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| www.youreawhore.com |
| "fiction" by Derek Speerer |
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The most intense passion ever to grace my otherwise moribund romantic career streaked, exploded and fizzled over a few dozen nights with the same incendiary rush and letdown of the cheesy-but-who-gives-a-fuck-I'm-in-Paradise Hilton Hawaiian's Friday night Waikiki fireworks finale. The episode was with, or rather a part of ("in" is most accurate) an absolute goddess of a woman who was and forever will be tragically in love with a cocaine addict. Though I would subsequently try my worst in an attempt to self-destruct for her, I never could take that junkie's place in her heart. If true love means you never reach the point where enough is enough, then there's never been a truer love than hers for Geoff the cokehead surfer. She broke my heart twice and threw me, a born optimist and lover of life, into the only two truly angst-filled, depressed phases of my life. After that enough was enough, my blackening heart quailed and I vowed never to let her (or any sloot) close enough to fuck me up again, except over the phone and via email.
I spent my entire senior year of college completely oblivious to the winter. I had a girlfriend from a tropical clime, and for whatever else in bodily attraction and existential happiness she gave rise to in me, the blazing tamas of my ascetic, long distance love melted away any frost that would cling to the windows of my New England dormitory. Sizzling red and brown images of us in love-steamed mirrors would force a retreat on any white cold that dared creep into the streets, banishing to my unconscious all snow, slush and ice. The swollen, pollinated love of spring once rang and reigned eternal in me, no matter the temporal or physical distance from its source.
Then our relationship fractured like a palm tree in a freak tropical winter, all those thousands of miles away, and her love for me oozed from the cracks like the cushioning pus out of a foot blister that never was her real skin. It ended and now all I have of her are pictures that make me drip either upstairs or down, and this horribly dramatic Ben Harper music. I remember the bodily sensation, the nearly tangible hum in me of her love when I listen to Ben Harper.
It was like a contest between me and a few similarly melodramatic college friends to see who could feel the songs. Sad, sappy love music brought out the best self-spite, my addiction of choice. Since she left me the newest drug has been bubbly Jack Johnson, but it had formerly been his more jaded cohort, Ben Harper. In school we would need a fix of Innocent Criminals just to get through 4am, especially with a joint to burn down with our emotional stability. I guess the non-love-themed Burn One Down was the gateway song to all of it, but really any Ben Harper would do, and any woeful, post-vertigo Ben Harper would do better; any of the opening strains from Live From the Mars (disc two) were particularly potent brews for us sad, lonely songaholics.
She was in the job hunt the first time she broke my heart. It left her needy, the repeated failure and fear that she wouldn't find a sponsor to keep her in Hawaii. She had grown tired of phone sex and phone love, and started to notice the eyes of men following her when she went out. After she broke my heart for the second time, after I saw her at Auntie Pasto's on Kapahulu Ave. with her arm around the bulky shoulder of my nemesis interloper, I decided that I would find her a job. I called a computer science major college buddy of mine now living in Amsterdam and figured out how to make a website. On that glorious international crossroads for pornhungry masturbators I plastered pictures of her in bed with me, my face pixel-distorted; I transposed a few pictures of her face onto slight masculine bodies with similar skin tone, clumsily groping limp transsexual penises; I put a link to the video I had secretly made of us in her Ala Moana apartment one night, the night I happened to ad-lib and shot it in her face. A search for Indonesian Facials on Google still ought to take you there. I emailed a link to everyone ever on a forward she had sent me: friends, coworkers, relatives, even e-service reps.
I packaged it all up professional-like, with printouts of every single page of the site in a nice white folder, stills of the video clip and all, and wrote on the front on a yellow sticky note: "Congratulations on your new job: you're a whore!" and had it delivered to her at the office where she was temping. I also sent her two bouquets of flowers from different companies with different ex's names on the cards. I hadn't heard from her since the night at Auntie Pasto's, though I always hoped to and I would hate how nervous I became with each message-less call I missed on my cell unidentified beyond "Unavailable," "Anonymous" or "Restricted." So if the new line of employment I opened up for her ever made her a star, even if I never heard from her again, I wanted to make sure that she wouldn't forget the little people who helped her along the way.
Of course that's not actually what I did. My real revenge was much more bitter, much less sweet. I would imagine, like a spiteful 6-year-old who's sure they'll be sorry when I'm dead, that if I had taken pictures of us in coitus, if I had any internet savvy friends, if I had captured a facial (or any sex act) on film, if I had any balls, how I would fix her little red and brown wagon. Pathetically enough, I would usually do this on the hop, jogging with headphones playing something predictably scornful, before I would imagine the face of the man she left me for and, unknowingly increasing my gait, glory in pummeling his diesel corpus into a bruised sack of broken bones. After the jog I'd shower and masturbate furiously to fantasies of other women I've had until, exhausted and to the point of giving up, I'd picture Her and blow a few million potential offspring into well-deserved oblivion.
It's been months now, and closure has not even visited, but Valentine's Day reminded me of our last cordial exchange, overly perfumed gift packages in mail planes flying opposite directions over the Pacific. Ironically, we both gave underwear we'd never see each other in. My brief attempts at trying again in between the two heartbreaks, foolishly optimistic after graduating and moving to Hawaii, led to mercenary sex with uniforms of day-before-laundry-day crappy lingerie and holey boxers. Although we didn't bother with deliberately putting on romantic music, the fucking Honolulu radio station mocked our failure anyways with Bob Marley's "Mellow Mood" and a local remake of "Islands in the Stream." Then I left her, hated her, and myself, all of it, and cried my sorry, pussy ass to sleep with Ben fucking Harper's "The Woman in You" on repeat. |
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| January 22, 2003 |
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