Read it and see…it ain't the usual thing. By the way, rice crispy treats dipped in peanut butter is pretty much the greatest thing ever, try it sometime,- A

Miss Fortune

Let me sing you a song about a slut named Fortune. The first thing you needed to know about me, is that I am not the kind of person who is easily persuaded by her slings and arrows. Fortune is a whore dressed in sullied scarlet. She is a Clairol Blonde, the sort of woman who watches All My Children in the day, embellishes herself in Clinique at night, and knows how to kiss you so hard your lips collapse and tremble in a seizure after she's done with them. You know the woman, Mrs. Fortune, married to every damn sucker she meets. She adores you one minute, makes you the embodiment of her capacity to love, then, when you least expect it, she will kick you to the curb as you come home and find her sleeping with the mailman.

But I would not let her seduce me; I would never call myself her victim. I do not even blame her for my weary existence, my wretched dream, and my wasted ruin.

I have lived, breathed, and eaten August's smoky silence, and all I can tell you is that it is not a white color you see when the Grim Reaper pays his final visit, but rather a charcoal shade so melancholy that even the London sky is more vivid and crystal.

But this isn't a story about me. I don't want you to know me, I don't want you to know the man who threw away the only decent thing he had in his life for a couple of hours of eminence.

You, CEO in your dusty, black Doc Martins, you teenagers, swaggering in your low Levis, you old woman, holding your groceries, your orange juice and saltines, closely to your breast—

My little audience, spectators, and indifferent passer-bys, I will not bore you, for I have performed for thousands of crowds just like you in my day and I know what sells tickets. Back in my white bandana days, when life was as sweet and brand new as a bag of m&m's waiting to be chugged and swallowed, I was once a connoisseur on how to please my aficionados.

The first lesson, if anyone cares to hear, is never a sing a song about your own pathetic reality.

People do not want to hear songs about ex boy banders, dumpster smokers, or damned sinners playing their acoustic guitars outside McDonalds. People do not want to know how many boxes of Easy Mac you can afford after you sell your Grammy to a Pawn Shop across the street from where you used to work. People do not want to hear those stories and I am damn aware of it. I suppose it's pretty much the only thing I really do know…how to please a couple of nameless, meaningless fans.

But to indulge your monotony, I will tell you a little bit about myself.

I never had the kind of entitled education they promise children when they grumble about going back to school. The dreams of higher education, high school, college, and all the choices and opportunities they provide, never sold me. Education was simply a baseball card I traded in for something more valuable…my own notoriety. After all, on this grassy diamond of perpetual time, what man seeks are not pictures of history and the successes and failures of history's players, man seeks his own destiny; and for a brief moment in this game of life, I was Babe hitting my record homer. Everyday I woke up with the resilience of knowing that I was a Hall of Famer; and what was first base when it was an easy jog to get to third? What were steroids, peanuts and cracker jacks, when I had platinum albums, Swedish super models, and any kind of drug a college student could dream of at my finger tips?

And yet, the band, which I will not call by name because it vexes the weakest cog in me, my brain, was doomed from the beginning. The boys were hopeless romantics falling for the poetry of the ages. They could have been the first American colonists sitting on Plymouth Rock; they were so idealistic about their fresh future. But the truth was frightening; we were not ready for our independence.

We were only scared shitless children who held up flags and banged drums for our cause even if we could not even imagine what war entailed. We played Super Mario Brothers at three in the morning; we downed chicken fingers and French fries at classy European restaurants; we thought Britney Spears really was that innocent and waiting for the right man; we believed that the Red Sock could win a World Series; we believed in ourselves and our music; but who were we kidding? We were only children playing chicken with Darius Mills, an oppressive king who did more than tax us and humiliate us on the world stage. We were children, submissive little babies, who dreamed about rebelling, but could only hold on to Daddy D's hand for fear of drowning.

But this song is not about what I once was, or even what I became. This song is about her…the woman who wielded her magic and transformed me into this bearded, crumpled, and shambled man. This song is about a girl who should have stayed a child when youth was still an eloquent promise.

