(Sorry for this slightly confusing way to post this story.) Please scroll on down for the beginning.
Thanks you for reading,
Domenic
E-6
It did not help matters that I began to date the therapist I mentioned before. She was an important factor in exorcising a noxious form of recycled insecurity, and so much pain and anger caused by this callous and damaging game at my expense. As I began to show strong signs of not allowing the wardrobe gambling game to affect me, in fact to be empowered with the experience, boomeranging its bite, my relationship with Dr. Torrequada became more and more romantic.
How could I forget being dumped by the always exquisitely dressed Dr. Torrquada while my left hand was tied to my own bed post by an aged ill fitting give away T shirt with a fictional so called ‘nougat’ monster representing some gimmicky candy bar that was now only sold in certain parts of South Carolina?. Why all this… just before telling me that she needed ‘space’ or whatever it was she decanted then and there with much blurble and bluster. I was denied even an onanistic ending of it all; my body and spirit crumbled at the thought of what that shirt represented. How it instantly stood for my shabby and almost dystopian blandness in clothing, or what I irrationally imagined to still to be the case. Tied with it, dumped…
Yes, I knew it was all bullshit. I didn’t care about having just a few pairs of Brave New World khaki pants that could hardly be distinguished, or the clothing I possessed in general back then. Big fucking deal… I know. It took me back. It took a while more to feel liberated again from those freshly resurrected ill feelings from that time in my life. It was during times such as the latter mentioned relapse into a flaccid gloom, that I wanted to strangle the memory of that gasconading little fuck Sammy Boy the foreskin choker. Oh yeah, I had names for him. You try to laugh everything off as I did to myself that night in the restaurant waiting for Sam. Not easy. He thought he was such a smooth operator, just gliding on the stupidity of others. Or what was Sam really up to? How interested was he in simply making money?
Sam contacted me after chancing upon a call I made to a radio program broadcast on WDTIX Norohosquet. If this was not strange enough, Gary also called into this show. Yes, we all lived in Delphi Two, had dated the same DJ from WDTIX, and were now to meet at one of the most highly regarded Asian Fusion restaurants in town: Prawn Dawn. Everyone would be dressed neatly. We were all familiar with the place. We even occasionally stopped in for drinks, but never noticed, or were at Prawn Dawn during the same days or time.
So yes, I got there before Gary and Sam, and chatted with L the bartender. She told me stories of Gary and his various dates that had me spitting up my Geckle Loom and Lime on the rocks. Gary the groping slickster! He was an entrepreneur now. L knew quite a bit about the old Neck Breaker from my freshman days of college. Why shouldn’t Gary be an Entrepreneur? I chided myself for being so superficial and prejudiced in my immediate thoughts. I suppose we all move on from reciting the Two Live Crew to bigger and better things. He couldn’t be as insufferable as an Andrew Lewis, my co-worker, who told endless stories of the avant-garde composers he stopped listening to during high school, while he pretended to champion a so called persecuted business elite in South America and wore fashion clothes mimicking working class attire from some bygone strong American Union era, clothes made in slave wage labor zones. Of course Andrew was sitting there at PD slurping up Yaki noodles with some glamour girl clutching her telephone as she occasionally looked up at Lewis’s pretty scallion green watery eyes.
Sam was the next to walk in. He wore soft stone baggy pants and an ill fitting indigo blazer with a tight fit. His right hand was bandaged, and I noticed something that looked like a Tic-Tac-Toe game marked up on the soft white gauzy surface of this bandaging. Sam walked right past me to the men’s room. When he came out, his hair was combed to the other side, its wet seal fat slick dirty blonde locks heavily parted, a sort of Maginot line bristling with product. A pack of candy cigarettes was slightly bulging from his jacket breast pocket when he walked. Maybe he was trying to quit smoking real butts?
Sam walked right up to me without looking at me. He put his head on my left shoulder, and began to shake his head from side to side. I was a little freaked. My mom had done something very similar to me when she told me about the death of my little sister. I was stunned, frightened. My exuberantly comical and upbeat mood scattered into clumsy phalanxes on a retreat to an abolished homeland.
