Poking The Bear

θωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτ υιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπα φγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκ ξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβν Poking The Bear θωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτ υιοπασδφγηϕκτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ µθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερ ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ νµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωε ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµρτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδ ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ William Graff

ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ “Go not to men, but tarry in the ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ forest! Rather go to the animals!

Why will thou not be like me, a bear οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµρτψυιοπασδφγη among bears, a bird among birds?”κλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχ Nietzsche, “Zarathustra” βνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθω ρτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυι ασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγ ϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξ ϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθ ερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυ πασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφ ϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξ ϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµρ ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ νµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωε ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ Prologue

Do any of you understand what loneliness is? Put your five-dollar latte down and really think about that question for a moment. I don’t mean the loneliness that comes from missing your boyfriend or girlfriend for a week, or the pain of a messy and acrimonious breakup. I mean the everyday, deep-down entrenched loneliness that comes from never knowing love, but still seeing everyday those who could save you, reach out a hand and pull you out of the ever-growing thick black murk swirling around you, ignore you and never even know, never even have the slightest inkling that anyone could possibly feel that way about them. And you can’t even talk to these people, because of the fear of being found out, cast out, labeled as a freak, abnormal. It’s like cages within cages, an infinite series of traps that encircles everything you can see or ever will see. Your life becomes a journey down an endless corridor where every door is locked, with faces behind each one laughing at and mocking you.

This is a loneliness that permeates each and every aspect of your being, a loneliness that makes it a Herculean chore to lift yourself out of bed in the morning, just to face the same old tired bullshit every single rotten day. It is a loneliness that fills you with a corrosive, burning hate for random people on the street: laughing young couples, children playing, old ladies with fearful faces toting shopping bags. It fills you with such complete and utter self-loathing that you can’t like anything, not even the things that used to give you joy.

And so you try to self-medicate to end the pain, the exposed nerve of your being that flares in pain constantly, maybe through booze, or pot, or for the more adventurous among us, the entire pharmaceutical rainbow that lay before us. And the pain becomes sealed off momentarily, but the bulwark cannot hold, reality will always breach through the chemical fog that closes around your brain. In return you increase the dosage to make it last longer, but eventually that fails as well. The only things that always remain are the sorrow, and the hatred, and the desire for oblivion. Their constant presence is a strange kind of comfort.

Everything reverses itself in your world. Laughter becomes a painful jagged sound that tears at your ears. Love seems like a wretched parody of itself, all sloppy sentimentality and shameful loss of self-control. You grow to despise the sun and

λζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ νµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωε ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµρτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδ ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδ ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµρτψυιοπασδφγη κλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχ βνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθω ρτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυι ασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγ gentle breezes and long for the dark clouds and cold sheets of rain, because you want the world to mirror your own gloomy interior hopelessness. It becomes impossible to have conversations with others because of the sense of futility that accompanies every exchange of mandated pleasantries.

There’s only two ways out of this world. Either you find someone to save you from your own wretched self-obsession, or you succumb to the spiral and let yourself be pulled down into death.

The circumscribed length of his world being woefully small, Pete had decided to draw upon his inner resolve and extend said boundaries beyond his normal comfort zone, which was well-worn trench territory. He had given much thought to all of the various permutations and possibilities, but had finally decided upon the following course of action: get shitfaced and go to the Bear Bar. It’s not like Pete hadn’t tried to go before, but there was always that same old regretful fear pulling him back by the shirt collar again. He’d walked by it, first down the opposite side of the street and then again down the side it was on, but he couldn’t force himself to go in.

Why not? Because the sense of shame instilled in him would not allow it, restricting his movements like an electric shock from a dog collar. Shame had always trumped desire in his mind. And he longed after those mysterious figures inside the brick walls, their unheard conversations passing through the air. How easy it must be for them, he brooded. Uncaring about what might happen, or who might know.

He sighed quietly and looked out his bedroom window. Across the gap between his apartment building and the neighboring unit, he could hear loud voices passing in the street. It was 8 PM on a Saturday night and the hipsters on his block were gathering in wild, youthful abandon to plot out their routes to places he would never be welcome at and people that wouldn’t look him in the eye. And here he was, alone, pacing nervously around like a dog in a cage.

He was above all the screaming and turmoil in the street in his man-cave, night after night. Sometimes when the yearning to be held and touched overwhelmed him, he would surf around the net in search of a reassuring bearish face and body to hold in his eye for a moment and allow them to become his world. He could picture whole histories in these moments: glimpse of a reality where his thoughts and desires played out as normal everyday actions: huddled together on a couch in a thick blanket with a beefy-shouldered lug, smoking high-grade medicinal weed from a six-foot glass bong and collapsing into each other’s arms with giggles at the sight of a Simpsons rerun.

All that he had to love were the pillows on his bed, which he clutched onto at night and tried to desperately imagine were human and could receive the love and emotion he was broadcasting into the ether. They couldn’t judge or dismiss, but neither could they accept or receive. Mute witnesses to his pathetic loneliness, they were one of the comforting certainties he had.

Sometimes in the winter, with the ancient radiator hissing steam behind his head as he lay in bed, he would press the pillows against the metal register and hold them in place for a short while, then return them to the bed and hold them tightly, nuzzling against their warmth and softness, inhaling his own saturated musk and pretending they were the torso of some cute cub he had seen that day on the bus, and not just

ϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθ ερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυ πασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφ ϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξ ϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµρ ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ νµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωε ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖ νµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωε ψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπ σδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγη λζξχϖβνµρτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδ ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ useless bags of hot feathers incapable of reciprocation. The desperation inherent in these rituals was not lost upon him. and their irony and pathetic nature stung at him like nettles.

Pete was used to this by now, however. He had not felt the touch of another human being for so long that its absence was in itself a kind of presence that extended a strange comfort. And there were always myriad distractions from the gaping, evergrowing hole that lay unquestioned at the center of his life. Sometimes it was booze, or weed. Sometimes it was television or a good book. But it never really completely masked the fact that he was desperately, hopelessly alone, like a polar bear adrift on a melting ice floe, silently wondering where his kingdom has gone.

People alternately terrified and repulsed him. Walking down the street he could barely restrain the disgust he felt at the pathetic detritus shuffling by. Thugged-out sixteen year olds in faux graffiti-covered hoodies from Cherry Creek desperately trying to be black. Even stupider made-up clowns in face paint advertising their allegiance to ICP, the worst band in human history. Old paper-faced women wrapped in swaddling coats in sweltering heat, clutching their packages ever closer to their wheezing chests. Predatory young professionals in black, all intensely consulting their technological talismans desperately trying to seem important, hoping their tailored suits and $2000 shoes will mask their deep lack of a moral compass or any intelligence beyond their chosen field of interest. Bovine Midwestern tourists who clog up the sidewalks with their crawling shuffle and doublewide strollers as they point and gawk at each chain store they behold, repeating its name out loud like a spell of protection.

But then, every so often, as a ray of sunlight cuts through a darkened sky, he would catch sight of a friendly ursine face in passing; through the window of a bus or car or idly sipping coffee on an outdoor patio or tossing a Frisbee in City Park, and his heart would tear itself from his chest cavity and hang there, suspended and weightless in space. He loved all these men completely from the first moment he saw them. Yet he remained on the periphery, knowing at the deepest and most elemental level, any one of them could save his life if he could only muster up the courage to approach them.

But he never thought he could, yet.

November 1

Pete (AM) The morning sun is in my eyes despite the blinds and again, my thoughts return to you.

It ended like I always knew it would end, abruptly and without fanfare. How I wanted it to end was another matter entirely. The things I imagined you never were meant to see, the high exalted places where I knew we belonged but which you never had the slightest inkling of. Yeah, all that happily ever after bullshit. I know it’s a crock and some business suited executive bean counters idea of how to put butts in seats but if we didn’t all want that on some level it wouldn’t be nearly so successful,

χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδ ηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζ χϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ ωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψ οπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωωερτψυιοπα φγηϕκλζξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκ ξχϖβνµθωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβν θωερτψυιοπασδφγηϕκλζξχϖβνµ would it? No matter how hard we try to portray ourselves as, how cool and unfeeling, and impervious to anything we want to appear to the rest of the world, it all comes down to wanting to love and having that love reciprocated. I wasn’t asking for anything anymore elaborate than that.

But my friend, it wasn’t fair to you at all. You were so guileless and strong, and I know we would have done anything for each other. You were trying to escape your family and I was trying to escape mine, weighed down by the expectations of the past. How can you carry that kind of weight around without being crushed by it?

The shouting across the street has stopped, it lasted all last night. Broken glass and women shrieking and barking dogs and that goddamn bass-heavy bull shit that rave kid plays. Fucking bunch of trust-fundy little shits. And they never shut up. Ever.

They are in complete and total love with the sound of their own disagreeable voices. I can hear them now through the walls, talking about God only knows what.

David (PM)

“Whatchu need?” said the platinum blonde as she leaned back on the futon. It was the day after Halloween and she was rubbing a sore spot on her neck, where latex from her costume last night was still attached in a folded fleshy lump. “He kept telling me that all night. “Anything you need I got it for you, girl.” All night it was like that. Just had to snap my fingers and he was there with a drink. It was so fucking hardcore. You should have been there.”

“Right.” He coughed into his shirtsleeve, and then examined it for flecks of blood.

“Goddam, we tore it up. “ She took a long drag of her cigarette, which had been lit in her hand for a precariously long time. “Had a whole suite in the DTC.” “I was here puking up blood, remember?” he said in a weary tone.

“Aww baby. I’m worried about you and your stress. We need to make out.”

“Uh-huh.” He ignored her and turned his attention back towards the television.

Her phone rang. “Who the fuck is calling me now? Oh, it’s Clark.”

“Is he still alive from last night?”

She frowned. “I’m talking to him right now.”

“Yes. I’m over at Grumpy Panties house. That’s my new name for you, dear. That could have been your costume yesterday, just some panties that say “Mr. Grumpy” on them. How’s that sound?”

“All right.” He grunted in a non-committal way and refocused his energies upon the television.

She laughed huskily and threw back her head. “Ahhh! I know girl!!! I was like, “Who is THAT bitch talking to him?” She better not is looking for trouble.

There was a commercial on the TV for insurance. The general theme of the ad seemed to be that insurance was a hip thing to have if you were between the ages of 18 and 35 and you should buy some, like cornflakes or dishwashing liquid. Neither of them was paying attention to it. Just a bunch of idle background noise, which no one registered or acknowledged.

“C’mon, team,” he said to the television screen, which was now showing a football game. His team was underperforming and not scoring, which distressed him.

“This game can suck my fucking ass,” Molly yelled. “What the fuck is their problem?”

“I don’t know,” he said, fishing around for the half-finished bowl from last night, through the sea of beer bottles and cigarette packages arrayed on the floor. “Where’s that bowl?”

“I think you left it on the couch, sweetie, darling.”

Jo on the couch stirred to life from her brief nap. Pretty much as exact an opposite to her friend as was possible, she was a short, chubby, well-tempered black woman with a pleasant Brit accent. She had only been back in America since Halloween morning, and functioning on a severe lack of sleep and a hangover that threatened to be one for the ages. Still, she was cheerful and agreeable where her friend was blunt and aggressive.

“Is this it?” she produced a small green glass pipe from between the cushions.

He smiled. “Yeah. Thanks, I never would have found that.”

She smiled back. “Cheers.”

Molly shrieked at the television screen. “Are you fucking retarded, referee or are you just blind? How can he call that interference! I will kill him! I will reach right through this television and throttle that man.” She threw her cell phone dramatically at the TV screen and missed by a mile. He picked it up and handed it back to her.

Her friend laughed. “Go ahead and try it.”

“Don’t tempt me, sweetness. It’s been a long day. I haven’t had any sleep. And Mr. Grumpy Pants here is a big grump. I really doubt your commitment to this relationship, dear. I think we need couples therapy.”

He yawned. “If you think so.”

Her friend turned her attention to the TV. “I want to get angry and yell at the large men on telly too!” She looked at a guard who was idly scratching his large backside in view of the camera. “Oooh, you MAN! You can’t keep the ball and you’re stupid

and smelly and….those pants make your Butt look fat!” She folded her arms across her lap and smiled, looking supremely proud of herself.

Molly’s cell phone rang again. The ringtone was the latest hit of a musical group made up of 18 year olds whose career would be over before they could (legally) drink.

“Ooohhh!! It’s my friend Stuart. Shut up you guys,” she yelled, despite the fact that she was the only one making any noise.”

“Stuart, what’s going down? Are you going to the dispensary like you said?

Awesome. Do me a huge favor, would you?”

DAY 2: AM Pete I started a new temp job today, my old cushy government position having been eliminated by a state desperately trying to claw its way out of the red. Anonymous drones and corporate bullshit aren’t my favorite things, but it beats the hell out of cooking food for stoned trust funders. God help me if I ever find myself doing that again.

I waste a good five minutes trying to find an entrance to the building that isn’t locked, which is yet another thing my temp agency neglected to warn me of. It’s a 19th Century stone and brick building downtown with huge old wooden staircases. It looks like a real-estate agency’s wet dream and something that I can see becoming a trendy club or super expensive condo.

I waste several minutes waiting by the old service elevator with its ornate wrought iron doors before I notice the microscopic sign loosely attached to it that reads OUT OF SERVICE. I climb the three flights of stairs up and hide in the alcove, panting and trying to catch my breath. Great, first thing they’re going to see is me being a hot, sweaty mess. I was trying so hard not to be the fat guy.

As I enter the glass enclosed office area, I look around at the walls. No art. Just austere looking exposed brick. Not a good sign. A heavily made-up receptionist whose austere looking dress cost more than I make in a month notices me and asks frostily if I am the temp. I nod cheerily in assent, and she steers me in the direction of the overstuffed sofa.

I sit in the lobby, shake my obsequious supervisor’s hands, smile and nod through an extremely rushed Power Point presentation, then proceed to eight hours of the most mind numbing data entry I have ever seen, which basically consists of exploiting search engines to maximize hits for clients. A trained monkey could do the work, but a college-trained monkey? I think not. That’s where I come in.

I have a rushed lunch trying to eat an iffy bean and cheese burrito on a breezy outdoor patio and then back to it. Daylight is waning outside and it depresses me to think of

going to work in the dark and coming back home in the dark. Luckily, I have enough pot to smoke when I get home that those thoughts are quickly erased from my mind.

Sweet lady Jane, the only woman I ever loved…in you know, that way. It scares me sometimes to think of having to go without my crutch, because then I can feel all the anger and the fear and the stress come bubbling to the surface…I can’t have that all out in the open. There is a place for that, and that is filed tidily away at the back of my brain, where it should be. I lie back in my bed in a cheery haze and quickly slip into sleep.

David (PM) “You have to go,” Dave told Molly, who was sprawled across his futon.

“Oh, honey, I don’t want to go back there now. It’s gonna be all weird.” She made a sad, sour face.

He sighed and put his face in his hands. “ I feel like shit. And I need some peace and quiet. Which are not things I can get with you here.”

“Honey…” she trilled in that familiar mix of pleading and demanding.

“Don’t call me that. You’re not my girlfriend.”

She pouted. “Well, it was different a few hours ago.”