You may see her light golden hair, speckled, pallid face, and delicate Skittle red lips smiling at you on any of the TTC buses running throughout Toronto; you may imagine you can hear her singing to you as you drive by one of her massive billboards on the interstate to New York; you may pass her gorgeous, surprising eyes and yearn for them to be looking at you. But she is never with you; she is a figment of some wonderful, past fantasy, lucid but perplexed, real but transitory.

Oh, I wish I could explain to you how much I long to heed to that powerful voice as I did when I was a young man, to see her adolescent, waterfall eyes searing into me until my stomach cart wheels and I can no longer stand, but words cannot fulfill my heart's fervent pleas. There is no use in imagining or explaining anymore. Language is now irrelevant.

She used to believe I could be more than a question on Jeopardy, more than a joke on late night television, but she was as idealistic as I was when I was a child, and she was ultimately greatly mistaken in her brave belief.

She was not a woman. I was not her man.

She was a stranger, and far from commercially gorgeous. From first glance, a man would indifferently assume she was a Wal-Mart shopper, not a Milan high fashion model. She was not the kind of woman a man immediately discerns at the party: the one in welcoming white halters, or plunging purple gowns. She was not, for that matter, Bitch Fortune, who blows kisses your way in her tight jeans barely covering her gaudy, crimson thong.

No, my girl was not a conventional beauty, but she was a hard mouthed, witty, brilliant girl who could make your head spin in circles when she spoke. You noticed her voice and her mind before you noticed her face. And, yet, even in the silent moments, she had a sheer elegance that far surpassed any Matel plastic doll I had ever met.

She was not simply pure and good, nor was she mendacious and seductive. She was hard on the edges with messy blunt, fire engine red hair, but she was also quiet and vulnerable at her quivering lips, and forlorn eyes. What a magnificent kid she was; the kind you hope will fly to Never-Never Land to remain that charming and lively forever.

For me, she was a portrait of summer. She was everything that I did not get to be, and yet, how quickly she wanted to change her portrait, how quickly Wendy wanted to leave Peter, how quickly summer yearned to metamorphosis into winter.

I am no fool of fortune; I knew she sought adulthood because of me. I believe I was what preyed on her subconscious those last months before the accident. I was the rank dirt that hovered in the wake of her dreams.

There is in me, a temporary disdain for the public world that distorted what we had. Entertainment Progress labeled it another wayward Little Tommy Q scandal; People used me as a scapegoat in their year of dry celebrity gossip. But losing my job, my reputation, and my friends were not the worst consequences of a night that will haunt me until all of my tomorrows have died beside my yesterdays.

Despite what the papers said, I never slept with her. The very idea of anyone, let alone a workaholic producer, claiming and tainting her innocence seemed abominable to me. Then again, this weary, workaholic producer gradually began to believe if anyone had a right to claim her, it was him. None of those imprudent boys that she dated for a whim deserved her; only I belonged to her, only I memorized every note that quivered out of her mouth as she spoke; only I could made even her laughter sound like music. Only I could not love her, so I hid in the game of solitaire. For years I was nothing more than an ace of cold diamonds.

Yet, eighteen approached in no hurry. The years lagged like crippled old dogs, muzzled and yearning to break free, but also content in their somnolent progression away from the kennel.

Somewhere down the road of vinyl records, coy stares, and innocent flirtations, my girl was no longer a clumsy child, but some kind of rare nightingale, lovely, simplistic, and mellow. Her last songs were as bittersweet as the temporal light from a cinnamon Christmas Candle, burning on the coldest days of the year. Her euphonious final chords made me deaf for centuries, while the voice that accompanied the music only hummed for a marble moment.

Immediately after the fateful night, I searched the mountain crevices of memory to find the sound of her voice, but it pains me to say, that it was only the skeleton of music that lingered in the back of my mind. The enthusiasm in her voice to finish her junior album, her anticipation for her approaching birthday, and her last words she ever spoke to me, "You're a good man Quincy," were taken from me, and taken from the soulful song of remembrance.

The papers only mentioned the numbers, the cold hard number. The number of drinks I had that night. The number of my blood alcohol level, the number of miles per hour my car was burning. The number of women I had slept with that year. The number of drugs I had taken. The number of people who bought her freshmen and sophomore album. The number of bones broken. The number of the legal age of consent. The number 17.

