06.10.04: New design. Got rid of the art and tape trading sections since I don't really trade
anymore. Lots of new poetry.
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Case study: A boy is beaten by his father during childhood. When he is in mid-teens, he waits one day for his mother to pick him up from horseback riding lessons. When she gets there, she tells him his father is dead of Lou Gherig’s disease.
Prognosis: The boy will grow up afraid of attachment. He will push women away before they can get close. He will give up before failing to avoid eventual failure. He will have superficial friendships because he refuses to open himself up to people. There are panic attacks and Xanax and borderline alcoholism ahead.
And this is all true of James. People say, “he is a burnt out cigarette of a man;” “he’s a caricature from every book of mediocre fiction;” “he sucks.” I say things like that about him, too. I think people are right to view the present as a point to judge others, if there is any correct point from which to judge, but we all overlook something in him sometimes—the way something occasionally shows out of the status quo he seems to have assigned himself to.
* * *
I sit in my dorm room with James. The sheets have come off my bed and he’s reclining on the bare mattress, a cigarette between his fingers. He is telling me stories about Ski Academy, where he went to high school.
“There was this kid that would pay anyone to do things,” he said. “One time, we were dipping and spitting into an empty bottle and he paid this kid a hundred bucks to drink it.” He laughs. “The kid booted for an hour.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say. I remember him doing similar things. In the dining hall, he lathered a piece of chicken with butter, then offered twenty dollars to anyone who would take a bite.
“It was so funny. Ski Academy was good, though. It was small. There were like forty-seven people there. Everyone knew each other.”
He sits up and ashes in an empty soda can on my desk next to the ashtray.
“Can you please use the damn ashtray. It’s there for a reason,” I tell him. No one has the heart or the guts to tell him to fuck off completely.
“Fine.” He gives me an offended look. “Hey, play that song.”
“Which?”
“The Cure one.” Every month, he gets a different song that he listens to five times a day until people to jump out the window every time they hear it. This month it is ‘Close to Me’ by The Cure. He gets up and wanders into the next room where Garrett lives.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we just got a whole bunch of penis enlargement pills,” James says to Garrett, “and then we didn’t stop taking them and we just got huge dicks.”
“Uh… not really, man.”
“Come on. It would be so funny.”
I sit on my bed editing Jake’s paper for a Literary Journalism class, while he is at my computer reading mine. It’s late. Cigarettes are feeling harsh on the back of my throat. James walks in, his paper in hand. He cocks an eyebrow and I hold my hand out, taking it. I read it while he paces around the room and eventually settles into a chair.
“I know it sucks,” he says.
“Let me read it first,” I tell him. He cringes as I strike a line, correct grammar, scratch my head and keep reading. It’s really well written, though.
“It’s just that you guys have it still and I don’t,” James says. He transferred from St. Lawrence University to Hampshire College for creative writing.
“Have it?” Jake asks.
James shrugs and asks for a cigarette. He’s talking about passion, about the willingness to be frustrated by the process of writing for the sake of creation—that he can’t maintain what always feels like a far off dream. He lights the cigarette and inhales, then taps the ashes into an empty beer can on my bookcase.
I remember back to the previous year. Jake and Ari lived in a lounge together. It was big and had a balcony, so we used it to party. Each night, there would be beer cans and empty handles of liquor covering the surfaces of the room, chairs knocked over, the smell of ten people drinking hard. The room was filled with screaming, loud music, giggling. There would be Jake, Ari, James, me, Garrett, Ian.
The smokers went out to the balcony to smoke. The guys went out to the balcony to piss two floors down onto the grass below. The balcony was also where all drunken half philosophies were exchanged. I took a long swig off a fifth of Jim Beam and passed it to Ian, who did the same. Ian was the spitting image of Jim Morrison. His eyes were dark and intense. I lit a cigarette and listened to the conversation between him and James. Off the balcony, the trees were flat against the sky, black on blacker.
“Hey, all I’m saying is that I’d rather have a farm and a wife and kids and be happy than live immortally through writing,” James said.
“Dostoevsky, man. Think of Dostoevsky. The man was a raging drunk. His life was shit. Think about that though. People will still be reading his shit in two hundred years,” Ian said.