“This is not a few hours ago, this is now. I already told you, what we did was a onetime deal only.”

A silence hung in the air between them. Small at first, it quickly grew to encompass various strata of elevation and intensity like a tornadic cell. The stillness became thick and dark.

Jo perceived this shifting energy and shifted her gaze out the window.

Dave coughed. “C’mon, call someone to come pick you and your friend up. I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept since before Halloween.”

“Poor baby,” She dialed. “Don’t worry baby, I’ll Be out of your hair soon.”

“Hey!” she shrieked at the phone. “Come pick me up. Mr. Grumpy Pants is all Mr. Sleepy Panties now. Where are you at?”

Pause.

“Colfax and what??? Why the fuck are you all the way over there? You need to get your shit together, little miss whosists, and get over here and pick me up.”

Pause, slightly longer this time.

“Well, how long is that? An hour? Fine. Be careful, you idiot.”

“She’s on her way. But somehow she ended up at the Mall.”

“What mall?”

“On East Colfax.”

“That’s like 25 miles from here.”

“So it’s going to take her a while. I’m going to take a shower, baby. I’ll be out before she’s back.”

“I don’t have any clean towels. And if you’ve forgotten, which I can’t believe, there’s a large gaping hole where my door used to be, courtesy of-“ “Of course I will tack up some towels so you can’t look in. What, were you planning to come sneak a peek?” She clucked her tongue disapprovingly.

“What kind of horrible dirty man are you? Really, dear.” The way she said it, she managed to wring every possible double-entendre effect out of the word dirty.

“I don’t know.” He had no will to fight at this point. His body was screaming SLEEP at him in letters writ a hundred miles large. He tasted blood every time he swallowed, and couldn’t keep his eyes open. But she was still here. And she just wouldn’t leave.

It bothered him when people were excessively clingy. It made him feel very, very uncomfortable. He’d never given her any overt signal, never beckoned her over, she was….just THERE. One moment he was sipping his Jameson’s in peace and the next she was there, trying hard to look like Sherilyn Fenn in Twin Peaks even though that show was cancelled before she was born, with a cherry stem in her mouth from whatever fruity tropical nightmare was in her glass.

“Hey, sport,” she had said. Then it had begun.

Day 3 AM Pete

I am a good 15 years older than everyone around me in this office, except for one middle-aged and perpetually nervous-looking secretary. They are all tall, thin, and look like they stepped out of a Levi’s ad. I am tall, not thin, and don’t look like I stepped out of an ad for anything except maybe debt consolidation.

This is quite different from my last gig temping for city government. There I was the only guy, everyone else was matronly women in their mid 50’s. I was kind of like a surrogate nephew to them, I guess. They liked that I knew how to use Excel spreadsheets and cut and paste, which is really 90% of the game in the temping biz.

Just for that knowledge alone, they considered me a tech genius.

This is different. These kids are all in their own little isolation bubble, headphones in and staring at their screens, using god knows how many different gadgets. One guy has a Bluetooth in one ear and an Ipod touch in the other, while surfing the net, which is a bit much, really. Is it possible to really be at that level of busy? It all seems very theatrical to me.

They don’t use phones, which is weird enough, but communicate only by Twitters, which is just the dumbest thing ever. Twitters and IM’s. How annoying. This is done, I can see, less out of a sense of efficiency, but a fear of being out of touch with the latest “social marketing” tools. I despise instant messaging, but when in Rome, I suppose.

I do my tedious work; get a message that completely contradicts what I was told to do before, and then start correcting everything from before. This place is a goddamn free-for-all. The laid-back attitude is really annoying me, partly because it is so smugly superficial and partly because deep down, I crave order. I want a hierarchy with delineations of authority. I want clear instructions on what I am to do, and when I am expected to finish them. I receive none of that here and it grates on me. I feel a little bit adrift at sea here coming from my city job where everything was laid out very black and white. File these in alphabetical order. Update this form, process these applications, and collate these files. All I do here is copy and paste stuff from an Excel sheet into a search engine. Apparently this is supposed to optimize search engine traffic for our client. Couldn’t tell you if it works or not, although they certainly seem to think they have a firm handle on it in the office with all their talk of packet sniffers and unique footprints.

No one talks either, so I listen to my Ipod a lot- thank you for that, Apple. It doesn’t really mask the tediousness but at least breaks it into manageable chunks. Four albums or so and it’s time for lunch, then another four albums. And it’s the same endless process of highlight/cut/paste. I am a drone, but I think about what I would be doing if I weren’t here- watching Judge Judy in my sweatpants and not shaving or showering- and it makes me shudder and feel better about having a job.

Unemployment is a nightmare for me. All that time, endless time with all that nothing to fill in the spaces. No wonder homeless people are so fucking crazy.

I daydreamed about him today and wished he was standing at my desk, his beefy arm on my shoulder, whispering all the gloriously filthy things he wanted to do to me in my ear, my face flushing redder at each one read down the line. Then he was gone.

Nothing new there.

Marking time, that’s all I ever seem to do, is mark time. Ticking off the seconds, one By one, from the longest list in the world.

I want time to mean something tangible, for once.

To have some sense of permanence instead of just whispers that no one hears.

Night is the only time that I really think about him now, when all the distractions are put aside and my brain is seeking new ways to torture me with his absence.

I loved him for years and years and he never knew. And I watched him meet the girl that became his wife and I hated her for being a wedge between us. And it was selfish and wrong but goddammit, he was the only thing I had. And I wanted to keep him right here, with me, watching TV and smoking pot.

Where is the cool bear that will sit in my bed, burning bowls and listening to vinyl?

No drama, no bullshit, just two chilled dudes who like each other…. with privileges.

Like someone to sit on the couch with me on a Sunday afternoon and rub my tummy while we watch football.

That was what killed me. He was the perfect boyfriend, but straight. You really are a bitch goddess, fate. What kind of supreme torture is being with your perfect match but unable to tell them that? All the nights on those long walks home from work, cutting through the darkened city park and those sleepy suburban streets, the words had begun to form in his mouth but he lacked the will to propel them into being.

Because as torturous as it was, it would have been a thousand times worse to have him hate me and never speak to me again…so I said nothing. And the pain and hate collected in the chambers of my heart like resin in a filthy pipe, sealing them off in inky black tar. Blackness leading down into nothingness…

David (PM) “Hey sport, “ she said as she sidled up to him at the bar, flashing a drunken grin.

He glanced over. She was a not unattractive blonde, dressed up in some kind of glittery hookerish costumed get up, with huge exaggerated cartoon sized tits and a zipper running down the length of her crotch, which he stared at and mentally tried to imagine the shape and tone of her vagina.

She rubbed his head, like petting a dog. “Whatcha drinkin’?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Jameson.”

“Oh, whiskey, yah? No thanks. I’m having TEQUILA!!!! Cause its HALLOWEEN, MUTHERFUCKERS!!!” She whooped and twirled in a victorious circle around the vinyl barstool, sending sticky droplets of her drink flying across her wake.

“I like tequila too. But they don’t mix well.” He offered a weak smile.

“Hey,” she said, wrinkling her brow in a show of mock seriousness, “I like you. I can tell you’re a serious guy. I think that’s cute. You’re like a writer or poet or some shit.”

She swayed back and forth, leaning against his chair, and he could feel her more than ample breasts grinding into his back.

“Or some shit, “ he repeated. What was with this girl?

“HA”! She barked, slapping him roughly on the back. “You’re alright. Say, my girlfriend and me are throwing a party tonight in the DTC. You should go. We got a hotel suite, room service, the whole nine yards, shit is ON!!” Her reddened face hovered before him, expectantly.

“Maybe.” He said. He already knew there was no way in hell this was going to happen, but he got the idea that just politely agreeing with her was probably the best course of action because this woman was plainly batshit nuts and bad news. Crazy just oozed out of her very pores, permeated her very being. You could feel it like a palatable wave. Not a woman to be trifled with, but then, what woman is, really?

They’d all turned on him in the end. Which is why he was sitting alone in the bar on Halloween drinking whiskey by himself.

Her girlfriend appeared from the other end of the bar. She was dressed in a rather flattering coat with a white fur trim. She surveyed the interior of the bar suspiciously, like she was contemplating burning the entire mess down and rebuilding it from scratch. This place did not satisfy her sartorial demands in the slightest.

“Let’s go. “ “Wait a second, honey.” She pulled a small scrap of paper from her enormous purse, and scrawled something down on it with a chewed up pen. She said, “Here’s my cell and room number. If you want to stop by later it’ll be fucking wild.”

“OK. I’ll try.” He folded and put it in his shirt pocket. He had absolutely no intention of doing so, but the crazed look in her eyes suggested to him that this was the safest thing to do.

“You from around here?”

“Yeah, I live across the street.” Almost instantly, he regretted saying that.

She winked to her girlfriend. “Let’s go, dear. Time for the party to start!”

They rumbled out the door and were soon gone.

The bartender put down the beer mug he was wiping and sidled up to him at the bar.

“Buddy, let me give you some friendly advice. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no. That girl is pure trouble, you understand?”

He smiled. “They all are. Hit me again.”

AM Pete I can’t sleep. I wake from a fitful hour of so, when a horrible dream forces me awake.

I was in my childhood home which was overrun by people, awful, grinning, hideous figures stealing my clothes, pissing on the floors, ripping the fixtures out of the walls…I wonder what that was all about.

I hug my pillow close to me. At night it becomes you. With my eyes closed and half asleep I can convince myself it’s you, and I am snuggled up against your warm and soft torso instead of pathetically clutching a pillow alone in the dark. I crave connection just like everyone else, I want to be touched, but I have to make do with this ridiculous half-baked substitute. I think about that study I read once in Psychology class, with the baby monkeys clinging onto their fake wire and cloth mothers. What does that make me?

Wanting to feel love, always yearning but never able to complete the gap between intention and reality. What have I been so afraid of all my life, what is preventing me from having a meaningful emotional and sexual relationship with another person? Is it because the masturbatory fantasy of my ideal mate has become so paramount in my mind that nothing in real life can measure up to it? Or perhaps I’m unwilling to follow the path of my parent’s own dysfunctional relationship?

Whatever the real reason is, I coasted through most of my life alone, a self-contained unit. I watched as my friends all picked up girls that became girlfriends that became wives, all while never becoming attached to anyone. And the girls that would have gone out with me I was too convinced of my own inferiority to pick up on their signals. I never had to go shopping for shoes or placate some irrational anger at 3 AM in the morning. I counted myself lucky I never had to change myself, never had to try not to swear or pretend I came from a wealthier family or dress like I was the social climber that I obviously am not.

With that solitude comes clarity. I knew the parameters of my world intimately, I knew what I was and was not capable of. I fumed that I was forced to live in squalor while lesser, dumber people were showered with wealth and fame. Even through all the endless humiliation and profound loneliness I always had the fact that I was better than my surroundings glowing above my head at all times, like a softly glowing diamond of surety.

How much longer I have to carry this burden of self-imposed exile is a question that I would desperately love to know. I have been waiting for so, so long. But I can’t keep this up forever. Loneliness left untended turns to bitterness, to hostility, to hate. I can’t walk down the street without feeling contempt and derision for everyone and everything around me. And I have a feeling that contempt is only a manifestation of the hatred I have for myself, way down at the core.

I try turning on the TV but all the overnight news is talking about is that shooter who lost his shit down in Texas. That’s the last thing I need to see right now, although I totally understand how someone could get to that point. Desperation takes hold and leads you around by the hand, your feet barely touching the ground. No one can really say what he or she would do in any situation until they are thrust into the middle of it.

We are all evil, we are all corruptible. I really don’t have much faith in humanity, and no one else would who was objectively paying attention to the situation.

I walk to the bathroom for a glass of water and stare at my puffy face in the mirror.

Some days I have a bounce in my step and think that I look sharp. This, however, is not one of those days. I look like a fat, tired, broken old man, which I suppose I am. I soak in my hideous reflection until I can’t bear it anymore and sit back down on the edge of my bed. I lie there for a minute in the stillness, doing nothing, until the loudness of the silence becomes overwhelming.

Insomnia terrifies me. The idea of never sleeping is horrifying. Sleep is the only time I feel at peace, where you are here with me and everything is as it should be. You remember that Talking Heads song that goes, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens?” So is sleep, when I have those blessed dreams of you and me. Perfect and static, perpetually unchanging. Those are becoming harder to come by.

I toy with the idea of looking you up on Facebook and manage to convince myself otherwise. What an evil fucking tool Facebook is. Put all the assholes you went to high school with and your ex-significant others in the same place and watch the fun.

Of course, like any phenomenon, it becomes permanently ruined when it seeps into the mainstream. I knew it was over when my right-wing uncle tried to get me to friend him. If that batshit crazy birther thinks Facebook is the place to be, then it’s time to get out before it turns into the wasteland that Myspace became.

I could still do it though, couldn’t I? We could talk like we used to even though he’s 2000 miles away. And I could stare at his profile picture…. no, dammit, no.

I have to get control of myself. I have to purge all thoughts of him from my mind. I can’t shut it off. A part of my brain is yammering his name incessantly and I can’t make it stop. The more I try to push his image out of my mind, the clearer and larger it becomes.

Alcohol is the only thing that will work here, clearly. I don’t have any, but I do have some fluorescent green Nyquil stashed at the back of my medicine cabinet. I open it up hastily and drink the whole thing in two prolonged draws. I shudder and a flood of drool shoots uncontrollably from my mouth to the floor. I lie back down and sink into unconsciousness. It is not an unpleasant feeling, I think as it descends over me.

PM David

David sat there at the bar for some time, clocking back neat whiskeys and watching the street trash pour in and revolve in their wobbly circles around him. It was a curious mix of humanity unique to Colfax: hookers looking for a quick jolt before they go out to face their johns, crack heads nervously looking for someone to scam, crack dealers looking for crack heads, the occasional lost looking student type eager to slum it in a “dangerous” dive bar, and the local alcoholics who only wandered in because they had no booze left in their apartments. He supposed that he fell into the latter category.

He only started drinking in earnest when Christie left. He had arrived home that one day and all the furniture was missing from his apartment, all the clothes missing from the closets…even some of his personal stuff was missing. She was an extremely enthusiastic cheerleader for spite. She was convinced that he was cheating on her and nothing he had said seemed like it could remedy the situation, in fact, everything he

had said only seemed to make her angrier, like gasoline to a tire fire. The facts don’t matter to someone like that. All they can see is the filter of their own feelings.

Just like all the others, this had started out fine in the beginning. She doted on him, bought him presents, would do anything to be with him. But she never could quite get over the constant attention he got from other women. She wasn’t the most secure person to begin with, and this only exacerbated the situation. She would harshly demand that he tell her the name of some unknown girl that had winked or smiled at him as they walked down the street. She had a whole history of the interloper and her boyfriend already invented and filed away in her head, invented out of nothing but paranoia and thin air.

He never expended any effort towards women, they pursued him and did all the work.

He was a handsome, rakish looking fellow, with a bushy crop of black hair and a winning, boyish smile. He had never had to expend much effort in his life to get laid, and consequently, he became rather jaded and disconnected from the whole process.