The papers threw together a mirage of words and images onto their flashy, hot off the press pages. I was painted in a dismal color. The man who hated himself more than his own stupid fortune, his own stupid luck, was also a child molester and an alcoholic. When Monday morning arrived in sad mirth, my bloody, dumb face woke up all of Canada. A narcissist and pathetic man sobbing and stupid, was smacked sober on the cover of every newspaper.

The paper failed to mention that her eighteenth birthday was only a day away, that we had waited three exhausting years for this day to come, that we were driving home from her friend's apartment and not some reprehensible hotel room as all of the journalists decided to spin the story, that I drank because it was the only way to stomach a night with her and her lead guitarist nestling in each other's affections throughout the dinner, that I drove her home because she begged me to give her a ride in that damn Blue Viper for old times sake. The papers also failed to mention that the girl who suffered serious internal injuries was more than the first Instant Star Winner.

There is, however, one thing that everyone got correct. I was, as I am still, the sole fiend, the only real monster of the night that condemned and ruined Jude at the cusp of her precious adulthood.

After she was rushed to the emergency room, after the sirens finally stopped wailing and the flashing lights faded to black, eternity decided to stand still. Eighteen came, but Jude barely came with it. The girl who awoke in the hospital that morning was not greeted with a birthday breakfast in bed, bubble gum balloons and blue berry muffins with a pastel candle on top, she was instead greeted with medical charts, yellow rubber hands holding red pens, and buzzing ceiling lights that flickered spontaneously like a lost recollection.

The Jude Harrison who came back to us could not tell you which Beatle shared her notorious last name, nor could she even phonetically read her own first name when the doctor spelled the letters out with a thick black sharpie. I will never forget the smell of that permanent marker, those nauseating, sweet and sour fumes that seeped into my skin as I grabbed the sharpie from the doctor and simply wrote on his pad the number eighteen, as I dreadfully smiled back at her. She needed to remember what this day meant for us, but the girl merely gave me back a miserable, lifeless expression, as dead and as empty as the aluminum cans of alcohol that cackled down the street when the Viper flipped over, spilling Jude and a lifetime of regrets onto the cold cement.

It was looking at the despondent girl in front of me that forced my heavy, aching body to soak up the gravity of my error. She was staring at a stranger. She was a stranger. This Jude was beautiful, quiet, and simple, and the first thing anyone noticed about her was her joyless smile and her lovely, lonely eyes. Jude Harrison no longer had any wit, any vibrato; Jude Harrison no longer had a voice.

Because of Darius' connections, she became the face of Vanity, and I became the man who murdered the voice, the spirit, and the attitude of G-Majors highest grossing artist.

The girl I knew is gone. Jude understood that life could be more than an orgiastic night of self-ruin. Jude believed that there was goodness in the familiarity of an old song beating out of the radio as we weaved across the winding roads at one in the morning. She believed that there was goodness in a car where we had stolen kisses and so many fond memories of past birthdays. She faithfully believed their was goodness in tires that moaned against hard surfaces, goodness in an often time dismal future and goodness in the roads we take to get there; there was goodness in misfortune, she thought, and their was goodness in a tired, empty driver. But she was wrong, the only decency in this ephemeral life was her spotless spirit, the girl who never made the world cold.

But this Jude cannot even take a sad song and make it better. Hers is the wail that shall never be heard; hers is the song that lives on only in the faint echoes of a taintless past.

And so we scuffle on every day, she smiles down at me on the advertisements on the 16th Street Billboard, and I sing for her. The Golden arches from the McDonald's sign keep my head dry when the skies decide to join my perpetual weeping; and our past is shut up safely in me like the psalms in a gilded Bible, opened only when I must remember the suffering we all must share for our spineless sins. Rarely will I ever open it to remember the incandescent promise and prayers of a better time. Rarely will I ever open it to rejoice for the Father and his Holy Name.

Now, good audience, I will sing any song you like for a dime, just none of her songs…and I also sadly must tell you I no longer sing, "Pick up the Pieces." In this crushed, dejected heart, there is no longer anything but broken blue metal and a few shattered memories to pick up.