Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the WB, Amy Sherman-Palladino or her and her husbands creation Gilmore Girls.
Spoiler Warning(s), for this chapter: Last Week Fights, This Week Tights.
Rated: Rated R for suggestive and harsh language.
Warning(s) in general: Chapter two does not leave off at the same point as 1st chapter.
I Think of Ice Cubes
Chapter Two
Wondering
I imagine Romeo must've felt like dying himself after he killed that sanctimonious bastard Tybalt and someone yelled to stand not amazed. But I am just that amazed in all the negative forms of the word. She said no. I blink look down then turn and walk out of her door.
After driving for 20 minutes I feel something rumbling up inside me and I have to pull over. Turning the engine off and just stare out the windshield, I think I have to throw up so I just sit and breathe through my nose-- the sobs come up a minute later. Fuck me, I'm sitting in my car crying like a pussy. Mr. Mother-fucking-Pussy crying in his God damn car like Lloyd Dobbler or some other useless prick, if only it was raining the scene would be set. I turn the key flip radio scanning all the talk radio trying to find some music. A College station is playing on a loop the DJ announcing last Monday as the date. They play a set of people I've never heard but I keep it on so I don't have to listen to my own breathing.
I look out the windows, parked in the New Haven train station parking lot I have a clear view of the platform, there's a girl with long reddish hair looking up and down the tracks. I watch her walk over to a pay phone take out a phone card and dial for what seems like two minutes I watch her mouth but she doesn't speak just swipes under her eyes and listens, she's crying, I can't watch anymore as she hangs up and slides down to the ground her head going into her hands. I reach for my backpack and take out my notebook and a pen and start writing.
And she sits, hair in her face, water on her face.
She wishes she was at the ocean, listening to anything
other than train trestles and the boom and crackle of
the P.A. announcer making incoherent announcements.
She wants to hear waves crashing, feel the salty sting
of the ocean on her face not warm tears dripping into
the corners of her mouth tasting less like salt more
like bitter lemons. She reaches into the corners of
her mind and imagines going back on all the bad things
she's done in her life, but knows full well the
impossibility of reconciling-- she wants to go home.
The empty woman. I say out loud shutting the notebook sliding the pen into the spiral placing both back inside my pack. Never gonna see her again. A second later I realize the double meaning behind what I just said to myself.
You look like hell. Is my greeting early that following morning. Curled on my side still in my clothes Todd stands over me with a toothbrush stuck in his mouth. He holds a cup in one hand and a tube of Tom's Toothpaste in the other.
You're one to talk. I say into my mattress.
Would you kindly shut up and answer your pager it's been beeping for like an hour nonstop. He kicks the side of my mattress with a socked foot.
I roll over onto my back trying to concentrate on what he just said.
Pager asshole, turn it off before I reach into your pants and throw it out the window.
It's then that I realize that a beeping sound iscoming from my ass I roll over and grab my pager from my back pocket the digital screen displays my bosses number. Fuck me!
Don't wanna. Todd says from inside the bathroom followed by a pointed flush.
Shut up. I say at the closed door.
I heard that. Well joy to the world he heard me, who
fucking cares. I heard that too.
I didn't say anything. Rolling off my mattress rifling through my clothes pile, picking out a semi clean shirt, pulling the one I'm wearing off and replacing it with the newer one.
Sixth sense. Todd says after blowing his nose.
Um yeah, later Todd. I say while grabbing for my leather jacket, my back pack, my boots and a Slim Jim from the kitchenette counter top.
The woman who lives next door is standing in her bathrobe in the hall, her ass in the air as she kneels over her most recent Welcome Mat. Todd keeps stealing them, shredding them and throwing the pieces in the alley. This time she's wielding a staple gun.
I hear her whisper in an eerily conniving voice. I look over my shoulder half expecting her to be sticking razor blades up through the back of the mat. Nope just staples twisted enough for me, wicked bitch.
At the stairs I slip on my boots, stuffing my jacket into my backpack my notebook and Luke's book getting bent up at the bottom of the bag.
Time passes but it's passing feels like pouring oat meal through a funnel, 50 year-old car oil on your hands by mistake and rubbing it on your face. I realized tonight that it's been exactly three months to the day that I royally made an idiot of my self in front of Rory. I don't even like thinking her name. When I think of her she's become this abstract thing that just kind of floats blurred at the edges with this annoying as hell Mona Lisa smile. I don't even have any pictures of her.
Every morning, I go to work every evening, I come home. Weekends, I go to the park and read. See old friends, take odd jobs to make extra cash. Sparingly, I visit Liz, since we do live in the same city it only seems appropriate. Once every few weeks I call Luke, sometimes he calls me. A couple of months ago he told me that he and Lorelai were together. He waited a beat, and said g'head say it. So I waited and said it.
Bout fuckin' time.
He called me a jackass but I could hear him smiling. I congratulated him(I did), and he thanked me. Without preamble, he asked if I'd done anything about the Rory situation or if I still believed that the ball was in her court. I couldn't admit to him that after the wedding, I pretty much declared myself to her, was ceremoniously shot down and ran home with my tail between my legs. I've left his book at the bottom of my pile and look at it every week or two. I won't admit that I've pretty much given up on love because I know without a doubt that I suck at it. I change the subject telling him that I took my GED adding that it was probably the easiest test I've ever taken in my life. If you can read the English language you can take this test. I could tell that underneath it all, he wanted to tell me that I was acting cocky and that for a lot of people it's hard. But he kept his mouth shut and said he was proud. Sometimes talking to him is hard.
I write a lot now. Poor vocabulary to use a lot but it's the truth. I write quite frequently. Sometimes I imagine that I'm somebody else for awhile like when I'm walking down the street I come up with these elaborate situations or experiences I could have. Getting published in the New Yorker, becoming an obscure but great screenwriter, moving to Italy and living in some rustic town with a beautiful faceless woman who sounds just like Sofia Loren and then morphs into Rory Gilmore. I won't allow myself to see myself getting published. I think it's to see myself an old man with a creaky leather couch living in Brooklyn with stacks of so many dusty books I can't reach or read them all.
Tonight I went out walking. Just walking, wondering about things like why this icy blonde girl I saw last week smiled at me. And why yesterday I think I saw her in a cab giving some greaser head. I thought about the way people walk and that I haven't watched the news in the longest time. I saw an old movie the other day about a guy who used people so much that he couldn't understand how at the end of the story no one wanted anything to do with him. I sat in the theater all the way through the credits half watching peoples names scroll up half watching the middle aged couple down front necking like teenagers. I prayed in that theater that I will never resemble anyone I know and the main character of the movie I just saw.
I just went out walking. I read that in a play once sometimes I think it's the perfect phrase to describe my life.
It's greedy to say that I'm surprised to see her sitting on my bed reading one of my books. It's half assed of me to admit that I don' kind of want to slide down to the floor and get my head straight.
We did this before, didn't we? I manage to get out.
She says. Things change.
God I hate it when she's cryptic like that.
Credits: The movie he saw is Alfie starring Michael Caine released 1965, play version by Bill Naughton Copyright 1963, the play mentioned is The Glass
Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the piece in the beginning is original.