However, Christie was different, somehow. Out of all the women he had slept with in his 25 years on the planet, she had struck some deep chord within him that he couldn’t identify. This worried him. If he couldn’t classify it easily, it must be wrong somehow.

That first night he had slept curled up on the cold and unforgiving hardwood floor in his empty apartment, clutching a cheap bottle of whiskey. This was quickly upgraded in the following weeks to Jameson, because he had reasoned that if he was to become a boozehound, he didn’t want to become some smelly bum. Only the very finest of liquors would pass his lips.. So in this way he had managed to convince himself that his drinking was an upscale, cultivated, refined exercise. Unlike what the barflies across the street practiced every single night.

Then, kneeling in front of the toilet one night, he had noticed flecks of blood in his vomit. This worried him, but not quite enough to stop drinking. So he looked up Web MD and became convinced he had an inflamed ulcer, made worse by his constant drinking. This made sense to him as his stomach had felt like it was tied in a tight knot ever since Christie had made her abrupt exit. He bought some Pepto and drank it in between Jameson slugs. This did very little, But at least reassured him somewhat that he was addressing the situation.

He decided to confine his drinking to the corner bar, in the thought that this would somehow curb it, as if being around other people would lighten his mood and make him drink less. This did not work either, as this was not that kind of bar. This was a dive institution, where career alcoholics arrived at 9 AM to start kicking back Bud Lights and argue about the Broncos coaching. Quite a few of these people spent more time in here than in their apartments, probably mostly because listening to the sound of other people was one of the few things keeping them alive.

He didn’t notice when Molly’s girlfriend made her entrance back in the bar around closing time, because by that point his vision was swimmy and he felt clammy. He did notice her face from above him, though, as he fell off his barstool and saw her angelic visage hovering over him.

“Wussah…what…” he mumbled.

“You poor thing. I’m glad my friend sent me back to check on you. She wanted me to bring you back to the party, but there’s no more partying for you, it looks like.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him up off the ground. Damn, she was surprisingly strong. “Let’s get you home.”

He turned to the bartender, who said nothing but shot him a sly wink. The bartender tapped her on the shoulder.

He pointed out the window towards the apartments across the street. ‘He lives in 205.

Careful going up the stairs.”

“Thank you, dear.” She produced some sad looking dollar bills from her purse and stuffed them in the tip jar.

“Come on.” She dragged him out of the bar, into the inky night.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was sitting on his couch, and she was in his kitchen, cheerily bustling around. There was a boiling kettle on the stove.

“I see you’re awake,” she said. “I’m making you some tea.”

“Uh…I don’t have any tea.” He rubbed his temples and tried to make the room come into focus.

“Of course you don’t have any tea. You’re a bloody Yank. But I am British, so lucky for you I smuggled some into this ridiculous country.” She pulled two packages of Earl Grey from the depths of her voluminous purse.

“Thanks.” He stood up and suddenly realized he was going to be startlingly ill. He ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. Yep, there was the blood again. It glared up at him from inside the toilet bowl like an over familiar friend, saying: “Hey fucker!

Guess what, I’m still here!”

“You all right in there?” came her voice from around the corner.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll just be a minute…”

“O.K dear.”

No girl had ever called him “dear” before. He kind of liked it. It was old-fashioned and refined and reassuring in its coziness, like a patchwork quilt your grandmother made before you were born. Christine had always called him “Babe”. He hated that, mostly because it made him think about that movie with the pig.

He gargled some mouthwash to get the puke smell out of his breath and wandered back to the living room. She was sitting there by the coffee table, and offered him a steaming mug. How the hell had she made that? He didn’t even know that he had a teakettle.

He inhaled. “This smells really good.”

She laughed. “Of course it’s good. What, did you think I was going to offer you some vile witches brew?”

“I don’t normally drink tea.”

“Obviously not, seeing as it doesn’t contain whiskey. You really need to ease up on that shite, man.” She clucked her tongue in mild rebuke.

“Yeah…”

“What was her name?”

He blinked. “What?”

“The bird that did this to you. What was her name?”

“How did you know that?” He looked at her in surprise.

“Oh please. Men think they’re so mysterious and aloof. There’s only one thing that can happen to a man to put them in a state like this- and that’s some bird that broke their heart. So what was her name?”

“Christie.” The syllables sounded strange and alien coming from his mouth.

She nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”

“I came home one day and she had packed everything…even stuff that wasn’t hers.

No note, no explanation- she was just gone. I still don’t know where she is.”

“Sounds like a right cunt.”

David snorted. “I guess she was, huh?” He had never heard a girl use the C-word before. That was pretty cool.

“Believe me, I know a few. Molly has her moments.”

“If you don’t mind me asking a personal question-“ “Fire away, luv.”

“Why the hell are you friends with her anyway? You two couldn’t possibly be more different from each other.”

“True. But we were roommates at one point, when I was in college here. Well, not here, in Boulder. CU.” She indicated Boulder by pointing out the window in a vague direction.

“You came all the way from England to go to school in fucking Boulder? Hippie Hospice?”

“Boulder is cool…if you ignore the hippies. Anyway, it’s like fucking Disneyland compared to where I grew up. What a dismal shithole. The sun never ever shines there. Then you come here and the sun is blazing in the sky, the mountains are glowing. There’s lovely, clean white snow on the ground, birds are singing…. I thought I was going to shit myself my first day in Colorado. Plus that weird altitude thing, which means you basically get really drunk really fast? That’s helpful when you’re in college.” She paused and grabbed a loose cigarette from her bag, lighting it with an idle flick of her thumb.

“Molly and I were assigned roommates the first year. I think she was some kind of fashion design major or something. I was there as an English major, can you believe it? How fuckin’ ironic is that? She drove me crazy for a while, then I just…gave in, I suppose.” She exhaled a medium-sized puff of smoke.

“Gave in? What do you mean?”

“Some people, and this isn’t a judgment call, just the way it is, have personalities that are so large, so outsized, that they just kind of control everything around them. They dominate the conversation, the mood…”

“So she’s attention-starved.”

“No, that’s not really it. Attention really has very little do with her. She craves excitement more than that. She probably fucked every guy in our building. And believe me, the usability ratio of that building was wary lower. She had a motorcycle for a while she rode without a helmet, and when taking drugs, she tends to go for the, you know the term, the “heroic dose”?

“Oh, yeah.” He had done more than his fair share of those.

“It’s like the potato crisp- I guess you call them chips, huh? - rule. She can’t have just one of anything. Because if she has something she wants something better. Or faster.

Or more…whatever.”

“So yeah, But why did she latch on to me? Out of everyone in that bar?’

“Are you kidding?” She laughed, unbelieving.

“What?”

“Dude, you’re hot, OK? Don’t try and sweep that under the rug. I thought you were a CK model or something. Adorable.”

“Sure.” He snorted and returned his gaze to his drink.

She cackled. “Awwwwww, look at how modest you are. That ‘s really endearing.”

“I don’t like talking about it.” He muttered under his breath.

“Why not?”

“It’s not something I feel I deserve attention for. I didn’t have any control over it, I don’t feel like it’s an accomplishment…so why should I get a huge ego over it?”

“Spoken like a true pot smoker.”

David reddened. “ You can tell, huh?”

“Honey, I went to college in Boulder, remember? The epicenter of pot? It’s like the American Amsterdam. And I have been known to smoke a few in my day. But lately it just puts me right to sleep.”

“Yeah, some people just have that brain chemistry. Just acts like a sleeping pill instead of getting them baked. It’s a damn shame. I’m glad I’m not like that.”

“It’s not a bad thing. I’d much rather have a beer. Or a burger.”

“Well, pot is probably better for you than a burger.”

“Oh, Christ, what are you, my mum? Don’t disappoint me and turn out to be one of those Vegan fascists. I have had quite enough of those, thank you very much.”

“No….I’m just saying, generally speaking, that it’s better. Hell, I like meat. I have a barbeque grill out back.”

“Really? Well, sir, you’re just full of surprises aren’t you? “ Her phone began to ring.

“Hel-lo?” Giggles. “Yes, he’s here. We’re in his house.”

“No, dear. He is in no shape to come over there. I had to drag him up the stairs. Why don’t you bring it over here? Well, how much longer do you have the room for? Well, don’t you think you’d better get out of there before they find out that it’s missing? Is anyone over there? Well, let them get stuck with the bill. Get your ass over here. Take a taxi. It’s only like 5 or 6 miles. Across from that bar we were at. YOU remember, dear. On Colfax. “ He figured it was far too late to back out at this point, so he said “Colfax and Clarkson.”

‘Did you hear that, dear? Colfax and Clarkson. Yes. See you soon.” She clicked the phone off.

“Well, I hope you didn’t have any plans, because here comes the tornado.”

“Nahh. It’ll be fun. I’m not ready to go to bed yet.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mean to keep you up if you’re not feeling well.” She said with concern.

“No, that tea was really good. I think I might be getting my second wind.” He made a show of flexing his arm muscles in a display of strength, which was slightly ridiculous considering his scrawny frame. She didn’t notice it, anyway.

“Well, muster up all your energy, because she will drain it. What shall we do while we wait for her?” She tossed the phone and the table and gave him a quizzical look.

Was she coming on to him? He was having a little trouble reading the situation.

‘What sounds good?” he finally said.

She told him.

AM Pete I wake at 5 AM. I don’t know why, but I do. I lie there perfectly still in the darkness, staring at the blood-red digital numbers on my clock. I don’t want to move or acknowledge them because that would make it real.

Another day of this tedious bullshit. How much more of this can a man take?

I don’t know, but by the end of the month I will have the answer in one form or another.

The giggly bitches in the apartment above me have taken to making strange hammering noises at 2 in the morning. This coupled with the American Idol winnable asshole across the street who likes to sing with his window open at the chilly early hour of 4, means I am groggier than normal this morning, and not looking forward to eight more tedious mindless hours of data entry. But, shit, you’ll do it anyway and never say a word. Because that’s me. I won’t let myself walk away from anything, no matter how lost the cause. I am an expert at clinging to wreckage like a barnacle.

Yup, that’s me, the rusty barnacle.

I ride the free shuttle bus down 16th Street mall on my way to work. During the day, it is packed with tourists, baseball fans, and the various flavors of unemployed out cruising around during the morning hours. But right now it’s too early for anyone to be on here but people headed to work. I love the urban game of “Let’s not make eye contact.” There’s a grubby bum in a filthy blue windbreaker in the backseat that smells like gasoline. He has tiny beady eyes and a huge, unkempt beard, and looks batshit crazy. People are going out of their way to pretend that he isn’t there. I mean, obviously in one sense they know he’s there; their sense organs perceive his presence and notify their brains. But it’s that urban armor that the townies wear that prevents them from seeing him as a human being. Because then you’re obligated to care, and if you multiply this process by the number of bums in the city…you’d never make it down the block.

Now the bum has started singing. Sounds like some stupid ass Dead song. Maybe he’s just some old acid burnout who ended up on the streets. This is Denver; there are a lot of dried-up old hippies doing the zombie shuffle around here still, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and Coors Light, with their graying ponytails and rotting tiedye. An awful lot of people got really, really mellow in the 70’s and stayed that way forever. Now he’s rapidly swaying back and forth in his seat to something only he can hear. Up go the newspapers, in go the Ipods. Did you say something? I don’t know,

can’t hear a thing, just listening to Coldplay over here. “Yellow”, oh yeah, that’s a quality jam. Turn it up, dude.

I wonder what it would actually take for someone to elicit some kind of response.

What if this guy started tap-dancing Hallelujah and praising the Lord? What if he fell to knees and started to vomit blood? What if, and I say this because of my prior experience in the New York transit system, he just up and took a huge cell phone sized shit in the middle of the floor? That would be fairly hard to ignore.

I look down the length of the bus. The usual businessmen playing with their Blackberries, and secretaries reading some god-awful pulp romance with flowery vines and gothic lettering on the cover, construction workers scarfing coffee- not one of them takes any notice of this singing vaudeville act going on. Of course, I’m no better than any of them either- I’m not looking at the guy either, although he’s only about 10 feet from me.

Suddenly he stops singing and bolts for the door. Before he leaves he turns and looks me dead in the eye and says, “They’re trying to take my bags away! Those are MY bags!” He then runs out into the street, still screaming about his bags, which are trash bags that smell like musty wet towels and something I don’t care to put my finger on.

He was swinging them around violently as he exited the bus.

As soon as he goes, the bus has an audible sigh of relief, a collective “Oh, thank God that crazy guy is gone.” People quickly resume their activities and forget the guy was ever there. I can still see him from the window of the shuttle, crowds parting in his wake like the Red Sea, as he angrily spun around his bags filled with God knows what.

Crazy people flock to me, for some reason. If I could figure out why, my life would be much easier than it is at this point. What is it about me that attracts such disorder?

Molly Molly stirred from within her expensive hotel suite. The room was a disheveled mess with bottles and trash everywhere, but she was not satisfied. Her party had been a bust, by her standards. Only two cute guys all night, Clark and Ian, and some bitches from work. The champagne had barely been touched- this was strictly a Coors Light crowd. She had drunk innumerous amounts of tequila and beer but was strangely sober.

Clark and Ian were long gone. She noticed that they had stolen the bottle of Grey Goose that was in the freezer. She couldn’t quite remember when they had left but she was sure they had left together. Just her luck, they’d probably both turn out to be gay. They were way too good-looking to be straight boys.

“What is it,” she wondered to herself aloud, “that guys don’t like about me?” If her friend had been there, she could have supplied a lengthy and detailed answer to that question, with diagrams and possibly a Power Point demonstration.

She thought that maybe her hair was too long or she maybe wasn’t wearing the right kind of makeup shade for her face or she had the wrong kind of shoes. She was constantly worried about details like this. It was understandable, considering the amount of women’s magazines she read. But she knew what guys like. A fun, perky girl down for good times, right?

She knew how to have a good time. Wherever she went a party started. People had a good time. They all said so. She had the pictures to prove it.

She wasn’t getting any answers from Cosmo anymore. She always read that entire magazine from cover to cover, every month, and all that it did was make her feel dirty and kind of hollow inside and deeply ashamed if she could see the outline of her thighs. Then it was back to cottage cheese and celery again for a whole week, and she didn’t really feel like dealing with that whole trip right now, thank you very much.

Then she realized the problem wasn’t guys. The guys she was with were cool. They had wealthy parents, drove expensive sports cars…but if she had to tie down the problem, it was the sex. Not that the sex wasn’t good. But she was tired of it. She had grown tired of its predictability, like everything else in her life.

The problem was she was getting fucked when what she really wanted was someone to make love to her. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had “made love” to her, or if it had ever actually happened. Certainly not in high school- that was a bunch of sweaty fumbling in the dark and little else. And not in college either.

Someone to actually offer a little foreplay beyond opening a bottle or passing a joint.

And maybe rub her back afterwards, and feet. And smoke a cigarette and play some XBox, or listen to her tell some bad joke.

And then just lie there together, with nothing to do. No “Whoa, is that the time? I gotta go…” Just two people lying there in the darkness. No plans, no agenda, just lying still because they can.

It sounded great. She thought about that guy she had met at the bar earlier. He was cute, looked unattached, lived fairly close.

She bet she could get in his pants fairly easily, even if he was sick. Males were easy enough to manipulate, they all respond to the same fairly standard cues. And if the cues didn’t work, there were always more direct methods.

