I work in a small neighborhood bar. I’ve worked there for three years! But I don’t work there as often or at the the same times or with the same people as I used to. Yesterday, a random Wednesday afternoon, I was walking to work, feeling the fall in the afternoon, and it got my nostalgia going. I remembered people. I remembered that glorious summer two years ago when I fucked everyone in South Baltimore (it felt like). I remembered how much fun I used to have flirting with a certain man. We drew it out for months before he finally asked me out. It was delicious. It was a delicious memory because that man doesn’t live in the neighborhood anymore and it’s been a long time since I ran into him. Tra-la. Dora with her happy horny memories.
I open the bar. I put on some Incredible String Band, like you do. (Like you do when you aren’t expecting people to show up for a while.) Customers appear. I tend to them. And then I see that man sitting in front of me. God damn it. Why. Playing it super cool, I say: “Holy shit!” And he replies: “I didn’t think you worked here anymore.”
The last person on earth that I want to see.* Oh reader, I loved him. Loved loved loved loved loved. A weird insane love. I can’t explain it. It was chemical. It was torture. It had been so long since I had felt anything, I was like a starving stray you bring home that can’t learn to regulate its appetite, I was just gorging on my own emotions. We dated for a while, my love was semi-requited, I suppose, but Tread-Lightly couldn’t requite me enough. I don’t really know what he wanted, and I’m not sure that he knew, but probably mostly what he wanted was to bang the bartender and did not expect her to fall madly in love with him. She did not expect it either. Her friends laughed at the man and officially she maintained the position that the man was preposterous. A degree in folklore.** Who once texted that he was swimming in a “mountain stream” and it made him feel like a Viking. Who once said that he wanted to be a blacksmith because then he wouldn’t feel self-conscious about having a big gut. I never did understand that logic. “Uh….well….you don’t have to feel self-conscious now.” I wanted to live in a cabin with him, daily plunging through pure mountain streams, listening to nothing but the purest most austere folk records, ladling out hearty nourishing soups while he wrote his masterpiece about storytelling traditions or whatever the fuck it was. I was gone, man, gone. Here is a good example of the depths to which I sunk: I used to have a hard time getting to sleep at his house for some reason but I didn’t even mind because I was happy to lie awake staring at him. Like a big creepy creep. Terribly conscious of my creepiness, I used to strategically arrange the pillows so he couldn’t see what I was doing if he happened to wake up.
I’m not usually like that. I swear. I have actually never been like that with any other man. Here is a quote from Jackson C. Frank: “It’s very hard to admit to your own failings in a love affair that is ended, and thereby retain perspective, and this work says so, very plainly. Just as we seek to blame anything other than ourselves it turns to a somewhat bitter-sweet ending that is more compromise than truth—’You never wanted me, and now I feel the same…’ A hopeless self-justification with your ‘back against the wall’.” That is what he had to say about his wonderful song You Never Wanted Me. Sing it, Mr. Frank. You know a certain bartender listened to the song about fifty times on repeat last night as she was cleaning up. Singing along while mopping up beer. Mmm. Deliciously sad. I enjoyed it, I admit. You know he felt what he wrote. Jackson C. Frank was the real deal—if you ever need to really bum yourself out for some reason, go have a look at his Wikipedia page. Spoiler alert he “was plagued by a series of personal issues.”
In any case. There I was, yesterday afternoon, with this dude in front of me. Completely unable to play it cool. “How have you been?” “Well. I had a heart attack in January.” “Yeah, you look great!” Not exactly the right thing to say. (He obviously had had to lose a lot of weight because of the heart attack.) Then he texted me as he was leaving and in my reply I had to remind him of the time when I got chlamydia. (By that point, I had just accepted that I had already made and was going to further make an ass of myself.)
For a long time, the most painful thing about this relationship, to me, was what a spectacular ass I made of myself. Worse than the heartbreak was the loss of all dignity! I wrote Tread-Lightly a letter—an honest-to-God, pen-and-ink letter—when we were breaking up in which I wrote, honest to God, the line about how I wanted to make him hearty nourishing soups. Hearty nourishing soups. I think the actual line was something a little more perverted, something like: “I want to make you hearty nourishing soups and then stuff you with sweet things until you groan.” The phrase “hearty nourishing soups” has become kind of my shorthand for making an ass of myself. My BFF, a very charitable person, recently told me: “You sacrificed your dignity to make literary history! You weren’t just being sad, it was a stylistic coup!”
That would be a nice thing to believe. I’ll work on it. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t mind making an ass of myself, and that is plenty.
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* This, now that I think about it, is not actually true. My old academic advisor would be worse. I guess anyone from my grad program at U Chicago. My father would also be pretty frightening. But of all the people who live in my little universe, Tread-Lightly is the person I would least like to see staring me down of an afternoon.
** Like Comic Book Guy!
dora random 