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26 Nov 2007, 16:21
It's not the first time it occurred to me that Max might be the devil, but it was certainly the most compelling evidence thus far.
The thought first occurred during a particularly bad stretch with my then-girlfriend who was also in the consideration. As we sat in his bedroom smoking and getting weird, Max's buggy eyes and talk on the essential freedom and dominion of man flagged wildly from perfidious to perfervid to perverted. "Men need to be free to think and act as they please"—yes. Mostly. "Women are a drag"—yes. Well, sometimes. "Men represent the creative force and we're adventursome and blub blub blub"—yes. Can be. But women can be, too. "Women have a role too and that's to love the cock and we should be having sex much more often than we are"—yes. Partly. And you're the devil.
But the dream, in its way, was more real than the stoned philippic. (Know that I was staying with Max at the time, sleeping on his floor.) I was some kind of minor demon, just another innocent in hell, playing hooky from a rock concert over which the devil was presiding. Attendance was mandatory, punishable by something pretty damn fearful (but which couldn't be all that bad, I suppose, in comparison to everyday life in hell). I was hanging out in the hallways which surrounded the kitchen in a big U, where the many doors led to dorm rooms. I don't know what I was doing there in the hallway but a little flying buddy was with me. Maybe we were playing jacks? Anyway, the concert ended and I didn't notice and curfew immediately kicked in. A figure approached the hall in which I was being delinquent and I fled, the figure pursued, and I ran into my dorm and hopped into bed. I was rushing and wriggling into the sheets and trying to be discreet about it when suddenly the devil appeared in the doorway. I was caught. And here's where it gets weird. At the same time that the devil cleared his throat, Max cleared his throat, which woke me up.
So Max might be the devil. I started spending less time at his apartment.
The first time I went to New York I passed Becky Bolin on the sidewalk somewhere in mid-Manhattan, a few blocks down from Central Park. She was talking earnestly with some tall blonde dude in a suit the dark color of business. Becky and I were friends in high school but I didn't stop her. I just saw her and was startled and she might not have seen me and we passed each other by—that's all she wrote.
In high school Becky dated Chris Tavis and Chris and I were friends too. On one of my many meanders around Denton, trying to be good and stay out of Max's hellhole, I passed him on the sidewalk. He was walking earnestly toward a club with a happy couple in the dingy glimmer of hip and he might not have seen me but probably did because we were the only four people on the sidewalk. He might not have recognized me. I've cut my hair. He and I were better friends than Becky and I were and I don't know why I didn't say hey or something cleverer than that but I didn't. Instead of saying hey and maybe getting a drink with them and meeting a few new people and hearing new music and then who knows what I retreated back to Max's place and drank a bottle of champagne. And in the morning there was hell to pay.
But however much a hell a hangover can be, regret is a hell that can't be helped with Gatorade and stupid movies.
I don't regret spending Thanksgiving with a friend's family rather than my own—it's my first Thanksgiving away—but I do regret not karaoke'ing more at The Meridian Room's "Scareoke" (an inappropriate term for use after Halloween), which is an after-dinner Thanksgiving tradition among the people that took me. I cajoled Elisabeth's boyfriend Josh into singing El Paso conmigo but when we left, kicked out into the cold not long after closing time, standing there waiting nearly an hour for a cab that didn't know how to get us home, the night felt incomplete without having gotten down to Love Shack.
Dallas is a city for suburbanites. It's impossible to get a cab without a reservation. This is because there aren't any patrolling. We called while huddling outside the bar and they told us 15 minutes. Three police cars passed. Not a single cab. 45 minutes later, two screech up to the sidewalk simultaneously, the one in second position proclaiming on his horn that we're his legitimate fare. Both drivers rush out of their cabs toward us, one waving a cell phone and the other a beeper (I've got you're number, you're coming with me!), both grabbing at our arms, shoving the other aside, shoving us into their cars. Melee. Mad cattiness. And then another party walks out from the bar and without a beat we're in civilization again.
In a manner of speaking. Elisabeth's parents moved into one of a new block of townhomes in Dallas after all three of their children had moved out. The development is in a residential district, surrounded by single- and multi-family houses and apartment buildings. They can walk to a liquor store but have to drive to a restaurant. Which kind of means it's a townhouse by name only. Real townhouses are built in cities and have the vertical build of most of the other buildings in cities because, in cities, it's cheaper to be tall than girthy. The townhouse neighborhoods of Dallas are suburbs with more expensive parking.
And they live in a kind of barrio. Down the hill from their house is what her mother calls a "Mexican goth club" where the patrons are patted down for guns and shivs and when they leave they drag race up the hill screaming blasphemies and shooting at each other. In actuality, it's a rather large sports bar/megaclub called 'ok' and is probably the kind of place where you'd see whole families eating chicken wings and cheering fútbol before the kitchen closes.
I regret not going there. But it's too late now. I'm in St Louis and won't be returning to Dallas until next I feel nostalgic for it. Which might be never.
Yesterday, Elisabeth drove the whole stretch herself. Josh doesn't know how to drive a stick and I have no insurance. To keep her spirits up we sang a lot and played a lot of games. We played 20 Questions and restricted the thing in question to things we had experienced that weekend after they failed to even approach my "Salvador Dali's Lobster Telephone". We played Truth Or Dare but I killed that by asking "who's the member of your immediate family that you like the least?" I killed most of the games we played, actually. I killed the Cliff/Fuck/Desert Island game (you're given a list of three people, one of whom you need to push off a cliff, one you'd have sex with, and one you'd spend your life with on a desert island) when I asked "your mother, his mother, and my mother". And I killed Would You Rather...? by asking "explode diarrhea in your mother's face or have your mother explode diarrhea in yours?"
Some people just can't face the tougher questions of life, I guess. But if you're in it for the long haul, sooner or later you're going to have to.
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