Her phone rang.

She answered it.

AM Pete

More tediousness at work, saved for a brief respite when the servers crapped out.

Sounds like they do a lot of data storage at this place so that’s hardly surprising. It’s a weird November outside. There was a massive storm the week before Halloween that blanketed the state with snow, now it’s fucking sunny and pushing 80. Just another thing I despise about this fucking state. Is it too much to ask to live in a state with distinct seasons? I swear, there were seasons when I was a kid- and the worst thing about it is watching the weathermen on TV here. They fucking rejoice in the fact that it’s shorts and tank top weather 10 days from Thanksgiving. It’s not great, goddammit, and it’s not right. Don’t they realize the way it should be?

I can’t decide what to do now. This job will be over soon enough, then what? I feel like I’m just wasting time here. I wish someone would hire me for a real job. That is what I went to school for, right? I thought that was the idea why I put myself in debt for the rest of my life. This economy sucks and I just want a cushy job, doing something I like, and making a decent amount of money at it. That seems like shooting for the moon these days. It’s amazing how just a few years can change your perspective so radically.

I could be a bum on the corner, sleeping on park benches and drinking 40’s in the bushes of Civic Center. Hassling tourists for change and sleeping during the day.

Seems like more and more people are choosing that particular path. They all congregate down at the corner of Colfax and Broadway, which I walk by pretty much every day. The dirty musk of cheap-ass Mexican brick weed permeates everything, although you’d have to really be an idiot to get busted for that by the cops here- they just don’t care, as long as you keep it out of sight of the tourists. Most of the tourists know better than to walk down Colfax anyway. It’s practically legal here since the medical marijuana bill passed, and dispensaries are going up everywhere. Not that this helps me out any. I still don’t have a card. I guess “chronic stress” could be considered a pre-existing condition, huh?

Pot’s the only thing that eases my stress in the slightest. Booze makes it worse. Pills, forget that. Not interested. Meditation helps a little but never lasts very long. Pot, though…zowie, Cavey! I can be in a raging fury, ready to throttle the next person I see, and then smoke a joint. Ten minutes later, my blood pressure is down, I feel relaxed, and really want to watch some Doctor Who and drink a large Slurpee.

Nothing else works.

I hate being associated with all the low-lifes who smoke it though. That offends me. I have a job, I am productive, and I get shit done. The burnouts on the corner, who smoke all day, every day, are idiots. And when you smoke that much, it just gets more and more expensive to maintain the buzz. There’s not a moment of the day these baggy panted idiots aren’t high, standing their on the corner dressed like large, incontinent children. You know, sometimes I like to be high, but sometimes I like not to be high as well. Sometimes I would rather be drunk. Or stone cold sober and not in a state of yawning stupefaction.

I look at it like a baby sucking a nipple would. Sure it’s great at first, but you got to know when to stop. Otherwise, there’s eventually going to come a point where the milk stops flowing and all you’re drawing is air. Or blood.

See, right now I’m a little bit high. I’m sitting cross-legged on my floor, listening to the hum of the radiator, and I’m thinking it kind of sounds like a coiled snake, or air escaping through a balloon. The thought is mildly amusing, and the corners of my mouth are raising in a grin. I am not giggling insanely like a hyena or eating six gallons of ice cream (though I probably could.)

My experimental days with drugs are in the rearview now. I only did coke once and hated it; it just made my lips numb and made me feel like getting into a fight for no reason. I generally feel anxious and high-strung anyway, I don’t need a drug that simulates that. Far too expensive as well, so leave that for the real-estate agents and investment brokers.

And although I was a fan of the blotter back in the day, there’s only so many times you can ride that train. Really, once you’ve seen little elves dancing around merrily in fresh falling fluorescent snow, why do you need to go back there again? Or felt the walls and floor breathing around you as you make some vain attempt at sleep while trying to ignore that your kitchen cabinets hate you?

One of the unsung perks of adulthood is knowing exactly who the fuck you are and what the fuck you want. At 35 I reached that point where I decided that I like to smoke pot, I like to fuck dudes, and I am completely convinced of the fact that there is no God. Any one of these activities would put me on the radar of the political right, all three is a veritable trifecta of unheretofore-discovered vilification. Actually I could call that three and a half; cause the truth is I’m not just gay. I mean yeah, I like dudes, but not the kind you’re thinking of. I like large, beefy, hairy dudes. Bears, as they are called in the parlance of those in the know. These are dudes that would not be caught dead in skinny leg jeans or doing Pilates, these are men that look like cops or construction workers or football players (linemen and guards, please.) Guys who look like they are capable of an honest day’s work, thick-framed dudes who have beer bellies and thick hair on their fronts and backs.

I remember when I first moved here, and decided to check out the Pride festival in Civic Center Park. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, and I had to psych myself up considerably before I even left my apartment. That was in my paranoid phase, where I was afraid to go to the Bear Bar, passing by it several times walking down the street, trying to look without looking and being seen. That I even made it there was a small miracle in itself.

I walked to the parade, found some shelter from the relentless summer sun under a tree, and watched as the parade of tackiness went by. Float after float of feathers, sequins, Speedos, and soap bubbles, topped off with loud and awful booming house music, brought to you courtesy of Coors Light and Microsoft. These parades stopped being political along time ago, right around the same time that corporations smelled money to be made like blood in the water.

I looked around at the crowd. I couldn’t figure out why all these straight people and families were here. I guess they thought it was an excuse to party, like a second Halloween. Like everything else, this had become so much watered down bullshit. I felt completely alienated. I didn’t connect or feel anything for this bunch of exclusionary assholes.

Then I saw the Bear float pass by, and I could feel myself lift out of my body for a second, above the angry dykes and the CK models and the noisy, sweaty sea of strollers and drag and sequins and giant turkey legs and glossy advertisements for things I couldn’t possibly afford anyway. There were several big, beefy, hairy, hot guys dancing on their float, looking like they could be plumbers or IT guys or construction workers, not freaky aliens from Planet Fagatron.

There was a really cute black-haired chubby cub at the back of the float in a skimpy blue bathing suit, fearlessly showing off his meaty thighs and large rump. Our eyes met for a second and he winked at me, then he was gone, waving down the crowded street. It was then I knew that there was actually a place for me in this world.

This, that is to say “Bear culture”, is sometimes referred to as the second closet.

Because although society has advanced to the point where it may be accepted and OK for you to tell your mom that you’re gay, it is far less accepted for you to tell her that you’re a Bear. And the whole notion of Bearness really fucks with straight people’s heads. They have a hard time wrapping their brains around it. “People want to fuck fat guys?” They just can’t process it. Fat dudes are supposed to be nothing but jokes, comic relief. Nobody is supposed to want them. The idea that big burly dudes are walking around being gay without anyone knowing scares them. There is no such thing as “looking gay” anymore…. anybody could be one. The guy that picks up your trash could be gay, or your high school PE teacher, or that beefy dude in front of you in the line at the grocery store. And for a world that likes to compartmentalize things in neat, tiny little boxes, that is a scary thought indeed. How can we discriminate against them if they don’t have the decency to look like faggots? We can’t have faggots running around in straight-people outfits! How are we supposed to know who to beat up?

Bears are (or should be) past all that superfluous bullshit. Past ego, past worrying about what kind of jeans to wear, or what kind of $200 cologne to buy, or how to crunch your abs or blast your quads. This kind of acceptance of the way you look is very much feared by advertisers, who thrive on making you spend money because you think you look ugly, or are too fat, too bald, have stinky underarms… the modern proper Bear pridefully turns up his snout at such blatant trickery. He wears what is clean and what he likes. Sometimes if he really likes it, it might even be a little ripe.

He has a few beers if he goddamn well feels like it, and doesn’t dither around worrying about how many crunches to do to work it off, because he would never be caught dead doing anything called a “crunch”, unless it somehow involved some delicious new kind of breakfast cereal.

I would be the first to admit that this is an ideal, not an actual hard and fast rule. I have met plenty of bearish looking fellas who seem all rough and tough on the outside but turn into screaming, pearl-clutching queens at the drop of a hat. Or express fondness for show tunes or Barbara Streisand, both of whom make me want to coat the walls with vomit. This is not a popular thing to say in the community, but that’s a real deal breaker for me. I am not attracted to femininity or people who act like such. If that were the case, why wouldn’t I just go out with girls? Although I have tried that, and, er, it didn’t work. Some fumbling in the dark and a lot of desperate pep talks to myself resulted in nothing but a waste of time and some very

dissatisfied women. It just wasn’t happening for me, it was like trying to get excited about a tree or a sock. Not meant to be.

So that’s who I am, I guess. A pot-smoking Bear with some anger issues. Yes, I have been known to get angry from time to time. A lot of childhood issues come bubbling up at inopportune times in inappropriate places. I got beat up a lot as a little kid.

Like, daily. By the same group of kids, everyday, after school. I can still see their smirking faces now, wearing their cool backwards ball caps and their expensive shoes they had to go to the good mall to get. I was an easy target, as I had no friends and I offered little resistance. I never fought back. Ever. I don’t know if I didn’t know how, or I just didn’t want to. But I never felt like I was there when it was happening anyway. It was more like I was floating above myself, watching myself being beaten.

I never had more than a handful of friends when I was growing up. And those friends tended to be as emotionally damaged, if not more so, than myself. Some of them burned me quite bad, especially my next-door neighbor with the functionally alcoholic parents, who liked to steal my mom’s valuables whenever he was inside my house.

So I don’t trust people, generally. And I get insanely angry when I feel like I’m being taken advantage of. And I got big so no one would ever touch me again. Well, my plan worked, I suppose. Hooray.

PM Jo She lugged David’s limp body out of the bar and into the street. It was a good thing she was pretty strong, because he was out like a light and not helping at all.

There was only one flight of stairs to go up. She leaned his body up against the railing and contemplated how she was going to accomplish this. She decided to just get behind him and drag him up by the collar. He was a tiny little hipster- 5’7” and maybe 120 pounds- so at least it wasn’t like trying to lug a wrestler around or something. She drugs him up the first step. Not too bad, like dragging luggage around.

She dragged him up to the landing and then stood there for a minute, catching her breath. What the hell was she doing dragging passed out white boys around? This hadn’t been on the agenda when Molly had invited her over here.

She was out of college, back in the UK, in a fairly well paying job, but bored out of her skull. When she got the e-mail, she jumped at the chance to go. She had time off coming up anyway, and Halloween sounded like a fun time to go to America.

Anyway, this place ran pretty efficiently with or without her- it’s not like she would be missed all that much. Truth be told, she did really very little besides read e-mails and look over proposal plans. Nothing that would alter the fate of the earth.

She packed some random stuff at her flat while thinking about what bullshit Molly would drag her into this time. She had a knack for attracting trouble, but that’s one of

the reasons why they were friends- Molly had the guts to do things she did not. And sometimes, it paid off. Sometimes, like when they ended up in the Boulder Jail Detox on St. Patrick’s Day, it didn’t work. Whatever. Her friends here were all very nice, and proper, like you’d expect people in her field to be, but they were also very dry and dull. She doubted her friend Jo would show off her tits in a crowded bar for drinks, or set Black Cats off in a movie theatre. Molly had done both of these thingsactually both on the same day. Then, for the cherry on top of the sundae, she had propositioned the taxi driver on the way back to the apartment. It was probably best for them all that he barely spoke English.

She got the next flight that she could find, and soon she was on her way out of the country. It had been a good time, up until now. The passed out body made a snoring noise that could have broken glass.

“Here we are, your apartment.” She pushed at the door, it opened. Unlocked. Stupid, or nothing to steal. She looked inside. Nothing to steal.

She dragged David in and left him in a heap by the couch. His wallet had fallen out of his back pocket. She picked it up and started to look through it. Driver’s License, Student ID….boring. There were some phone numbers, including her friends, wadded up in an interior pocket. Then there was what looked like half of a parking ticket. No cash, debit cards. Well, he’s not a captain of industry yet, she thought, But there’s still time.

She threw the wallet on the kitchen counter and decided what she needed right then and there was a hot cup of tea. She dug around through the kitchen cabinets in search of something that would serve to boil water. To her amazement, she found a teakettle, unopened and in the original box, at the back of one of the cupboards. Obviously a gift from Mom or some aunt that had never been opened. Well, there is a time for everything, she decided, and ripped the packaging open. She looked at the teapot. It was a top shelf, fairly expensive looking stainless steel teapot. Quite nice, miles better than hers, actually. And he wasn’t even using it. She felt a little pang of jealousy and then realized how ridiculous that was.

She snooped around the kitchen while she put the water onto boil. Dirty encrusted dishes, a very scary looking sponge and some filthy dishtowels. Not a neat freak.

Good to know.

There was a half-empty jar of Dijon mustard, a forlorn and ancient box of baking soda, and some bottled beer inside the fridge. Not a gourmet chef, obviously.

Probably never eats anyway, just drinks Mountain Dew like a hummingbird. Maybe some popcorn or chips every once in a while, or microwave burritos. Look at the skinny thing; he looked like he’d never had a decent home-cooked meal in his life.

She would have to rectify that.

David was making mumble-moaning noises in the other room, like he was coming around. She decided to nip into the bathroom and freshen up while Mr. Comatose arose from his slumber.

AM Pete Sometimes at night I’ll say his name to myself, just to hear it. Just to have the familiar and comfortable sensation of the syllables in his mouth as a tangible reminder of his existence. Yes, this is one of the weird little tics I have, again. I am nothing if not a collection of odd habits.

Don’t really feel like walking to work in the wet snow today, but like always I drag my big old rump out of bed and get going. I wonder if I will have the balls to just play hooky one of these days. My Midwestern programming tells me if there’s money to be made, you make it, whether you feel like it or not. I have to work at toning that shit down.

I stand there in the shower nodding in and out of consciousness as the hot water hits my face. I still have bits and pieces of my dream floating around my head, and as always, the faint but conscious product of his memory that covers everything.

For some reason my Internet connection is out so I turn on the TV to catch some news. The insipid banter of the FOX affiliate is too horrid to contemplate (especially their wacky guy who does cute man in the street bullshit) so I flip to channel 7, which is slightly more subdued. There is a picture of a large weather map. Denver is directly under a green and yellow radar lump, which is a huge swirling mass of storm clouds.

The roads are just beginning to get slick when I start walking and visibility is low; however, that doesn’t slow down Denver drivers anyway. People roar through red lights with some frequency around here, probably the fact that the Art Institute is right here doesn’t help. Kids are just shitty drivers. I was one…when I had a car.

There’s no bums out this morning, begging for change. Lately they’ve started selling a fundraising newspaper for money. I guess this makes them feel like they are actually working, by trying to sell some shitty paper no one will read, instead of harassing people for change to buy 40’s. I made the mistake once of actually buying one once. I guess I was feeling magnanimous, or high, or some combination of the two. Next day, he’s on the same corner. I tell him I bought one yesterday and don’t have any change, which was true. He shoots me a steely look and says in his most guilt-inducing voice, “Can’t you help out the homeless?” I said “No.” Next day, he’s gone from the corner. I wonder where all the bums go when it gets cold. They’re not all in the shelters. It’s kind of like wondering where all the baby pigeons are.

