She seemed different to me now. It was like she had been several different women since I first met her. I’m sure I’m different too. All the lives and lies we live.
Years ago I met her when I was working at a radio station. I was DJing a live broadcast at a club and she was introduced to me by a girl that worked with me. After the gig, the three of us ate at an all night diner and when she got up to use the restroom, my friend told me, “Watch out for this one! She’s an actress and she’s crazy, I think. You’ll need eyes in the back of your beautiful bald head!”
She licked the creme from her spoon and added, “But she’s really sweet and I know for a fact she digs you and everything you do on the air.” 12 years had passed and she was driving me from BBC Broadcast Centre in White City to her place. She had already upset me by being an hour late and she told me how I had changed since we last saw each other by saying I had put on weight.
“Have you ever played hooky, called in sick and ran off with a lover for a day away from everything? How did you do it, what did you do and how did it feel?” She said crinkling the cellophane from the last pack of smokes she ever did. “Did you make a baby?” She put her hand on my knee.
I didn’t answer. “I don’t believe people plan on having kids. People get pregnant and justify it by saying they ‘Planned’ it, to fit in with society and to be nice to their “Accidents/Kids.” The ones that do plan, need fertilization, are selling off their children, or are acting in Pregnancy Test Strip commercials.” She told me smiling.
“Have you ever met someone at night, drank, danced, talked, laughed, then later made passionate love to them only to discover the next morning they were hideously deformed?” She continued as we climbed out of the car. There was a heavy girl I had a crush on when I was young, I really liked her when no one did, even the girls were mean to her, but when she lost the weight and became a hotty she ignored me and got pregnant by the jock and had 5 babies. “Book title; Fat Friend becomes a Thin Bitch!” She said unlocking the door to her flat.
Has anything like that happened to you? “Have you ever wanted to go back in time and tell that lost love how much they meant to you and that you’re sorry for leaving them?” She unzipped her top.
When I was a kid I would read Creem magazine and the words of Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Patti Smith, and Cynthia Rose, and imagine they were talking just to me with albums spread out on the carpet sharing with me the good, the bad and the why of music. But who would explain to me about relationships? “Is there a band or singer you loved and then years later you were playing some old tunes and you went, ‘Gee, what did I ever see in them? That’s awful!’ She took her boots off.
She unbuttoned her jeans and peeled out of them. She wasn’t wearing panties. She glanced at me to see it I was watching. “Are there old clothes you have that you just can’t get rid of because of the memories, or you don’t want to admit time is passing?” She was nude and she kissed me on my neck as she wrapped herself around me. My mom used to make quilts and they had everything in them. All my old clothes. I lost her to cancer and the house with all my quilts that she made for me burned. I don’t like to acquire things that I know I will lose.
“I’ll always be here for you, baby.” She whispered in my ear. We lose everything.
She wanted me to see an old porno from the 70s that for some as yet unknown reason she loved. We had finished the last bottle of wine, it was storming outside, she just put her head on my lap when the tape was eaten in the VCR and she said, “Our memories won’t be like videotape will it? We’ll always remember this, right?”
Days later she was to show me the Agatha Christie house. We never found it. There was a big party. We crashed it. A heal on her shoe broke and she took them off. I saw a plate of treats. I scooped them up. We ran with the stolen goods and had a picnic in Kensington Gardens. Has there ever been a nagging question you had to ask and then were very sorry you ever did because now you were afraid it would alter the way you felt about someone?
Years earlier she had put her bare feet up on my dashboard as an ocean breeze blew through the open windows and Underworld’s song, Born Slippy played. “I love this song so much I would marry it!” she said painting her toenails. “Not only that, but I would marry it, fuck it and then kill it for it’s money,” she added. Have you ever fallen in love with someone a long distance away, and were troubled by how to get there to be with them? What did you do?
I showed up at the small dirty room she rented in Tower Hamlets and she asked me with her wicked look, “Wanna pet my pussy?” I knew she wanted me to say, “Move your cat and I will,” like Johnny Carson did, but I wasn’t in the mood to play with her. My allergies were acting up, so I grabbed her cat, threw it outside where it would surely die, then I undressed what was left of her clothing and banged her on the kitchen table. 8 years later the industry I found myself trapped in was falling apart. We had seen a band at Brixton Academy she knew and there was talk of me making a video for them for some quick cash to pay of a growing debt.
We warmed our hands over the fire in the oil drum. She told me she had runaway from her family and haven’t talked to them in 11 years. She told me she had been raped, but did nothing about it. She showed me her scars. The emotional ones. I slid up my sleeves and showed her mine. The self inflicted physical ones. “You could be my family” she said. I smiled and she kicked the drum and we watched the embers float up to the stars. The following week it was surprisingly sunny and one day in that said week I walked the aisles of the East End Thrift Store near the Whitechapel Tube looking for her. She had found an old wedding dress. It was draped across her arm like dying lover. She was sad. “This might have been someone’s happiest day. Now it’s thrown away.” She looked up at me with her big eyes, “Tell me this isn’t going to happen to us.”
In Santa Monica 8 years later, I sat in her car, the rain pelted the windshield, you could barely see the beach, she put her head on the steering wheel and said, “Why shut me out? Why are you ignoring everyone? What have we all done, for you to build this wall?” That weekend in her Venice apartment where she lived now while working on a soon to be canceled television series on a soon to be bankrupt cable channel she tried to tell me everything. How everything would be different for us. How it would be wonderful. How we could be happy.
“I don’t care what’s happened these past years, it’s not real, we have each other now. We still love each other and that’s all that matters!” She told me. We embraced. I caught my reflection in a photo on her nightstand and I knew bad dreams were on their way for me again. Dreams of her with all those other men.
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