“Why shouldn’t we be friends? We should be very good friends. That’s what I think. Because I know we can. I sense that we can. I think there is something about us that. It’s been some time. I’m so….”
Sam went on talking in this breathless manner, short sentences speeding pass sleepy toll booth operators, rapt slurry going for a midnight jog from a cold morning mouth. I did not doubt his sincerity. I did see him nervously eye my clothes, looking me up and down in a very intimidated or guarded way. Was everyone looking at my clothes? Why was everyone ordering the tuna? I began to sweat, clenching a fist, breathing painfully with each inhalation.
It passed. My jovial mood returned. The overhanging lights of the Prawn Dawn Bar we were sitting at regained their regal ease. I think I even laughed a bit, as one does at a school bully they encounter in a future scene when you can clearly remove yourself from yourself, watch an everyday chimera of the supposed so-solid and unwavering, get scratched out into insipid glyphs, the melt-play of a spoiled pot of pretend. Once seen, you have little doubt that such a bully or show off or however it went, became nothing more than a diminishing continuation of a sort of over confident caricature now stricken with a fatalistic humbleness that might temporarily tip over into amiable chauvinistic buddy-up play.
Sam Forskrenn asked me for my forgiveness. I granted it with a smile and relief. I did not want a big deal, or a lot of talk. I wanted a quiet moment of shared deep reflection. Prawn Dawn became as loud as I ever heard it at that moment, and therefore all the more quiet. A guest had berated a waiter for opening a pot of steaming mussels into his face. We talked about how we thought of each other over the years, how the thoughts changed. We talked about enmity in general. It got deep. It got shallow.
We finished a good two drinks together before Gary finally walked into the restaurant from the back entrance where the municipal parking was located. Gary looked cocky and ridiculous, but almost tender somehow. I was touched and slightly amazed about the ease of mutual volubility with Sam, as well as the very effusive and particular stories we bandied. We were sometimes upset at each other, very curious, in need of understanding, sympathy, forgiveness, and so forth. I have to admit that these twenty or so minutes with Sam at the slick and ultra-modern darkly lit back bar at Prawn Dawn, were to my mind, easily, the most unambiguously open hearted conversation I’ve ever had. I listened to every word of Sam’s as if he were me, and not just any me, but one that desperately needed to be understood in a time of great sorrow and vertiginous doubt or confusion.
We all shared a love of fine cuisine, and cooking. This continued to surprise me, even as our chitty chat turned to the fascination, nay, great interest we shared in opening a restaurant. Gary certainly didn’t strike me as a man with a critical palette, or a yen for excellent victuals or culinary innovation, or anything of the like. I was wrong. It was understandably hard to picture or fathom that there might have now been a foodie or something like that stored in the body of a person I only remember as basically an oversexed boy, sucking the final flavor particle air out of a bag of cheap BBQ chips, and then farting onto his bed dripping of filth and gyrating to terrible light porn rap or Cheap Trick cover band music.
We all studiously avoided talk of the gambling on my wardrobe from college years. There was hardly any talk of Heveilah Low or the now vanished FLP pills scene at Leg up Beer Garden. Any contentious topic was more than contained. It was obliterated by a new and odd feeling of unity, and pertinacity of purpose. We did speak a lot about Delphi 2, the strangeness of not running into each other (But we did of course, in certain ways we never really noticed or wanted to notice.)
Gary did eventually tell a dirty story about dogging H Low on some cheap party boat in Nova Scotia. He kept on giving details of some turquoise hippie necklace she wore, how it looked on her tan skin, the slipperiness of the boat’s bathroom floor, the FLP pills they were on. The detailing in this story became both enthralling and extremely unsettling; it was in short, irresistible. We all laughed at the idea of intensely fucking on a so called party boat while one and their partner were both transiently fluent in Farsi, or was it Tamil English…..out of their pretty skulls