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4:21 pm | 13 January 2003 | only dancing

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way�"
�Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Goddamnit.

So. There was an Elvis-loving, James-Dean-looking, suede-and-corduroy beef-jerky-strip of a blue-eyed boy. And there was a girl, hapless, the intersection of a fast-flying bird and a plate-glass window, the horror of the ocean. She worked for thirty hours straight under her despotic French boss-lady and ended up crying over a cigarette in the parking lot. "You could use a drink," he stated. She sniffed, nodded. It began.

I should have known better what some things meant, should have read things for what they were, not what I had been taught. Should�ve should�ve should�ve. When we were introduced you assumed I was French and when I sent you a picture of Elvis, it didn�t help things. You love Elvis for his quintessential rock stardom, his mastery of the cool. I love Elvis for his pathos, his terrible tragedy. We should have cleared that up.

I'm moving too fast for you. You, of course, are the Elvis-loving, James-Dean-looking, suede-and-corduroy beef-jerky-strip of a blue-eyed boy, of a range-riding boy, of a drive-too-fast, don't-worry-I'm-drunk, she's-buying-a-stairway-to-heaven boy. With us still? Good. Then, of course: me. I'll hop your fifteen-foot cyclone fence in wooden platform shoes, and I have. We have been friends for more than two years, and you have been gone half that.

You lived in a house that clings to the jaw of a tiny canyon, and I rode in your Jeep to the back of the high rock walls. The trail was thick with dust and the field at the top was dead, yellow, burned-looking. You were proud of the waterfall, but it was a sad, whimper-thin trickle of iron-fraught water, slick with mold, staining its passing down the face of the cliff just past the child-sized cave we couldn�t quite climb to. Our friend Carl got out of jail and you and he argued about wood while I wandered around barefoot in a paperthin t-shirt and ripped denim miniskirt, held up only by your borrowed belt. I whipped rocks over the edge with a wing-sweep of my right arm, picked up giant glossyblack beetles in my cowboy hat, presented them to your arguments as silent proof. Carl looked at me spitefully for intruding, and I jammed the hat back on my head and turned away.

We drank cheap and nameless mescal together until our tongues thickened; I curled up in a Champagne-sorrowful bundle on the foot of your bed; I brought you the most peat-riddled bottle of bastard whiskey I could find. I'll say Dude until I die. Your Jeep swung in a circle, too fast, too tight, too accurate. Don't worry, I'm drunk, you said. Dude, I replied. We understand each other.

We were reprimanded for using �fuck� in a company e-mail. Or rather, I wrote They wouldn�t know the fucking difference, anyway and you replied They sure as fuck wouldn�t and the "consultant" that The Company brought in said "If you want to fuck him, do it on your own time" to me, which was highly inappropriate and probably sexual harassment, but I was too busy muffling giggles to think litigation. To celebrate our write-ups we went to the sad, septuagenarian cocktail lounge down the street and drank until we stumbled. I hung my head out the window while we darted erratically down Wilshire, the cool vapors of night curling through the heat that clung to my hair. We should not have been driving then. We should never have been driving.

After the Built to Spill show I hung back. We traded books. I strode by your office, clockwise, rapid as the wind down the canyon, and slid stacks of cds onto your desk while all the Asian boys tittered. "Yrself is Steam sucks," you emailed me, referring to the Mercury Rev album. "Tell me about it," I typed slowly, referring to my heart.

On sunless days we watched Splendor in the Grass silently in the darkness, and I thought to myself, you're a slow-moving shipwreck in my bloodstream.

I was translating then, translating all the time then, Kubrick, Tolkien, the odd and awful Seagal, ninety hours a week, drinking Champagne on the roof with the Germans when upper management had gone home for the night, throwing corks and cigarette butts against the night-lit skyline, not trusting myself too close to the edge. I left the office at eleven every night and went to Ren�e�s with you, where the bartender, impressed by my fortitude, plyed me with free Scotch. I still made it to my desk by seven every morning. I drank at least two gallons of coffee daily, developed tremors and an ulcer from the booze and caffeine, developed carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow from the translating, got a giant raise for proofreading at the rate of 2,000 sentences an hour with a .005% margin of error, and every hour you drove me a little crazier. I swung by your desk on your twenty-seventh birthday where, predictably, you were hiding from the party HR had misguidedly tried to throw.

"I�m gonna quit, man. I can�t take it."
"And do what?"
"Nothing, I guess."
"Cool. Do you want some birthday cake?"
"Uh, yeah, but I�m not going down there."
"I�ll bring you some, dude. Since you�re quitting and all."
"Thanks." We understand each other.

That night we sat at your kitchen table, fucked up again, and I wrote some wasted aphorism about courage and foolhardiness being the same damn thing�the wasted bravery of Scylla/Charybdis�on a scrap of the free arts paper while you read American history to me.

When Sitting Bull was assassinated by the tribal police in 1890, you said, his white horse heard the shots and began to dance. His horse was a gift from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, trained to dance when it heard gunshots. It began dancing and prancing, sitting on its haunches and raising up its front legs, jumping around, bowing, curtsying, doing all the tricks it had been taught. It honored its dead master in the only way it knew. All who saw it said that the horse was possessed, wakan, in the spirit way, because it was unhurt, though it had danced through a hail of bullets. While Sitting Bull lay dying, his horse was dancing above him.

I traced circles on the wood with the base of my glass, wobbled downstairs, laid on the filthy-tiled bathroom floor and cried like a rusty windmill turning in an inconsistent wind. At your tap on the door, I pressed one black-ringed eye to the crack of the doorjamb and mumbled, If Hell is anything like this, I'd better clean up my act.

You went to sleep and I was trapped by the locked gate until, emboldened by drunkenness and love, I climbed over. When I hopped your cyclone fence, it was to get out. It was to drift down the soft shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway, alone in my impossible shoes.

Driving to the canyon that last time, the sun set over-easy, dripping majestically through the smog-fingered sky, and on the side of the road, a car began to burn. I sobbed as I flew past it. An hour later, we were drunk again�"We have enough time to drink before we go," you noted sensibly, which seemed eminently reasonable. I drank tequila and danced alone in front of a mirror while you laid on the floor in the other room, music shaking the house the way the waves did at night. You drove me to the airport in my too-short skirt while Led Zeppelin blared. The security measures in effect, then only two weeks after everything fell, were dazzling�a panoply of flashing lights in dangerous oranges, reds. We were lost, circling the airport, me hanging my arms out the window, laughing until I cried as the Jeep did a slow waltz through unlit parking lots. Finally I flung open the door, dragging my suitcase a mile, and staggered into the terminal.

Since then, there are nights that I drive past your house silent as a manta ray, gliding, drifting. You have disappeared. The man who answers your phone knows your name, doesn't know where you've gone.

Just before all this ended, we leaned against each other at a disco-lit party that felt like a death, and when you brought me more wine I sailed deeper inside the bottle, a tiny, listing ship, and then I climbed onto a tabletop and began to sway, wavering like an underwater light, while you looked at me, always with the same bewilderment lacing your eyes. Don't worry, I'm drunk, I said. Don't worry, dude. I'm only dancing. I'm only dancing. I'm only dancing.


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