October 12, 2002
House of Cards
I know, for example, that if I leave town at the beginning of a relationship, when I come back it will have fallen apart and I'll be totally fucked up for ages over it. This has happened three times to me. The first, at sixteen, I left town on a school trip to Washington. Upon my arrival home my rival in love came up to me (he met me there at the airport, the bastard) and he said, "I've got some bad news."
And he laid it on me.
And I didn't believe him.
So I went to her house, where she confirmed everything -- there on the front porch with a light rain on the sidewalk. She sat on the bench and spelled it out for me, and I tried to come up with a line to win her back, something that Bogart might say, but all I could come up with was: "Now I don't have a date for the prom."
"I'll still go with you, if you'd like," she said, and I said "No," because, after all, I still had some pride -- a few grams of it, which all leaked out of me in the rain when I walked home down sixth avenue that night.
I called her house a few days later. Just to be sure... you know... in case she had made an error, in case she had been sleepwalking. Her seven-year old sister answered the phone: "She doesn't want to talk to you," she said, and I said "Is she there?" and there was a brief pause and then, in her perfectly innocent lilt, "She doesn't want to talk to you."
Seven-year old executioners are the worst.
I spent the balance of that year listening to sad songs on an old one-speaker tape deck and moaning. I'd drive my parent's car to the gas station across the street from where she lived and fill it up -- buy some snacks, linger in the car smoking on the off chance that she would be sitting in the window and my amazing display of devotion would win her back. I'd sit there eating flaming hot Cheetos and wait for her to come out of the house in the rain -- run reckless though the traffic and sit next to me in the passenger seat of the car, hold my hand and say: "I've made a terrible mistake." Instead ended up with hands red from all the flaming hot Cheetos I'd eaten. The taste sill reminds me of heartache.
I spent prom night with my friend Nate, drinking wine in a park and moaning. *
The second time this happened I was going to visit my friend Felix in Chicago. The girl was an aspiring tattoo artist. She bought me a drink at the local dive bar and we sang along to Hank Williams songs. She had tattoos up and down her long white arms, a short bob haircut, and a long, thin neck. We would hole up in my apartment and watch the snow come down behind the 7-eleven --smoke cigarettes and listen to the newest bands. I took the train to Chicago and she came with me to the station. We had a drink at the Terminal Bar and Grill, and then she walked me to the platform and we dry-humped in a shady recess next to the train. When I came back she wouldn't return my calls. I didn't see her at the bar. Later, I learned, she got together with one of the artists at the Emporium of Design. He had horns and shaved teeth. I couldn't compete.
The most recent time... well... I think there's a statute of limitations this sort of thing ... I can't write about it here, but I can say that I saw it coming. I was going on a trip, and I said: "You will leave me when I come back," and she said: "No I wont." But she did. Things defy explanation.
I'm trying to figure out what to do with this knowledge. It's clearly a pattern, a narrative of my life that will keep happening as long as I'm around, unless I find a way to undo it. Maybe it happens to everybody and they just don't notice it. Maybe there are people whos loves leave them every time they buy a new pair of blue jeans or spot a bird on the wing. Maybe I just happened to notice the leaving town part of it, even though there're whole legions of things that can go wrong out there. It's like we're all in love in a china shop -- I break the eggs, you break the vases, but something breaks in the end.
It could also be fate, but I don't believe in god, so it's difficult to imagine that there is some higher force that would have an imagination annoying enough to plot this out. But it can't be random can it? What are the odds? Every time I leave town, she leaves. Maybe that first time with the Cheetos I accidentally willed this fate forward into my future. Maybe my romantic life is a one-way function, like time -- an equation that, once solved, can't be undone.
In voodoo, as in life, the first step to recovery is to acknowledge that you are cursed.
I can picture old Leon Lencicki wandering down a dusty road in Markow, singing a dirty song about the girls who carry the pails of milk, and there's an old gypsy woman on the road. She says: "Let me tell you your fortune," and he says: "Sorry, no time... got to get down to the train station."
She would have been offended, but not enough to smite him there on the spot; not enough to make his children have webbed feet; not enough to make his skin scale or his teeth fall out. But still, she'd have been a little pissed, so she digs through her little day-planner of curses and comes up with an old one they used to use on sailors. "No one sails anymore," she figures, "it won't be that bad for him." And she sends the curse after him, down the road like an angry little hornet.
When Leon gets back home the girl who carries the milk pails doesn't come around. He goes to her house and throws stones at the window, and an angelic little girl comes out and says:
"She doesn't want to see you."
"Is she here?"
"She doesn't want to see you."
Leon weeps in the barn. He drinks rye whiskey and stays out late on the roads wailing into the silence of the trees. He watches the farm cats. His clothes become tattered and torn and wet. His mother tells him to get over it.
And he does.
But when the girl from the dry-goods store leaves him after his trip to the provinces he knows something is going on. He travels through the region and finds the gypsy woman. She looks just as old as the last time he saw her.
He says: "Every time I leave town, my love erases."
And she says: "Yes ... well don't leave town."
"What do you mean? I have to stay here?" he says.
"...or don't fall in love"
"What is this curse?"
"Oh ... something the Trojans came up with after Odysseus fucked them over. 'Course it was too late to use on him by then - he made it home and she was waiting for him --but they kept it around. Just don't leave town without her. It's pretty manageable as far as curses go."
I'm tired of leaving town anyway. I'm tired of leaving and coming back to something that has changed; two astronauts floating away from each other in space; a man on a train shining a flashlight while the woman who loves him stands on the platform and calculates the weight of her sadness based on the warping of time on the tracks.
I want to go there and never come back.
*) That prom night (in the gutter with me drinking wine) Nate was moaning about a girl he loved. They are married now, with a child -- my godson. He is too young to worry about time or comings and goings. Everything, for him, is just so. His parents are time travelers.