The sidewalk is starting to get slippery in spots and I am glad that I am wearing my boots with extra traction. God knows if I fell on my ass and broke something I’d be completely fucked. I can’t really think too broadly about the implications of that, or I’d never leave my apartment.

I begin thinking as I hit the third block that it’s not going to be long before there’s some kind of an accident, and soon enough, one unfolds right before me at the intersection of Sherman and 12th. A car comes roaring down Sherman, fails to brake as the light changes to red, then goes spinning through the intersection, quickly Tboned by on coming traffic. Then there is much slamming of brakes, which really

isn’t a great idea. Cars start sliding through the light, desperately trying to avoid the cars that have just contacted.

I see a cell phone come flying out of the window of the car that caused the accident.

Big surprise there. Those devices are the fucking scourges of the Earth. I mentally decide to move my walk down a block, because there is no fucking way I am getting through this intersection now. I look to see if anyone is hurt. The guy who caused the accident is out of the car and looking around with his arms folded, sheepishly. He looks bruised but not hurt too badly.

The driver of the other car, I can’t tell. There is steam pouring out of his radiator, and my vision of the area is pretty much completely obscured. . A cop pulls up in a parking lot across the street and leaves his lights flashing. He motions me over. Great, now I got to give an accident report. I’m never going to get to work.

“Hey, did you see this happen?”

“Yeah,” I say. “This guy here, “ I point to the sheepish looking man, “came speeding down Sherman and didn’t stop at the red. Then he spun around on the ice and only stopped when he got T-boned by that grey car there. I don’t know if he’s OK or what.”

The cop nodded. “OK, thanks. Just stay there for a minute.”

“I got to get to work.” I impatiently pointed at my watch.

“Just for a minute.”

He walked over to the first man and asked for his registration, then walked over to the other car. The man inside was shaken, but largely unharmed except for a few gashes from some broken glass. The airbag had deployed and he was sitting dazed behind it.

“Is he OK?” I yelled. Steam was covering everything and I couldn’t see a thing.

“Sir, are you alright?” the cop said. He pointed his flashlight at the man but he didn’t move. He was still gripping the steering wheel tight. Looking dead ahead.

“I think he might be in shock. I’m calling for backup, this is getting nuts.” The cop removed his radio from his hip pocket and dialed into the central station.

“Requesting backup, 12th and Sherman, major accident, need roadblocks and traffic control.”

“OK, can I go?”

“Yeah. Be careful.” He waved me off, and turned his attention back to rousing the driver of the car. The driver of the other car approached him. The cop asked for his name. It sounded like “Ian”. Well, Ian, congratulations on fucking up this guy with your cell phone and your lack of driving skills. What a winner you must Be.

I walked off. Sometimes I am glad I don’t have a car, like now. I guess it seems like a really green thing to do, But that’s not why. More a money-saving thing then anything else, I suppose. And I like living places where you don’t need a car to live and work, like here. Fuck the suburbs. Who wants to live clear out there? Those people are afraid of the city. Pussies. Fucking posers. They come out here on the weekends to slum it up, and take all the goddamn parking spaces, block the sidewalks with their slow walking and goddamn immense two-seater strollers. Then they run back home to their gated communities before the scary black people come out at dark.

Pathetic slummers. How paranoid would living in some gated complex make you?

Hell, I’ve woken up to find homeless people sleeping in my hallway, that doesn’t mean I’m going to run out and buy deadbolts for the front door.

I’m a city guy, always have been, even when I was living in a shitty small town in Nebraska. I just bided my time and counted the days until I could get the fuck out of that one star town. People like to wax nostalgic about the family values of small towns. I guess they have advantages. No traffic. No bums. No crowds. The lack of these things is nice, I suppose. And the quiet at night is peaceful, if peace is what you’re after. People tend not to worry about their doors being locked at night or being mugged while walking down the street.

But what the hell are you supposed to do when you’re drunk and want a falafel at 1 o clock in the morning, huh? Or if you want to go see a movie that isn’t some Hollywood blockbuster bullshit? Or find a decent chai latte, or a bookstore that doesn’t stock Danielle Steel or Stephen King? Or maybe you want to go to a bar that serves more than Coors Light and whiskey. Maybe you want to go out and get mojitos, or some foo-foo thing with straws and fruit poking out of it at every conceivable angle. You’re sure as hell not going to get that at the Sportsman’s Lounge, and if you ask, you’re probably going to get the living shit beaten out of you with a pool cue.

Not only that, but in a small town, every one knows each other, and knows each other’s business disturbingly closely. I see it every time I go to visit my family for Christmas and listen to my relatives talk: they don’t talk about concepts or philosophies or ideas or even events, they talk about people.

They’ll all be huddled around in the high-backed chairs in my parent’s dining room, the women drinking that awful Franzia box wine and the men drinking whiskey and waters, and someone will say something like: “Well, Gladys finally fell down on the ice outside the senior center. Looks like the doctors told her she’ll have to have her hip replaced.”

Who the fuck is Gladys? I want to say, but they just keep talking and talking about shit that happened twenty years before I was born. About some obscure play called in a Huskers game thirty years ago. Although it’s better for me if these conversations remain in the past, because if there is any talk about the present, it will invariably turn around to whatever they were told to think by Fox News that week and how can I possibly like such an incompetent, Marxist, freedom hater like Obama?

Then invariably, my uncle from Omaha will say something so colossally ignorant that will make my blood pressure spike. My relatives are all solidly right wing, but even they admit that he and my aunt Jean have gone off the deep end. They passed out copies of a book called “The Conspiracy” to everyone they knew. I had the luck to examine a copy. I guess calling it “a book” is more praise than it deserves, as it is really a glorified pamphlet, with a cardboard cover and that plastic spiral binding you might find on a locally published collection of recipes. It looks like it was printed on some ancient dot matrix printer about 20 years ago, and the majority of it rails against the Clinton family. There is some incomprehensible bullshit about the Merovingian Bloodline and how evil Catholicism is, plus some pretty standard bashing of gays and some really nutty shit about UFO’s and forced federal FEMA relocation camps, the directions to which can be found on the backs of speed-limit signs. I shudder when I realize that they actually believe every word of what is transparently raving lunacy.

Who are these people?

I quit trying to argue with these people. What’s the fucking point? They aren’t changing and neither am I. I usually end up in a corner somewhere, reading a book or listening to music, while they gather in the living room for Hannity or O’Reilly. I am so outnumbered at these things its ridiculous. And I can’t even begin to tell them what I really think of their colossal load of Bible-fearing bullshit they’ve constructed around themselves.

‘Well, if you really want to know what I think, Uncle Bob, we should legalize marijuana and gay marriage, pull out of Afghanistan and use that money to ensure that everyone has health care, with a public option. I think the Democrats should stop being a bunch of pussies and ignore the Republicans completely, as they have shown over and over again the last thing they are interested in is compromise. I think Rupert Murdoch should be publicly flogged in a public square for crimes against journalism and common decency. I think that the fear mongering Bullshit peddled by Fox News should be subject to the same journalistic integrity as other news sources, since they insist it is “news”, and they should be publicly ridiculed every time they make up stories out of thin air or deliberately try to falsify information. And I wish Obama were here right now so he could kick you in the crotch for being such an idiot.

“We’re going to vote those fascists out of office.” Do you realize how completely stupid that sounds? When was the last time a fascist got “voted” out of anything?

See, words mean things. You can’t just string crap together because you like the sound of your own voice, or because you’re parroting what you heard some douche bag say on talk radio the other day. That’s what I think.”

I don’t want to come across here as too hateful, so let me just say that I really don’t hate these people, they are my family and of course I love them in my own way. It’s just this particular form of brain rot they demonstrate is a new one. They weren’t like this when I was a little kid. It just got worse with time, and when Clinton got elected, that really was the start of the mega-insanity.

My grandmother was the first. She took to watching nothing but FOX news all day long, insanely loud. And she would count the minutes down to her beloved Bill O’ Reilly, who’s name no one had better impugn in her presence. She got a signed book and jacket from him one Christmas, you would have thought she had just received the

Hope Diamond instead of a cheap-ass book and nylon windbreaker that was probably assembled by small children in Korea. But for her it was like receiving the word of GOD. Some one who understood. Who knew what this country used to be like, what it should be like and what was wrong with everything. Nobody had any common sense anymore. Crazy people everywhere, she would say. You won’t get me on one of those airplanes. I know better than that. She would also rail at length about those “egghead professors with their pointy beards.” She had developed a real distrust of education, which more or less was accountable to her dependence on FOX. It was to their advantage to make their viewers distrust and demonize the intellectuals, and rely on them as their only source of information.

I guess it’s a good thing that she died before Obama was elected, because I don’t think that would have gone down well. Not to say that she was racist, but as a 90year-old white lady in Nebraska who I doubt had seen more than a handful of black people in her entire life that weren’t on TV, I just think the concept of a black president would have made her head explode.

Ultimately, it comes down to fear. They don’t recognize the country they live in anymore, and easily succumb to nostalgia coated with fear. But things are always changing, regardless of whatever memories are clouding your vision.

Rather than incite a riot at Christmas time, I just say nothing. But my thoughts are not too hard to discern. I just drink more to push them down from the surface. How nice it would be to not have to pretend. How relaxing it would be to truly be myself without fear of disapproval. But not at this time and not in this place.

There is a time and a place for everything and I am slowly approaching that moment.

And when I reach it, it wills all be out on the table, and they will cluck their fingers and was their tongues in disapproval and pray for my misbegotten soul. But by then I will be far far away. Across this brown and forsaken farmland and deep into the gleaming city, where I can finally be truly free.

PM Molly Molly played idly with her hair in the taxicab, turning a lock over and over again in her nervous hands. She was going over and over in her head the things she was going to say and do when she was reunited with the cute guy again. First and foremost, she would be forward, because he was obviously shy. She would dominate the situation to her advantage, as always, and somehow or another the night would end up with the two of them in bed.

This was the tack she usually took, but she was especially nervous for it to work now.

She really thought this guy was cute, and would be different from all the others. No more frat boys. That was something she was eager to be done with. They were all talk, especially around their friends. Then you get them in the sack and they’re too drunk to last for more than a couple of minutes before they fall asleep. Done and done with that scene.

None of these assholes ever called her either. If she did by chance run into one of them, there was either a mumbled “hey” followed by them walking away quickly, or the old “I see you and know who you are but I am going to pretend like I have never seen you before in my life, because I am with my friend here and to explain your existence to them would be far too difficult, so who the fuck are you?” routine.

There was this guy from her work, Daniel, who loved her like crazy, and would give her anything she wanted, and yeah, she had slept with him a few times, but she thought of him as more of a fuck buddy than a boyfriend. He wasn’t a hideous mutant, or anything, there was just no spark there. It was no challenge- he was far too easy, and predictable. No dangerous streak- he didn’t have a bad bone in his body.

This guy would be different, she felt. He would ask her to stay. He would invite her to read his poetry (she just knew he had to have written some.). He would tell her exciting stories of his life, and lay out fascinating pictures on the bedspread of all the places that he had visited. She had never really been out of Colorado, unless you count the family trip that she had taken to Six Flags when she was 14. She certainly didn’t. That was trip that her stepfather had gotten fresh with her while her mom was gone and she had threatened to break his arm. The trip went downhill from there.

She pulled out a mirror and made sure her makeup was good. She wanted to make a good impression right out of the gate. One time she had gone on a date with this guy she liked and things weren’t going well but she couldn’t figure out why. At the end after he had left she went to the bathroom and noticed she had a piece of food stuck in her front teeth for the entire date. So that was definitely not happening this time.

The taxi pulled up to the apartment. She called her friend to let her know she was here. No answer. Well, he had to be in one of these. She paid the driver and got out.

“Hey, bitch, I’m here!” she screamed up at the apartments while clinging to the railing.

No reaction. She walked up the stairs to look in the windows.

She could hear voices coming from one and peeked inside. Her friend and the guy were sitting on the couch, feeling each other up.

The guy looked up, and nudged Jo. She looked up as well.

“Hey!” she said, disentangling herself and sitting up. “That was quick!”

“Hey guys.” She pointed to her friend. “Come here, we need to talk.”

“It was nothing…we just couldn’t figure out what to do while we waited for you.”

“Well, I’m here now. Let’s do it up.”

“Where is everyone else? I thought you were bringing the party over.”

Molly laughed. “Honey, you know better than that. I am the party.”

With her purse swinging, she started humming a funky little tune and doing an exaggerated hippy sway back and forth as she walked to the table and yelled ‘TA FREAKING DA!” She opened up her purse and threw a quarter ounce jar of immaculate, stinky green buds onto the table. This was followed by more beer and a bottle of champagne, which she immediately offered to her friend, who smiled and sat back on the couch, trying to figure out a way to open it.

The man looked at the glass jar with serious interest. “Holy shit, that’s some skunky ass weed. Where’d you pick that up?” He picked it up off the table and held it under his nose, savoring the pungent aroma like a fine wine.

“I know this dude, Stuart, that works at a dispensary, in Aurora.” This was true. He owed her a favor after a party she had thrown he was in attendance at. The guy had made a total drunken fool of himself, after embarking on an ill-advised binge of Coors Light and Rumpleminze, and ended up pissing himself and passing out in a corner of her house. She threatened to tell his girlfriend, who was not in attendance at the party and would not be thrilled to learn of her boyfriend’s behavior. He swore he could cut her a deal. She got a quarter sack that would sell for a respectable $100 or up on the street for $50. Not too bad for cleaning up a little piss.

The man was impressed. “Jesus, look at the crystals dripping off these buds. I’m getting high just looking at this shit.”

Molly laughed. “Well, dear, just think how high you’ll get when you actually smoke some.”

“Yeah…I should get the bong out for this sticky-icky.” He wandered over to the hall closet and pulled out a small white skull-shaped bong. He sniffed the water and his face instantly wrinkled with distaste.

“Urrrg, I need to change the water in this fucker. I hope I have some ice in the freezer.”

Jo got the champagne bottle open. “You should by now. I made some when we got here.”

“You are an angel.” He danced to the kitchen, bong in hand.

Molly and her friend exchanged knowing looks while he was in the other room.

Molly said “ You better not be getting in my way while I get on this dude.” Jo’s said, “I am sure I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He came back from the kitchen with a fresh, clean ice-filled bong, humming the happy little tune of the stoner who knows he’s about to get stoned.

“Boy, I sure am excited. I’ve been dry for a while. Just had a bowl of some schwag left. We are going to get so baked.” He could hardly believe his luck. He had been so desperate for pot; he had considered the last-ditch effort of going down to Civic Center Park to buy shitty brickweed from the Mexicans, but now- just look at this stuff! He licked his lips in anticipation of that familiar blissful intoxication.

“Yeah. This is some high-grade shit.” She broke off a bud from the bag. It instantaneously fused itself to her hand with its dripping resin. She shook it loose, stuffed it in the bowl and handed it back to Peter.

“As the host, I have to offer you the freshy hit.”

“Awww, that’s so sweet. “ He lit it up and took a massive hit, holding it for about 20 seconds before erupting in a coughing, hacking fit, which lasted much longer.

She patted him on the back. “Awe, honey, are you OK? Gotta take it easy with this stuff, It’ll creep up on you.”

He smiled weakly and handed her the bong. “Oh my God. That shit tastes like God’s pussy.”