“Who cares after you’re dead?” James tossed his cigarette butt over the railing. His eyes remained shallow, glazed, the color on the very surface. They both looked at me.
“I’m not convinced that happiness and writing are mutually exclusive,” I said. I leaned against the brick to keep from swaying. I remembered him claiming on some night that he wanted to die nobly. Really, though, who cares if you’re dead? What’s the difference? but I didn’t say anything about it.
This was a continuing debate that never went anywhere. I had heard it about ten times before. It never went anywhere because after about five minutes they stopped listening to one another and began ranting.
I opened the sliding glass door and went inside. They followed, and we joined the circle where everyone was screaming along to “Stand By Me.”
The lounge is empty. It’s the end of the semester and everyone has gone home except James and me. James kicks his feet up onto the table. His pant leg settles next to a half empty bottle of grappa, then he raises an eyebrow and looks over at me.
“So, what should we do?” he asks.
“I dunno. We can play surrealist questions.” Surrealist questions is a game where one person writes a question and the other an answer. Both players don’t see what the other writes until after its written. The questions and answers are often eerily matched in a good game. We play for an hour and then he turns to me, looking at me from behind cigarette smoke.
“When I was eighteen, I went to Europe to find love. I did a semester at Oxford, but I really went to find someone.”
I’m touched by this cheesy cliché of Europe, his naivety at the time. Though I’m thinking it, I don’t want to ask him if too many bad romance novels had gotten to his head. I just say: “You didn’t find anyone?”
“No. I used to really believe in love. That it was everything. I don’t anymore.”
“What changed?” I look at him. His eyes look distant, deeper than usual, as if they opened from the back.
“I don’t know,” he says.
The film and photo building sits in a cluster of other similar looking buildings—white and metal, some cement. I am getting ready to leave with Jake, Tim, and Garrett. James shows up, his eyes red. Only I realize that he had been crying.
“I broke up with Kate. Then I sat in my truck for like forty-five minutes,” James says. He tries to smile, looking down. They had been dating for months. She was the first girl of many that I had seen him with that he hadn’t fucked for a week then hated.
“I’m sorry, man,” someone says, but I don’t turn to see who it is. I am watching his eyes. Everyone makes to leave.
I want to ask if there is something I can do. If he wants me to stay and just sit with him and listen to him, or just to sit there and be quiet with him. But we don’t talk like that unless it is late and we are drunk and there is nothing else to do, no one else around. We talk about booze and getting laid and hot women.
“She’s so pretty,” he whispers. No one else seems to have heard it. There are tears glazing the surface of his eyes.
James and I sit outside the dorm on a couch. It’s cold despite it being April. I sit curled up, looking at James. He sits straight ahead, looking out at the quad.
“When I was at Oxford, I got really into Emily Dickinson,” he says. “This is my favorite poem:
"My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third even to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.”
“Why is it your favorite?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Just, the last line, it’s so perfect.”
We are at James’s house. There is a keg of Rolling Rock sitting in the basement, but James and I are sitting outside rolling and smoking cigarettes. I am reeling after four games of beer pong.
“I need sex,” he says. “I haven’t gotten any in a month.”
“Yeah I have a three month dry spell going for me. I think I need a friend with benefits.” I’m not propositioning him. He’s my friend. This is what we talk about.
He laughs. “Yeah, me too. Let’s go back inside.”
We all play more beer pong, sit around, talk, listen to music. I am trying unsuccessfully to strum out “My Generation” by The Who on James’s guitar when he walks up to me. I put the guitar down. Everyone else is getting ready to leave.
“So, if you ever want a friends with benefits thing, you can call me,” he says.
"Okay. I’ll see you later, James.”
I pile into the car with everyone. I never call him. He leans against the siding of his house and blows smoke rings as we pull out of the driveway.
I remember it like a photograph. Everyone is standing around the bocce court. Ari is toeing the gravel. Jake and Garrett are studying the bocce balls. James is standing with his back against the fence. He’s staring at nothing, not because there isn’t anything to stare at, but because it's easier not to look.
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