Debilitating Gas (575 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.66 on 14 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by kL (View user info) at 2007-05-13 03:59:28 EDT
So here's me, pounding the pavement at dusk in downtown. The boring restaurants are all taking down their menus, putting up their bouncers; getting ready to rake in the yuppie disposable partying income.
I guess I should be mad that I'm here. They'd called me to come out, saying something about a movie, and something about her. Her being there. So I bussed and walked and found the place. Then what? Nine fifty, nine fifty-five, ten o'clock, the movie was starting, I guess. So they were inside, I wasn't. 'How am I going to find them in there?' And I left. Probably no loss anyways. Probably, ten dollars gone on some flick I wouldn't watch even if it was free on an insomniac airline. Probably, she'd be with some girlfriends and I'd be sitting way far from her next to some goon with fat elbows, or worse: in front of her so I wouldn't be able to watch the projection flicker on her hair, wondering what she's thinking. So, you know, I don't feel so bad I'm out alone, walking. The city has a nice heartbeat at night, even if I'm too young to touch the ticker yet.
Now I'm in a record shop open late. The logo is nice and garish: yellow and red, just the way some seedy, late-night shop should be. I'm browsing and making some eyes at a girl who's exciting me with hers, so big but shy. I'm turning away and mindlessly flipping, though. I know that I've got no more heart to waste on another girl. And I'm turning to leave, I'm already midway through the door, and the Chinatown electronic door music is playing, when I feel a light touch on my arm.
'Hey, you got the time?' The girl is saying to me, but her eyes are telling me that she's looking for more than some numbers for the darkness. They've got the same scared excitement in them that I know I've had in mine, approaching girls with the same nothing words.
So I reach in to my pocket and check my phone, 'Yeah, it's ten thirty.' Wow, and my voice is sounding weird in a deep way. Is it something with this chick?
'Oh! I didn't know it was so late. I've got to get home," she's saying with a coy forwardness that's getting me going pretty well, to be honest, 'Any chance you're going to the West End?'
No. 'Yeah, something like that.' Why am I saying this? What the hell am I doing, walking with her to the bus stop, finding out that her name is Jenny and that she goes to the all-girls school just a few blocks from mine. Now I'm asking all fake quizzically if she doesn't agree that being a lesbian in an all girls school is the world's best situation. It's not that funny, but she's laughing anyways, and I'm not sold, but smiling anyways, 'cause really, she's already got me dazzled in an unknown flash-in-the-pan kind of way. Fuck me as to why, she's not that cute.
The conversation is weirdly easy, but we're clambering to the back of the empty bus, and I've no bright ideas. She's looking at me with those sexy, adventurous eyes and I'm not fit for this. Just some kid in love with a girl who's probably in the theatre rubbing elbows with the theoretically fat-elbowed guy, thinking what nice, large elbows he has, without thinking about me a bit, but that doesn't change that I'm in love. So, fucking conversation, I'm asking if she likes music, and slipping some pillowcase headphones over our ears. Well, watching the window and thinking about the girl, and slipping glances at this girl (not the girl) next to me, the time is passing. And I'm seeing that she's okay, so I'm giving it thought zero. Then, I don't know how long we've been going like that, but it's got to be more than a few songs that have played when she pops off the 'phones, and smiling my way, goes hopping off the bus. It takes a bit and them I'm remembering that I'm now a few songs farther from my house than I was before, and a few songs closer to seven, when my mom will come in to my room, banging pots, and pouring water, and singing songs, and getting me out of bed for school.
So I'm climbing off the bus in the middle of affluent nowhere, but knowing that the bus coming on the other side of the street in the opposite direction can't be a bad idea. So familiarity is slowly sweeping the streets like splashes of colour onto black and white filmstrips and I'm flipping songs absentmindedly. The street signs keep whirring like a register upwards: seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth. Nice and simple, 'cause I'm getting off at twenty-fifth, to crawl in to bed at a painless hour.
But a plan is forming, and I can see some store lights still open, and the street extending straight in to the horizon like in one of those boring paintings of an empty road where the street's like a long, upside-down 'V'. And at the point of that horizon is a sign on the street that says forty-one, and near that is the house where she lives. And the plan is still forming, I'm thinking a note, and something sweet. A cake, or a cookie, or it doesn't matter. The note is what's important.
In the plan, I'm leaving the note and the sweet whatever on her doorstep. She's finding it and lighting up and going upstairs and reading and knowing and reciprocating later. But... now the streets are reading twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and since I've lost some of the optimism of my teens, I guess, I'm thinking about content and reaction. What's in my plan note to make her light up? Well, I guess I don't know, 'cause I'm already getting off the bus and walking past the store and up my sidewalk and in my house.
Here's my room, and the dark. I flip the lid of my computer, and the room is flooded with techno light. I'm still wrapped in my headphones, Bjork is singing, and I'm reading the messages on the screen:
Julie - 9:45 PM says: Hey u there?
Julie - 9:50 PM says: Guess ur at the movie
Matt - 9:30 PM says: yo you left yet? Julie's not comin anymore, iono why.
And I'm shutting the lid, and executing the light and lying face-up on the bed; staring at the grey-black ceiling, and realizing. Thinking I could have gone, and been at her house. Then she'd have been thinking I was there... and I'd have been thinking she'd be away... and it could've been one of those moments, you know? But that's over, and I'm sleeping, and all that's left is the hiss that the latent disappointment of tonight makes as it seeps over my crumpled frame like some debilitating gas.
User Reviews
Submitted by GREEEN (user info) at 2007-05-15 04:58:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by cshape (user info) at 2007-05-15 02:30:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
shit. thanks for the responses, i didn't know what kind of rating this would get.
Submitted by Ozymandias (user info) at 2007-05-14 17:07:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent writing all around. The emotion was conveyed very well.
Submitted by zwerg (user info) at 2007-05-14 12:33:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by DirtyHarry (user info) at 2007-05-14 12:19:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
aww
Submitted by Susie_Derkins (user info) at 2007-05-14 10:00:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by sir_cowman (user info) at 2007-05-13 22:22:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Who would rate this less than a perfect two?
Beautiful.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-05-13 20:24:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by i_can_get_you_a_toe (user info) at 2007-05-13 17:08:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by Ballare (user info) at 2007-05-13 12:52:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Huh.
Submitted by hidden101 (user info) at 2007-05-13 11:11:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
wow. this was really, really good.
Submitted by lungfish (user info) at 2007-05-13 05:57:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't think it's drivel...and I don't mean to ignore. It's just that I'm a bit drunk; I tried to read it, but it wasn't sinking in. No offense. It had nothing to do with you. I will try again tomorrow. I promise. Whatever. Beer.
Not drivel, I'm sure. Well, maybe it is. I'll let you know tomorrow. I'm an excellent typist.
Submitted by cshape (user info) at 2007-05-13 05:51:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
drivel.
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-05-13 04:13:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Becoming an alpha dog is not a passive endeavor.
Bitches smell fear and they don't like it...
unless they're leading you back to the pack for their own amusment, or dinner.
That's because fear doesn't fuck, protect, intrigue or communicate very well.