Molly laughed. “Well, that’s pretty much what the dude who sold it to me said.” She had seen Pineapple Express too.

She opened one of the beers from her purse and took a big swallow.

“No more booze for you, dear. Only good healthy medicinal pot for you. You’re gonna get better smoking that, you’ll see.”

He chuckled. “ I already feel better. My stomach feels like a thousand times better.”

“Oh, were you sick, honey?” She purred with concern.

“Yeah, I threw up a little while ago.”

“Poor baby.” She walked to him and kissed his forehead lightly. He gave a wry little smile.

“You sure are nice to me.”

“Well, you’re a nice guy. To let a couple of strange girls in your house in the middle of the night. “ “Well, I appreciate your friend helping me to get home. I was in pretty bad shape.”

She frowned. “Too much whisky. No more of that stuff for you. It’ll eat you up inside.” Molly took a huge pull of beer and hit the bong again, almost simultaneously.

Jo was in the kitchen looking for a clean glass. She finally gave up and began drinking straight out of the bottle. She took a deep pull from the bottle and wiped her arm with the sleeve of her blouse.

“Hey girl, come out here and hit this thing.” Molly yelled.

“Oh Christ, it’s Boulder all over again. Coming.”

Jo sat her champagne bottle down on the edge of the table and took a toke. She immediately fell back on the floor in a coughing fit, rolling back and forth and laughing hysterically, enveloped in a sweet-smelling cloud.

“Oh my God!” she yelled, still coughing profusely. “That shit is ridiculous!”

“I bet they don’t have pot like that in Britain, huh?”

“Not like that stuff. Of course, in Birmingham it’s more about hash, but good Lord!

That was….” She trailed off and stared up vacantly at a ceiling tile. “Uhh, yeah. I should go sit down now.” She grabbed back her bottle and sank into the couch.

Molly fixed her position close to David, sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to light the bong again. It was going to be easier than she thought. Good thing he was a pot smoker, she thought. A few more hits and he would be too stoned to resist

anything she tried to pull. But not now, not yet. She had to time this right and make it work. She liked this guy too much already to fuck it up by being hasty.

“So,” she said, “tell me about yourself. I hardly know anything about you.”

“Oh, not a lot to tell, really. Graduated college last year, still can’t get a decent job.

Moved out here from Montana about 10 years ago.”

“Montana, huh? How was that?”

“A complete shithole. Bunch of racist fucks everywhere who only care about NASCAR and hunting and beer. I wouldn’t go back there if you paid me.” David frowned, remembering some past wounding slight.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. So what did you go to college for?”

“Oh, I changed majors a bunch of times. I wanted to be a business major to begin, then a history major…then somehow I ended up in Computer Science. I figured it was the only likely way to have a decent job.”

“And that didn’t work?”

“No, because everyone has a Computer Science degree. It doesn’t really mean anything anymore. So I’m trying to write an app for the IPhone. That’s really the way to make a lotta money.” He figured that if the guy who invented the Ifart app could make $150,000 in a single day, he could surely make enough to get the Student Loan people off his back.

“Oh, you know how to do that?” She was impressed, but tried not to let it show.

He nodded. “Yeah, I taught myself the code. I’m working on this idea, it’s kind of like a hot or not thing. You take a picture of someone with your phone camera and then upload it to this site, and you vote on whether you would do the person or not.”

Molly laughed. “Oh, I would so totally buy that app.”

David said “Really? Well, if I can get you and a million other people to buy it, I’ll be set for life.” He liked to think about having a ridiculous amount of money in the bank and never working again for the rest of his life. This idea was greatly appealing to him.

She sweetly continued, “And if I had a picture of you I would vote yes, for sure.”

He grinned weakly. “Ha, yeah. I hear that a lot.”

‘Did you ever do any modeling?” She downshifted the conversational gear.

“Me? Nah. I guess I thought about it. Seems kind of gay.”

“What’s gay about it?”

“Hanging out, getting your picture taken all the time, being told what clothes you have to wear and where you have to be seen at- that’s not my thing.” He made a sour face to illustrate that this concept disgusted him.

“Seems like a great job to me. You get paid for doing basically nothing.”

“Well, I suppose I could get with that. But I don’t really give a shit about fashion.”

This was true, as a look in his closet would have revealed. David was strictly a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy, with some dress shirts and khakis thrown in for work. He

owned precisely two pairs of shoes and one winter coat. Still, his handsomeness overcame his natural impairment of style. This is not something that would have worked for a less good-looking guy, who would be roundly dismissed as being a lazy slob. With him, it conveyed a carefree, casual attitude towards life. But one could only get away with this attitude when young, as he would discover in the future.

“Yeah, I’ve had people tell me that before, Oh, you should be in magazines, or whatever, but I don’t think-“ There was a sharp pounding on the door. They all sat up, startled and not a little paranoid.

David turned his gaze to the door. Who the hell could that possibly be?

“Are you gonna answer that?” Molly said.

Jo’s Flashback Her romantic life was in shambles, like always, but who was to blame for that beside herself, really? She had a habit of attracting nice guys and then gradually pushing them away, almost unconsciously, really, but there would come a point in the relationship where there was almost an audible click, like vast well-oiled machinery kicking into motion, and her attitude would change. She would be cooler and more distant, less talkative, less cooperative- just a flat out bitch, really.

There were plenty of good examples of this habit at work in her life. But the one she felt the worst about was Cal. Cal had worked in the bank that she interned in, as a teller. He was an American expat who had fled the country around the time of the first King Bush’s reign, and had no intentions of going back. He lived in a small flat in London, which he paid far too much for, but he was too happy with the idea of living in an apartment in London that he put up no resistance.

He was American, true. But he was more of the classic definition of American than how the term has been perverted post 9-11, an oversized, towheaded friendly kid, with a firm handshake and bright white smile. At 6’ 5’ and 300 pounds he could have come across as intimidating, But there wasn’t an ounce of guile or meanness in the guy. He was friendly, warm and outgoing, made people feel instantly at home, and had a loud, booming, contagious laugh. He was that rarest, most beautiful thing: a genuinely nice person.

Cal met her one day when she came in to get her last paycheck. He noticed her across the way and motioned her to come over, waving frantically with his large, beefy paws.

She smiled. It was hard to not smile around Cal. ‘Cal, right? “ She said.

“Yeah. I met you really briefly one time but you had to go.”

“So this is my last day here. I got a new job.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you. I knew you were leaving, and I’d probably never see you again, and I always thought you were a cool person, and…”

He trailed off. Damn, this was harder than he had imagined.

She brightened. “My goodness, Cal, you’re blushing!”

“I am not!” he shouted. Of course, he was.

Jo thought that was one of the cutest things she had ever seen in her life.

“Oh, I’m just going to come out and say it. Would you like to go, you know on a date sometime?” He looked up at her, pleadingly with his watery eyes. It was surprisingly effective, she thought, since Cal was so sincere and good and disarming. It was like being propositioned by a cocker spaniel.

“Oh, of course, dear. Where would you like to go?”

“Really?” He had the look on his face of a six-year old who has just been told he can open all of his Christmas presents early. “That’s awesome!”

“So where would you like to go, dear?’

“Well, there’s a nice little coffee shop by my flat…do you like coffee?”

“No, not really.”

“Oh.” His face fell slightly. He said nothing.

As a woman, of course, Jo had already sensed that he was desperately hoping that she would make the next move, so she leaped into the fray.

“I wouldn’t mind going out for a nice glass of wine, though?” she offered.

He looked up. “Oh, do you like to drink?”

“I’ve been known to tipple a few, mate.”

“Right on. Well, there’s a pub pretty close to me, too, that I don’t mind going to-“ Jo made a sour face. “Oh, not the Kensington, eh?”

He said, “How do you know that?”

“Oh, c’mon. That’s where all the Americans drink. They show bloody football in there, and not the proper kind, the Yank kind. Besides, you can’t just take me down the pub on our first date. You want to impress me, right?”

He grinned. “Yeah.”

“Good! So you have to pony up, I’m afraid, and take me somewhere a bit more flash.

Somewhere where the hip young things in skinny drainpipe jeans hang out.”

He laughed, self-deprecatingly. “I don’t think I could wear drainpipes. It wouldn’t be a very good look for me, I’m afraid. “ “Oh, dear, I know you can’t wear drainpipes. Look at you, you big burly man. I don’t give a toss about that, it’s just those trendy kids know where the good clubs are. And I’ve heard rumors about this place called Exposed.”

He blanched. “ I think I read something about that place, isn’t it a gay bar?”

She smiled. “That’s not a problem, is it?” It really was a deal breaker for her when guys turned out to have a big hang-up about gay people.

His forehead scrunched up. “Well, no…I mean, I’m not a homophobe or anything, but…. why would you want me to take you to a gay bar for our first date?”

“Several reasons, really. It puts us on more even ground. I don’t have to worry about you checking out other women. And I don’t have to worry about getting hit on by some drunken fool. Plus, this will broaden your horizons. And believe me, they are going to love you in this place, Mr. Bear.” She punctuated that last word with a cartoonish little growl and paw in the air.

“Mr. Bear? What does that mean?”

“Oh, you’ll find out. Shall we say, Friday at 8? You come pick me up at my place; we take a taxi over there? “ “Where do you live?”

Jo pulled a napkin from the depths of her purse and began scrawling a crude map on it in felt tip pen. “26g Hounslow, OK? Here’s my cell number too.” She handed it to him. He accepted it and folded it and placed it into his pocket very proudly.

“OK. I’ll see ya then. You won’t regret this! It’ll be a blast!” He waved to her as she walked out of the bank.

Four days later, Cal was at her front door, nervously grinning and perspiring profusely. He was dressed very well for an American, she thought, nice button up shirt and tailored jacket, sharp pants, and shoes that screamed, “ I just bought these an hour ago.” His earnestness was overwhelming and quite endearing, she thought.

She swung the door open wide. “Hey, Cal. You ready for our first date?”

He laughed. “Very. I hope that you have a fun time tonight.”

“Oh, I will.” The fact is, she was playing a fairly elaborate prank on him, knowing full well that Friday was Bear Night at this particular club, thus ensuring that all eyes would be on her date, not her. That seemed dandy to her. But she was just wondering how long she could last without busting up laughing. Cal just looked at her earnestly.

“Taxi’s waiting,” he said, standing there with his hands in his pockets.

“O.K, show me the way.” Jo proffered her arm, all demure and ladylike, doncha know. They walked arm in arm the twenty feet to the taxi.

“Where to?” said the cabbie.

“Um, here’s the address,” Cal said as he handed the man a piece of paper.

The man looked at the flyer, and then back at Cal, and then at the flyer again.

“Hell’s Bells, son. You’re going to be a huge hit at this place.” He let out a little saucy whistle.

“Um….thanks?”

Cal stared at his date. “Why did he say that?”

“Did you Google “Bear” like I told you to?”

“No, but…is that it? Am I a Bear?”

The cabbie cackled maniacally. ‘Spot on, spot on, son. They’re thick on the ground in the forest you’re headed to.”

He shot her a look that said, “What are you up to?”

“So I guess that makes me Goldilocks,” she said.

The cabbie started merrily whistling “If You Go Out In The Woods Tonight”.

“It’s cool. I know you’re sweating me a little. You don’t think I’m a hip guy, I don’t know what all the cool kids are into here. “ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Oh, I know you’re cool. Any straight guy who would consent to do this as a first date already has scored, like a thousand cool points.” Which was true. Try as she might, she couldn’t come up with the name of even one ex-boyfriend who would have consent to this situation. “Are you mad, woman?” they would have said. Come to think of it, this was really like something out of some American sitcom. This was like an updated Three’s Company episode.

He beamed. “Well, that’s good to hear. Hope I don’t blow it.”

“Honey, you and I are going to have so much fun tonight you won’t believe it.”

The taxi pulled up to a small, non-descript storefront with metal blinds surrounding it.

The front was covered with gang tags. Pretty street.

“This is it?” Cal asked quizzically.

“Yup. The more nondescript it looks on the outside, the better it will be on the inside.

The really cool places don’t have to advertise. Keeps the punters out, you know?”

Cal wondered what a punter was, and why one would want to keep them out.

They exited the taxi and surveyed the area. There were several large men in a corner huddled smoking cigarettes. They observed Cal and began checking him out.

“Let’s go in.”

Cal thought he heard one of the men behind him say “Woof.” But that was ridiculous.

Who would say “woof” at someone? What does that even mean? Dogs aren’t bears.

Inside there was a DJ at the far end of the room playing some bland electronica. He was saving the choice stuff for later, it was still far too early.

“Five pound cover, loves.” A bouncer who couldn’t have been a hair under 400 pounds and 6’9” came lumbering up to them. He had an enormous red beard that covered most of his face, and was covered in various and sundry tattoos. He looked like he could crush someone’s head like a melon. However, when he saw Cal, he went a little gooey.

“Oh..hey, are you American, dearie?” he lisped in Cal’s face.

“Yeah.” He looked embarrassed to admit it.

“Well, you are a nice bit of beef, aren’t you? Did those blokes out there woof at you as you came in?”

“Well, yeah, what was that about?”

The bouncer looked at her disapprovingly. “Child, what have you told this boy?”

She laughed. “It’s O.K- He’s my date. I made him take us here.”

The bouncer looked at her. “Well, that’s a new one on me. Boy, you’re as straight as an arrow, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

The bouncer threw back his enormous head and roared with laughter. “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard! You have got some guts, fella. Come on in.

There was a gleaming, stainless-steel encased bar in the center of the room and various couches and chairs (and many dark nooks and crannies) surrounding it. They headed towards it.

“What would my lady like from her fair bear?”

Jo snorted. “Are you going to start rhyming on me now?”

“No, I’ll stop.”

“I would love a Tanqueray and tonic. What will you have?”

“I don’t know. I don’t drink all that much.” He shrugged.

“I have a feeling you will tonight.”

“I think I’ll have a gin and tonic too. Sounds refreshing.”

They reached the center of the bar. The bartender, who looked not a little like a British version of Jonah Hill, welcomed them.

‘Hey fella. Hey angel. Whattaya have?”

‘Two Tanqueray and tonic please.”

“Coming right up.” The bartender paused. “Cutie-pie.”

Cal laughed. “The bartender thinks I’m hot.”

“Honey, everyone in this room thinks you’re hot. Just look around.”

Cal did. As his gaze shifted across the room, he noticed a sea of eyes turning to meet his gaze and trying to hold his attention. Several guys licked their lips when their eyes met.

‘Whoa…that’s weird.” Cal tried not to meet the man’s gaze.

“You know, that’s what women have to deal with all the time. Blokes staring at you from every angle. Looking at you with that hungry look.”

He exhaled. “Gee, that kind of sucks. I don’t know if I could deal with all this attention all the time. “ Jo smiled and sipped at her drink. “You’re learning, you’re learning.”

The DJ started playing some Daft Punk and Cal leapt up.

“Hey! I love this song! Will you dance with me?” He offered his hand.

“Of course.”

