The car on the car port like a dead fish November 4, 1985


 

So Monday arrives and passes, and she hasn’t come back.
This is about six hours after she said she would arrive and still no sign of her.

I see her boyfriend’s car outside my window – it looks like a dead fish in the driveway: no license plate in front, bald tires all around with a spare tire somehow attached to the top.

It amazes me how little she has actually changed in all these years, and how the one I knew from back then could easily take the place of this one, and despite the years of so called experience – know no difference.

She ages like everybody else, but fundamental change does not occur – except those changes forced upon her by circumstance, changes that sneak past her basic characteristics, but fail to change the way she lives her life.

She retains the façade of innocence I knew back then. But time has reshaped her into something more of a housewife than the party animal she once was.

But she still has no real sense of herself, packing up her whole existence for even small trips the way she did for larger ones when young.

She comes off as and maybe really is a simple-hearted soul, struggling to find some small measure of happiness.

She was never the cocaine-headed club girl many mistook her for, although the real danger men face is mistaking her for that wholesome, farm-girl she portrays. She is that and so much more, and always when men take up with the former, they get shocked when they find the rest, and run away.

She keeps talking about living out in the woods somewhere, and the simple life she really doesn’t completely understand – but shifts from one place to another with no real roots in any place.

She is never satisfied. But she rarely has a single goal, but fluctuates, seeking this and that like a child who get attracted to one shinny thing only to get drawn to another, changing places of residence, jobs and men when they grow too burdensome.

At one time, she earned as much as $1,000 a week on what she calls “date nights,” and squandered it as fast as she earned it, and thus squandered the dream of her life in the woods she could have used that money to get.

Now, she has abandoned her latest boyfriend’s car in the car port outside the window of my cold water flat in Passaic and I’m left to wonder if she will ever come back to reclaim it, or has she once more moved on, forgetting the small details of a life she always sees as history, while she searches for some new dream – she knowing perfectly well, I will always be here waiting if and when she decides she needs me again.

 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more