them out for a night on the town,’ she says, her eyes still back in the conversation we were just having. ‘Would you like to come along?’

‘I don’t think so…I’ve got to open tomorrow.’

‘Well, it was really good to see you,’ she says with the frown of disappointment we all have when we briefly get to visit our pasts. She gives me one more burning glance of desperation, and hugs me tightly. As she catches up to her friends waiting near the entrance, I think of the wide-eyed boy who used to get butterflies when he saw her, the one whose face would beam so wide as she drunkenly pirouetted down the sidewalk in front of him on their way home.

The cracked yolk of the sun has broken over the red brick path in the center of town, and it still remains early enough to be quaint. Most everyone is still sleeping. The only ones out are the coffee-and-walk senior citizens, a few one-night stands gone wrong, the sullen employees hosing down the bar patios, and the stray bleary-eyed student accompanied by visiting parents. Jackie leans against a light post outside of a Wendy’s, burrowing her hands under her armpits as she peers down the street with puckered lips and a squint. A slight ring of black eyeliner encircle bright blue eyes that look out of place on her dark complexion, which is splashed with a few patches of imperceptible freckles and framed by the two jagged slits of dark brown hair that swoop down from the sides of her bangs. Poking out from behind them is a pair of elf-like ears studded with modest diamonds. She’s barefoot, holding a pair of heels, and wearing a hooded Michigan sweatshirt over a sleek black dress that clings halfway down her thighs. In the morning light her preparation for the previous evening looks somewhat pitiable.

“Thanks for coming,” she says, wiggling her painted toes as she glances down at them. I shake a cigarette from my pack and hand it to her before she can ask.

“How was last night?”

“Terrible” she mumbles, her lips clamped as she lights it. Jackie has been smoking for three years, but still handles a cigarette like a naïve middle-schooler. “I got raped.” Her bangs flutter upwards as she exhales. “Well, practically.” She says it as if getting raped were something akin to losing your friends at the bar or running up too high a tab.

“What does ‘practically’ mean?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She slides her arms around my pathetically slender hips and places her chin on my shoulder. “Can we just not talk about it?”

On Saturday morning the sidewalks around the houses off-campus are usually strewn with broken bottles and vomit, so I carry her on my back for the last two blocks back to her place, no small task given that I only outweigh her by about fifteen pounds. ‘Faster!’ she cackles, digging her knees into my ribs and tightening her grip on my neck. This is as affectionate as she’s ever been in public with me. Normally she won’t even hold my hand unless she’s drunk or her friends aren’t around.

I met Jackie during our sophomore year on a night she had walked into a bar to find a girl with a tattoo on the small of her back licking her then-boyfriend’s ear near the pool tables. She led her friend out the door by the hand and marched to a party she knew of across campus. She fucked two people there, in the same bathroom, two hours apart. I was the latter, and the fifth person she’d ever been with. I’d imagine she’s approaching the twenties now.

Somehow, I always seem to end up with her, or girls like her. There’s a myriad of reasons as to how this can happen: too many drinks, a lack of new music, the thrill of slumming, the notion of possibly being a muse of some sort, the stimulating conversation, the possession of drugs, pity in a few cases; sometimes I serve as nothing more than a break from the norm. We all stray from types every now and again.

I’m brooding and I’m heartfelt and I’m capable of fostering the idea that actual caring exists beyond a mutual appreciation of beauty (not normally found amongst a crowd of suitors that sings “Born in the U.S.A.” with a patriotic sentiment). And she’s right to think that I care. And because I care, I’m not usually a part of all of what are considered the more glamorous aspects.

The Saturday nights of balancing on heels in slit dresses, flashing hollow laughs and smiles; none of that is reserved for me. I get the Thursday evenings in bars, the quiet evenings in, the hooded sweatshirts and jeans. I don’t normally get to animalistic groping in the bar bathroom by way of fifteen minutes of light conversation, I don’t get to drunkenly toss her over my shoulder like a dominated Neanderthal as everyone laughs, and someone makes a crack about sex. Instead I get to clean up the mess. I get solemn shifts to the bedroom signaled by way of hour-long, occasionally tear-filled conversation. And maybe she is spoiled and selfish and petty. But then again, if we were to fly over a gold miner from Uzbekistan and let him observe your life for a day, what do you suspect he would conclude?

‘Do you have any pot?’ she asks as her heels hit the concrete of her front porch with a thud. My back crackles like bubble wrap as I let her go.

‘Back at my place.’

‘I can borrow Anna’s car.’

Jackie wants to get high with me as often as she wants to sleep with me, which is about once every other half moon. The posing of the question is more of a direct statement that she wants to, as she assumes that I am willing to appease her at any time (she is correct). She dashes in to change and grab the keys and twenty minutes later we’re cruising the narrow strip of road wedged between inert cornfields in an immaculate silver Honda that still smells like a new car, despite the fact that it has thirty-six thousand miles on it.

A gaudy sparkling disco ball hangs from the rearview mirror, along with a beaded necklace and a tassel from her friend Anna’s high school graduation. The backseat is littered with a pile of sweatshirts, some clothing catalogs, and a pair of cork platform shoes. There are three CD’s in the center console – Garth Brooks, Christina Aguilera and a mix titled ‘Slutty Songs’, but Jackie had asked me to grab 10,000 Maniacs from my room. Her mother used to listen to Natalie Merchant while she made dinner.

She wants to hear the one with the one with the ‘who-who-who’s’, and as she bobs her head along to it while taking a pull from the joint I smile at the fact that she’s singing along to a warning against the spoiling of children.

‘Play the one with the banjo next’ she says, coughing as she hands the joint over to me.

‘A lot of them have banjo in it.’

‘The one about the boy named Jack.’

‘That’s about Jack Kerouac.’

She just smiles and sings along with the ‘who-who-who’s’, pouting her lips and floating her hand out the window. I want to be her, the sun shining on my highlights, riding around with someone who adored me, singing along to breezy music with flamboyance a few hours after I’ve been (practically) raped.