They moved to the back of the room. Cal started gyrating his hips and throwing his beefy arms around crazily. He called that “dancing.” She looked at him and started swaying a little, back and forth. The song was hard to resist and the floor was filling up. They moved closer. He did the little movement that John Travolta did in Pulp Fiction, where he drew his finger across his forehead. This made her laugh and almost spill her drink. Cal was drawing quite the appreciative crowd. Some tried to move a little closer to him. He was oblivious, happily shaking his sizeable rump to and fro.

“Are you having fun yet?” he yelled out at her.

“I’m just getting started,” she said.

“Awesome!” He did a weird little strut that was kind of the white boy version of the moonwalk, and then bent down to do a split. Quite impressive really.

“Somebody buy this guy a drink!” yelled someone from the back of the bar.

Soon there was a fresh drink in Cal’s hand, which he downed quickly. He then attempted to do a breakdance move (spinning on the floor), which he pulled off with great aplomb. Bears were crowding in to get a look at him and applauding.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” A short furry cub was standing there. He was wearing a worn flannel shirt and jeans that were very tight in the proper places.

“Pardon me, do you know that bloke?” He pointed in the direction of Cal. “Yeah, he’s my date.”

The cubs face fell. “Damn. You’re lucky, you know that? At least you saved me the embarrassment of hitting on him. He’s fucking gorgeous. “ “I don’t think he would have been offended- But he’s pretty straight. I made him take me here.”

“You know everyone in this bar wants to sleep with your date, right?”

“That’s why we came here. Takes the pressure off me.”

He laughed. “You’re a pretty sharp bird. Cheers, luv.” He disappeared back into the crowd.

Cal was now sufficiently liquored up to attempt a back flip, which he pulled off to delirious cheers from the crowd. People tended to think he couldn’t do such things because he was a large guy, but he had always been athletic. He played guard on his high school football team and a little in college, and even liked to do yoga, on his doctor’s advice. He just had no venue for showing it off- except here.

The song ended and Cal was swept up in the applause that surrounded him. He beamed and bowed in all directions, gratefully soaking up the adoration like a sponge.

She walked up to him, and forced herself through the throng of admirers surrounding him.

‘Sorry fellas, he’s mine,” Jo said, wrapping her arms around him. Cal reddened a bit more than the red he already was. There was an audible sigh from the crowd. They walked back to the bar.

The bartender had been watching them with interest and said, “That was bloody amazing, mate! Let me buy you a drink, on the house.”

Cal said, “OK. One for my date too?”

And the night went on like that, various people coming over and buying them drinks to get a look at the hetero bear. They had many interesting conversations with people and got into a lively debate with some rugby folks about why American football was

better than rugby. Cal felt very strongly about this and waved his arms around mightily to illustrate his points.

The end of the night came, and they both were quite drunk. She decided to call them a taxi.

‘D’you want to come back to my place?”

She figured she pretty much owed him that much at this point for him being such a good sport, so she said, “Yeah, mate.”

“OK. It’s a little dirty-“ She pressed her finger up to his mouth. “Quit apologizing. I’m sure it’s fine.”

They walked out into the crisp night air to look for their taxi.

“Can I kiss you?’ he said.

“Well, I think that seems all right.”

He bent down to kiss her and covered her in an embrace with her mighty arms. His kiss was soft and deep and strong. She had never had an embrace like this before. It was so comforting and secure, like being hugged by a sofa.

Jo pulled back. “That was…. quite nice.” She was at a loss for what to say.

Cal saw his opening. “Yeah, we can do that more later, right?”

“Sounds like a safe bet.”

He punched the air in glee. “Yes!” The taxi arrived, and they drunkenly stumbled in. On the ride to his apartment, Cal groped in the dark for her thigh. She let him rest his hand there. He held it there and then attempted to get his other hand around her side. They sat there, in the darkness, tangled up and not saying anything, but humming with deep satisfaction.

They came out of the taxi laughing. Cal left the driver a ridiculous tip. He fumbled for the keys and then clumsily opened the door. They entered.

It was a small, sparsely furnished room, with a kitchenette towards the back, a bedroom on the other side and a small bathroom. Cal walked towards the coffee table and picked up a small syringe.

Her eyes grew huge. “Oh, god, you’re not a fucking junkie, are you? You can’t be.”

“No, I’m diabetic. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before, But it can be a deal breaker sometimes.”

“Oh. No, that’s fine. I had an aunt who had it.” Her aunt Nettie, whose house she always hated going to. Plastic slipcovers on all the furniture, and that one bowl of candy she left out for visitors that long ago had fused itself into one inedible peppermint glob.

“It’s under control if I take my insulin…but I can’t remember if I took a shot or not before I came to pick you up.”

“That’s a problem.” She clucked her tongue.

“I was so nervous…. and I had so many drinks…I can’t remember for the life of me. I don’t think I did.” He prepared the syringe and injected himself. Unfortunately for him, he had already given himself a shot, before he had picked her up.

“I need to use your loo.”

He pointed. “Over that way, m’lady.”

As she sat, she pondered the events of the night. She really liked this guy. He wasn’t like any of the guys she had dated before. He wasn’t obnoxiously full of himself, and didn’t talk endlessly about his family or money or car. He was sweet, that was the word. Sweet.

Jo closed her eyes and almost fell asleep for a moment. She finished her business and flushed, then examined herself in the mirror. Time to do a little touch up work. She reapplied her smudged lipstick, and played with her hair for a while trying to look seductive. When she was finally satisfied with the outcome, she opened the bathroom door.

Cal was nowhere to be seen. And there was a strange odor in the room. She looked down to see what it was. There was a thin layer of brown goo on the floor. It smelled like shit. She wrinkled her nose and looked again. It was shit.

“What the fuck? Cal, where are you?” she yelled.

There was no answer, so she followed the trail into the bedroom, trying to hold back her disgust. The trail weaved through the carpet to the other end of the room, where Cal laid on the floor, unconscious in a diabetic coma, with the curtains wrapped around him. He was covered head to toe in the leavings of his own bowels, which had voided as the insulin shock hit his system. He was very pale, and sweaty. To his everlasting horror, he had made the first misjudging of his sugar levels in a long while.

It dawned on her slowly what was happening, and panic struck her like a fist. “Oh my God! Cal, are you all right? Are you in shock?”

There was no response. She crept closer at the heap that was Cal.

“Still breathing. Cal!” she screamed in his face.

“Mmm.” Some dim sign of recognition. She slapped him in the face.

“What…. Oh my god, what the hell…”

“You had a little accident, guy.”

Cal slumped back again.

“Hey! Stay awake! Hold on.”

She ran to the other room, and rummaged through the cabinets. Finally she found a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and a trash bag. She took off her coat and put the trash bag over her. She also found some tongs, which she thought might also come in handy. She walked back to the prone figure. “Cal wake up!” She slapped him again.

“Take those clothes off, now. You’ve soiled yourself and you’re covered in crap.

Now take them off.”

He grunted and feebly tried to lift off his filthy shirt. She grabbed it with the tongs and threw it into another trash bag. “Now the pants.” They soon followed. He fell back down to the ground and left consciousness.

“Dammit, I have to find him some sugar.”

She ran to the kitchen and found some bite-sized Halloween candies. She ran back to Cal. “Cal! Wake up!” followed by another slap. “Eat this.” He did as he was told.

“And this.” Again, he ate the candy. Gradually he came around and surveyed his room.

“Oh, my sweet Lord….” He sat there with his face in his hands, weeping softly.

“Cal? C’mon, it’s OK. We’re going to get you in the shower OK?”

He looked at her covered with a trash bag and his own crap.

“Um, why don’t you take a shower first?”

“You have anything I can change into?”

He threw an XXL polo shirt and some shorts at her. Not her style, but now was not the time to be demanding. “Ok.” “Well, I’d hoped to have you Back here with my clothes off, But not like this.”

She managed a weak little smile at that.

After her shower she walked out into the living room. The trail of crap was gone and the room smelled like lilacs. Cal was also gone. She looked around for him in vain but he was not in the apartment. She could hardly blame him. He had been doing so well and then the most embarrassing thing imaginable had happened to him. She wondered if this was the sort of thing that could ruin a person. If everyone found out about this incident…poor Cal. Her coat was where she had hidden it, after the shitstorm had begun. It still retained the stink of the room. So much for that. She left it there. No amount of cleaning was ever going to get that smell out. Plus, she would never be able to wear it again without thinking about this night.

Jo sat there for a while, staring out the window and mulling over the events of the night, and then left. There was really nothing more to say, anyway. As she exited the apartment and left to find a waiting taxi, she never noticed Cal hidden behind a bush on the front lawn, silently weeping.

Through his tear-streaked eyes, Cal watched the taxi drive slowly away. He stood up and looked around. He brushed the leaves off of him and went back into his apartment silently.

After that, he called her the following Monday.

“Hi.” His voice was weak and had none of his customary enthusiasm.

“Hi, Are you OK?” “Yeah. I could have gone to the hospital, but I can’t afford that.”

“Oh.” “You know, I don’t blame you if you never want to see me again, but I just wanted to apologize…for that.”

“You made a mistake. It’s OK. Not the end of the world.”

‘Well, it felt like it. Anyway, thanks for not letting me die. I’m sorry I went and hid on you, but I just couldn’t deal with anymore.”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“So for our second date, how about you puke all over me? It’s only fair.”

Jo laughed at that, but they never did have that second date. She really liked him, but just couldn’t move past that. Something happens to a man whom a woman sees at their most vulnerable, and part of him dies. He was never really the same after the incident. Eventually, he quit his job as teller, gave up his flat and moved back to America to work for his dad selling trailers.

When she discovered from a friend of hers that Cal had gone abroad, she was surprised at first, but gradually saddened the more she thought of it. Why didn’t she try to stop him? Why couldn’t she move past it? She just gave up the nicest, cutest guy who had treated her better than anyone she’d ever been with. And it was too late.

He was another phantom of her past, moving in circles she would never see.

Cal thought about her a lot back at his parents’ house, a lot. She was the one that got away, always and forever in his mind. He sometimes wondered how things would have gone if maybe he had one less drink. If he would have remembered that he’d already taken a shot, and what would have happened. He’s sure they would have had sex, that much seemed a given.

He thought maybe God was punishing him for doing….what? Going to a gay bar?

Dating a black girl? There were people in his own family who would have told him he was going to hell for doing either. He didn’t know. Did it matter? She was there and he was here. An OK, average life. That’s what he had. It wasn’t so bad, he was certainly secure, and that was more than most people ever got. He guessed he should be grateful for what he had been given.

But sometimes at night, asleep, he would hear the call of the bears, the pounding of furry limbs and the warmth and sheer overwhelming love, of such ferocity that it scared him. They called to him from their deep forest in the darkest part of the woods, with the honeyed sweetness of their siren song, beckoning to come back and dance his happiest dance for them.

Molly’s Flashback Molly had never had much luck in her life with father figures. Her real father, if you could call him that, she never really knew. He had left when she was still an infant, unwilling to become a father. There weren’t even any pictures of him that she had ever seen; her mother had destroyed them long ago. Then had followed a succession of men her mother started to date, none lasting more than a few weeks or so. They would try to make chitchat with her, bring her dolls and toys, and attempt to ingratiate their way into her affections. None of their efforts worked. She had grown to understand that they would be replaced, ultimately, by the next buck down the line, so why bother growing attached to any of them?

When Gary came into the picture when she was 14, her mother expressly told her in one of her rare moments of clarity that things were different now.

‘This fella is for keeps. I can feel it. So you two had better get along, because he’s not going anywhere. “ She lit the cigarette that was dangling haphazardly from her lips.

“Where’d you pick this one up?” she sneered. Usually she found whatever guys were hanging around the bar or the bowling alley.

“We met at church,” her mother said haughtily, trying to make the word church sound as impressive as possible.

“When’s the last time you went to church?” Her mother usually spent her Sunday mornings hung over on the couch, wearing an eye mask and swearing at her whenever she entered the room.

“Just last week, thank you very much. Some girls from work invited me to their study group.” This was not good news. Her mother was already fairly unstable and detached from reality. The last thing she needed at this point was to become a Biblethumper, that would really send her over the edge.

“And this guy was at church?” She made a skeptical face. This sounded like one of her mother’s many invented stories, like the men from the IRS that stole her shoes.

“Yes, he was sitting in the pew across from me. And this is a true gentleman. I know,” she said, her eyes filling with tears of self-pity, “that sometimes I haven’t had the best judgment in men. But this is for real, I can just tell.”

Her new boyfriend showed up for dinner the following day. Gary was a stocky, balding man in an ill-fitting polyester leisure suit. He looked like an alcoholic high school gym teacher, which she was not surprised to discover was exactly what he was.

“So your mother tells me that it’s your birthday next week,” he said between mouthfuls of food.

“Yes.” She braced herself for the disappointment to come.

“We would like to take you to Six Flags next week, for your birthday.”

Despite her best efforts, she was excited to hear this. Molly loved rollercoasters or anything exciting like that, and had always wanted to go. She had begged her mother many times in the past, but was always turned down. She knew instinctively that the only reason she was going to go this time was an effort by her mom to smooth things over about this new man, to make everything all hunky dory, happy family.

She didn’t give a shit. She was going to Six Flags come hell or high water.

The day of her birthday, she happily got in the car with her mother and the man she was supposed to call “Dad”. Gary still gave her the creeps, for some reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on. This was not unusual, as she felt the same thing about each of her mother’s beaus, and was proved right each and every time. Still, she thought maybe this time it would be different. She held out that vague hope even though her instincts were telling her the complete opposite.

They headed out on the highway, and as her mom turned on the radio and started to sing tunelessly along, she slipped her Walkman headphones over her ears and turned

it up to the maximum volume. She stared out the window at the brown featureless farmland whizzing by her window. She couldn’t wait until she got old enough so she could get the fuck out of this nothing place. She would show all of them at school, and everyone who ever said anything bad about her. She was someone special, and she was busting to prove it. There was nothing for her here, couldn’t her mom see that? Of course not, she was too drunk to see her hand in front of her face most days.

Her mom and stepdad were singing along loudly now to the oldies station, really getting into it, Gary taking the backing “da da da” vocal while her mom stepped fearlessly into the lead. Some lame old piece of crap from a million years ago, probably the Beatles or someone worthless like that. What a bunch of idiots, she thought. Look how pathetic they are. I’d kill myself if I ever turned out like that. She bitterly turned her face away from them and back to the passing beige landscape. A billboard informed her that they were now only a mere two exits from Buffalo Bill’s souvenir shop. The billboard featured an ancient, weathered caricature of an Indian making a benevolent gesture of offering to the grateful white man. If it could have talked, it probably would have said “How.” She sneered at it until it passed from view.

They arrived at a Holiday Inn several hours later, and Molly anxiously got out of the car to stretch her legs. They would call it a day before heading off to the amusement park in the morning. Gary made a show of carrying the bags up to their rooms while her mother gave her assurances of her safety.

“Now we’re going to be in the room right next door, so if anything happens, you know where we are.” She tried to make a motherly face of concern.

“What’s going to happen?” she scoffed.

“You never know.” Her mom left the room and shut the door.

She sat there cross-legged on the bed, staring at the Johnny Carson repeat on the TV. She could hear giggling from the other side of the wall. If she had to listen to the two of them fuck all night she was seriously going to lose it.

