the window on the passenger side of my old car had been thoroughly
shattered, but nothing valuable was missing inside, because there was nothing
of value in there. The one strange thing
was that whoever it was that did this had taken my favorite compilation CD,
one I’d made recently and had left on the passenger seat. I wasn’t sure if the cops were only called
when a car had been stolen or something valuable like a cd player boosted from
it but my room mate said an attempted break in was worth their time so I spoke
with a team of cops that came by the house and took some photos of the old
car. Later I ripped up a thick green
yard waste trash bag and duct taped it to the hole left by the broken window
glass. This made me look poor, but I didn’t
mind; I was young and I’d been to college and it felt good to look poor.
One day a few months later I was driving down Sunset and
there was a fragile, slow-moving blue Hyundai driving in the next lane, which I
immediately took notice of the car
because I could hear a song from my stolen compilation cd coming out of the
window, and when that one ended, I heard the next song start. I took down the young man’s license plate,
because I guessed I’d have to give the information to the cops. I felt reluctant to do anything but follow
the man, or boy, for a few miles. This was
partially the result of white guilt; his slicked back hair was so black, and
his irises looked black too, and high cheekbones; to me he looked like a cross
between Johnny Depp and early pictures of Emiliano Zapata that I’d seen in my Sophomore
year class on the lasting Social Implications of the Mexican Revolution. I just wanted to drive behind him for a few
miles and see where he went.
I called the police and gave them his license plate number. Presumably something bad but not too bad
happened to him as a result of the insignificant break in to my old car. A year passed and I
gained twenty pounds. Two years passed and
I met my husband. Four years passed and
we got married. In that first year of our
marriage, I had three miscarriages. Five
years passed and my husband finally got the loan to start his HVAC
business. His office was in a gutted,
stationary Airstream trailer on a lot in a business park, surrounded by other managers who ran their businesses from trailers.
His was the best. He was the
best. It was amusing, the fact of his
office in that trailer, when all the other trailers there were designed to look like real little buildings. In his office, there were curtains
I’d made from old t-shirts of ours and a huge and beautiful old mahogany desk
that took up almost all of the floor space.
Customers never went there, of course.
People with HVAC problems called him and he dispatched one of his
workers to the freezing cold or insufferably hot home.
One day, a worker of his named Shan (formerly Shannon)
called over to me when I was leaving the trailer and she told me, “Hey, it was
kind of a weird job today. The guy whose
apartment I went to was playing all these songs that are like, the songs you
always put on all the mix cd’s you make everyone. It was too spooky, like too weird to just be
a coincidence.”
A few minutes later when she and my husband were having a
talk on the picnic bench by the trailer, I looked at the paperwork she’d just
turned in, and wrote down the address. I
entered it into my GPS and drove there, putting an Ativan under my tongue at a
stoplight and letting my cares and the core of my personality dissolve as the
pill dissolved under my tongue and seeped into the parts of my body that
contain both stress and hope. I arrived
at the building. It was an apartment
building that looked like it’d once been a boarding house; it was painted blue
gray with darker blue gray trim and made me think of Jonah’s whale. I kept as quiet as I could. I walked around to the back of the building,
and from an open window I heard one of my songs. Desolation Row, Bob Dylan. I'd always been perversely drawn to that song’s lyrics
because they were so mocking towards the women in the narrative, “Ophelia, she’s
‘neath the window, for her I feel so afraid, on her twenty second birthday, already
she is an old maid.” Besides that lyric
and something about Cinderella cagily observing the misery around her, I loved
the music itself, and the hopelessness described in the lyrics. The song ended and I heard the person inside
the apartment jingle his keys. I
hid. It was him.
For miles I followed him, and I don’t think he noticed. We stopped at an Arco station, and a Ralph’s,
for a 2-pack of paper towels and a loaf of what looked like wheat bread. He dressed in this hip way, like an old
fashioned greaser, sort of early Elvis.
I could see the outline of his penis through his tight black jeans. We drove to an apartment building, where he
went inside and stayed for three or four hours.
Through the filmy amber curtains that lightly rode the wind and hung
about the windows like smog, these curtains that hung like ghosts from the
windows of the room where he sat with two friends, I watched animated men punch
prostitutes in the stomach and beat cops over the head with billy clubs; they
were playing the video game Grand Theft Auto.
They were all three so amused and absorbed. Once, an older women brought in a sandwich
for the young man who was presumably her son, and he playfully slapped her
butt when she walked away. She quickly turned
back to face him and swatted him with a dish towel she’d had in her other
hand. Everyone was smiling.
Later that night,I followed him down Sunset Boulevard, and then, I started to
get a sinking feeling as I saw that he was parking to go into the bar I used to
go to almost every night when I was younger, when I was young enough to enjoy
having a thick trash bag taped to my car window. I don’t like going places that remind me of
the past. I don’t like to remember how I
used to be, before I turned over control of my psyche to my husband, before painful cramps doubled me over in pain and viscous bloody masses slid from my pussy into the
toilet bowl and meant months of brave sad smiles. I don’t like to remember how life was right
after college when I didn’t yet know what person I would become. But I followed him inside, and took
a stool three stools down from where he sat chatting jovially with a pretty
bartender. This is how I learned what I’d
lost, sitting there that night. I lost a
lot.