She thought she had some pills in her purse still. Maybe she could just knock herself out until tomorrow. She opened it up and dug through the various layers of trash to produce a healthy looking Quaalude that Mexican guy had given her. She filled a plastic cup with water and knocked it back. Fifteen minutes later she was out cold on the bed.

In what seemed like the very next moment, her mother was pounding on the door.

“Time to get up, honey. We’re leaving in 20 minutes. We have a schedule to keep, you know.” The television was still on and blaring the early morning news at her uncomprehending head.

Molly peeled her face up off the bedspread slowly and wiped the drool from her face.

A schedule? she groggily thought. That must have been Gary’s influence. Her mother certainly didn’t operate under any schedule, except the drink specials for her favorite bar.

The shower she had then was one of the best showers she had ever had. The streams of water were like magic fingers urging her awake. She was still a bit sluggish but she had just had the best sleep of her entire life. She emerged to see her parents nervously hovering, cameras on hand. Her mom smelled like booze already.

Gary gave her a bear hug from behind and yelled, “Happy Birthday, Birthday Girl!”

He smelled like cheap aftershave and cigarettes.

Molly recoiled a little but allowed him to complete the hug, which went on just a little longer than she was comfortable with. She really did want this to work. She had enough unpleasant memories, she was anxious to actively create a good one.

They left the hotel and headed out on the highway to the amusement park. Gary drove, while her mom drank steadily from a metal flask in her purse. Gary was ignoring this. By the time they got to the ticketing gate, her mom was unsteady on her feet. It was ten minutes after nine.

“You go off and have fun, honey. We’ll be here.” Her mom sat down on a bench between some trees. She was disappointed that they weren’t coming with her, But she remembered the last time her mom had been with her at an amusement park, and the copious vomit she had spread all over the entire rollercoaster, and the aftermath of that- she could deal with being by herself. She didn’t need anyone to have fun; she could have excitement all by herself.

Molly headed off to the first rollercoaster she could find. There was a long line, and the people at the end of it were a group of teenagers, loudly chatting and attempting to draw attention to themselves in the way that only teenagers can. Two dark-haired girls were laughing and play-fighting with two grinning blond haired boys. They were dressed stylishly for the time, which meant the girls had huge hair and baggy Espirit sweatshirts with frosted jeans, and the boys were wearing Vuarnet sunglasses and polo shirts with Guess jeans and white tennis shoes. They had that look on their faces of unstressful joy, which only the very young or very stupid can maintain. They ignored her as she approached and loudly continued their conversation.

One of the dark-haired girls was yelling, “Aren’t you glad that Lisa didn’t come with us? That girl is disgusting. Her mom was trying to get her to come, and I told her, “It’s my birthday, and I get to pick who comes to my party.”

Her group agreed. “Yeah, she’s poor. She couldn’t even afford a decent pair of jeans.

I saw her wearing a pair of Wranglers.”

They all made disgusted noises and laughed. Some of the boys made barnyard animal noises.

The girl continued, “She sits behind me in Science class and I have to look at the back of her stupid head all the time. And she’s got about a million split ends.”

The other girl said, “Bobby, I’m going to dunk you when we get to the splash pool.”

He replied, “Not if I dunk you first!” and smacked her on the butt, causing her to squeal in mock protest.

Molly stood there motionless, looking at their perfect tan bodies and their perfect white smiles. It was clear to anyone watching that these kids had never had to work for anything a day in their lives, or ever had any suffering cross their paths. They were perfect golden ciphers, with their whole lives laid out before them for the taking.

She felt an aching in her heart watching them, knowing that she could never, ever be like them no matter what she did. She could never possibly be that carefree and unconcerned. She bet that none of these kids had ever had to put their drunken mother to bed after she had passed out at the kitchen table, or watch their mom’s boyfriend OD from a bad batch of meth on her couch. They were the same species but lived in different universes, and the knowledge of that wore on her and made her feel extremely self-conscious.

Molly got into her seat and watched the metal bar come down in front of her. The rollercoaster started its ascent and she looked out onto the grounds below. She could see her mom and Gary down where she had left them. They were sloppily kissing.

She shook her head angrily and looked the other way, out into the parking lot.

Gradually the car got high enough so the cars looked like models and the people busily milling about looked like ants. She liked this feeling of being above it all, looking down. It gave her a sense of satisfaction that she couldn’t quite describe.

The car reached the apex of its height and started to careen down the track. Screams were filling the air. She couldn’t figure out why people screamed on these things.

You were on a track, inside a metal cage with a bar protecting you. It wasn’t like the car was suddenly going to detach itself from the track and go flying off into the parking lot. She felt safer in rollercoasters than she did in most places.

She felt the breeze in her face as the car accelerated towards the bottom. For a moment she closed her eyes and forgot everything: her drunk mom, her idiot stepfather, and the boys who told her that they loved her but treated her like crap and wouldn’t return her calls. Then the car slid to a halt and it was all back again.

Molly looked at her roll of tickets and decided that she would take another ride.

About an hour later, when she had been on several different rides, she headed off in search of her parents. She found Gary sitting alone on a park bench.

“Your mom wasn’t feeling well, so she went back to the room.” She knew what that meant, her mom had passed the point where it was acceptable for her to be in public and Gary had dumped off her drunken ass to go sleep it off. He looked at her expectantly.

“So it’s just you and me?” She sat down on the bench. This is what she had been afraid of.

“Looks like it. Let’s talk for a minute.”

Gary cleared his throat and began to speak. “I like your mother a lot and I want you to like me too. I bet that we could get to be friends if you gave me a shot.” He scooted to her closer, and extended his arm around her. His hand brushed her breast and paused on there for a moment.

“Good friends. Special friends.” He gave her breast a squeeze with his thumb and finger. His face locked into a disgusting leer.

Molly recoiled and twisted his arm up in hers sharply. He yowled in pain and released his grip.

“Listen, you asshole, try that again and I’ll fucking break it. You get me?”

He nodded through gritted teeth. She released his arm and ran off.

“Hey, come back here!” he yelled, But she was already gone, lost in the growing crowd.

She ran, and didn’t care where she was running, just as long as it was away from Gary. She knew it; her mom had picked another molesting freak. Why was it always this way? Why couldn’t she have normal parents like those kids in the line, who were sober in the morning and always showed up for the school play, and never brought creepy strangers home who wanted to fuck her?

She wandered around until she found herself back at the same rollercoaster. She rode the coaster until all her tickets were gone, and then wandered back towards the hotel.

She could only imagine what was waiting for her.

Molly knocked on the door and her mother answered, looking somewhat more lucid.

There was the smell of fresh coffee inside.

“Hello, dear.” she said. “Did you have a good time?”

‘Uh, yeah.” Molly said uncertainly. Gary stood in the corner of the room, eying her suspiciously.

“That’s good.” Her mom took a deep slurp of coffee. ‘Gary tells me that you and he are getting along well.”

Gary shot her a look that said, “Nod your head and agree.”

She nodded her head. “Yes. We had a good conversation. I think we understand each other now.” She shot him back a look that said, “Try that again and you’re dead.”

Her mom laughed. “Well, now, isn’t this something. A happy family, all together in the same room. “ She stood up and walked to the table by the window and opened a small box. ‘We got you a birthday cake.” The cake was small and white, with no decorations or candles. It looked like they had drove to the closest grocery store they had seen and bought the first cake that had met their eyes.

“Let’s sing the birthday song,” her mom said as she handed her a piece of cake.

They did, and she sat down eating her cake. Gary did the same, on the opposite side of the room, avoiding her look.

“Now me and Gary are going out tonight, so you have the room to yourself. Order yourself some room service, and maybe rent a movie or something. We won’t be back early.” She let out a sly giggle. This turned her stomach into a sour pit of nausea.

“So have fun tonight, dear. We have to check out by 10, so have your things ready in the morning to go.”

She went back to her suite. So that was the plan, huh? They were going to go out and get tanked, while she was here all by herself in the hotel? She didn’t think so. She was going to go have some fun, too. She was going to pick up a man tonight, she decided.

She knew that she would have to look as old as possible, so she layered on the makeup and wore the one nice dress she had brought on the off-chance that she would go somewhere nice. She spent a good hour and a half working on her look. Then she tottered off to the hotel bar, anxious to find some excitement.

It was dimly lit when she entered, and she had to squint her eyes to adjust to the low light. There was a stage at the far end of the room where a dispirited looking band was dutifully trudging through some soft cocktail jazz. There was a thick low-lying cloud of cigarette smoke covering the room. She approached the bar and tried to convey an image of adult sophistication.

“A Banana daiquiri, please.” She tossed her head to let her hair sweep back dramatically. This was a move she had practiced in the mirror many times after seeing it in an old movie.

The bartender didn’t even look up. “Comin’ right up!”

She sat down on the brown vinyl barstool and surveyed the room. There was a kind of Polynesian theme going on, with garish wallpaper and some surfboards bolted to the wall. All the servers were wearing Hawaiian shirts. There weren’t any cute looking guys, just some glum looking businessmen and overweight secretaries. A thick air of desperation permeated the room like year-old fryer grease.

Her drink arrived and she quickly started to down it. It was sweet and smooth and she couldn’t taste the liquor. She finished it and ordered another one, paying with the birthday money her grandmother had given her.

After the second one was downed, a man sat down on the stool next to her.

“Hey, sweet thing. Can I buy you a drink?” He grinned. He was in his mid-forties, wearing a polyester business suit. She smelled thick aftershave on him and his breath was thick with bourbon. She looked down at his scuffed shoes.

“OK,” she said. Nothing else looked like it was likely to happen.

‘What are you doing all alone?” he asked. “A pretty thing like you.”

“I’m here with my family, but they went off and left me here. It’s supposed to be my birthday party.” She frowned and tried to look sad.

“Oh? Well, happy birthday!” He raised his glass in a toast.

“Happy birthday,” she repeated, clinking her glass to his.

“You know, you have really pretty eyes,” he said, inching his stool closer to hers.

‘Really?” she giggled. “No one ever told me that before.” She knew some flattery was required here.

“Well, it’s true. You know, I travel around a lot- I’m a salesman for an industrial refrigeration service, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite as lovely a pair of eyes as

yours.” It was a lame-ass, tired come-on line, but she was lonely and soaked it in as devoutly as if it had come from the lips of Jesus.

Several drinks and rounds of compliments later, he asked to come see her room.

Molly was feeling confident and in charge and knew this guy wanted her. They breathlessly tumbled into the room and she fell on the bed. He threw his coat on the floor and jumped on the bed. They laughed.

“Mmm, baby, I want to get in you. Come on, take off that dress.” He fumbled for his belt and removed it, throwing his pants to the ground.

She laughed and unzipped her dress, almost tripping over her own legs in the process.

She stood there in her panties and bra, yelling “Ta-da!”

“Oh baby, you look good. Come here.” He gestured her over to the bed.

Molly followed, unhooking her bra as she went. She threw it and it landed on the lampshade, dangling there uncertainly like a question mark.

He grabbed her and buried his head in her breasts. “Oh yeah…. Oh my God.” “Mmm.” She reached down and pulled down his underwear and felt his crotch. His member responded to her touch.

He yelped. “Oh my God, I got to be in you right now or I’m going to fucking explode.”

He roughly flipped her over on the bed and entered her. She moaned in surprise.

“Oh yes, yes, that’s a tight little pussy. Oh God, that feels great.” He started to thrust faster and harder. She grimaced with every jab.

Molly felt the full weight of his body bear down on her, smelled his body odor and felt the coarse hair of his chest brush against her body. The stab of pain between her legs increased a little and she had to hear it, right then.

‘Tell me I’m special,” she yelled, from beneath him.

He grunted. “What?”

“Tell me I’m special. Tell me I’m special!” she screamed.

“Oh, you’re special baby, you’re so special. “ He was thrusting as fast as he could now.

“I’m special,” she repeated to herself.

“Uhhhhggg!” he yelped, and came into her. He exhaled and rolled over to his side.

“Oh baby, that was nice. So nice.” She lie there motionless. Not her best, but a little more efficient that the boys at school. At least this guy knew what he was doing.

The man glanced at his watch. “Baby, that was great. I’d love to hang around and celebrate your birthday, but I got to get going.”

“You have to go already? “ “My wife is going to wonder where I am. I don’t want to be in the doghouse,” he said, putting his pants and shoes back on.

“You have a wife? You didn’t say anything about that.” She looked down at the floor.

“Yeah, it can be a bit of a deal-breaker.” He stood up off the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “But you were sweet, baby. Happy Birthday.”

He left the room without saying another word, and the door swung shut behind him.

Molly lie there on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She felt the urge to cry but pressed it down and it soon passed. She dug some cigarettes from the bottom of her purse and lit one up, exhaling slowly. She bit her bottom lip.

She dialed the phone by the bed. No answer. Her mom was still out getting drunk with Gary. She had no idea where they were. She looked at the clock. It was only 9:45. She looked back in the purse. After much effort, she found another Quaalude at the bottom of the bag. She swallowed it and turned on the TV. Nothing was on. She watched talking heads make incomprehensible statements about subjects she knew nothing about. As she fell into unconsciousness she heard the voices surround her and protect, all whispering into her ear that she was the most special one of all.

Pete’s Flashback Flashbacking to the time when they were together was not hard, since Pete perpetually half lived in that world. It wasn’t like he was the happiest then, more like someone held up happiness next to him, and through comparison he could discern what it looked like.

In college, he had ended up cooking at a local café and made a circle of good friends.

Into this mix came a tall, beefy, curly haired lad that we will call Steve. He had just moved back to the city after getting divorced. The owner knew his ex-wife well, and perhaps took pity on him by hiring him.

The kitchen crew was your usual mix of malcontents and dreamers, united only in the commonality of all kitchen crews, in that they like to drink and smoke pot. Preferably on the job. A plastic 40 oz cup was the perfect place to keep your beer, and the walkin cooler (or failing that and depending on the weather, the gap Between the kitchen and the exterior garage) was the perfect place to smoke a little weed out of a hastily carved potato. Such was the only way to deal with kitchen stress brought on by over demanding vegans and students.

The new guy was different. For one, he was a staunch Christian, although he wasn’t the type to try and convert you. He just had been raised that way all his life, and at 22 and recently divorced, had never had anyone challenge his fundamental assumptions about life. He’d never smoked pot either, or been around drugs in any form, or been friends with anyone who wasn’t a white Christian.

Clearly it was time for some kind of trial by fire.

Steve started working on a Monday night, and was put in the care of my buddy Jim and myself, who virtually lived in the place. Well, our apartment was just around the corner, and there was a bar attached to the restaurant, so there was little need for us to migrate.

Jim started it out. “You see, we have to break you in because you’re a new cook. It’s an initiation.”

“OK, what do I have to do?” He was tentative, But ready to fit in. After the divorce, part of him had changed. He was beginning to question things a bit. He’d thought God’s plan had been for him to marry his girlfriend right out of high school and start a life together. When he caught her in bed with their youth pastor, he realized he’d been completely wrong about that. He wondered how many other things he was wrong about.

“Come in the walk-in with us and smoke this.” Jim pulled out a fat joint from his shirt pocket. Steve’s eyes widened like saucers.

“Gee, I’ve never smoked pot before.” He nervously tented his fingers together.

“Oh, don’t be such a pussy. If you want to survive here, you had better get used to it.

Cooks thrive on it.”

I smacked him on the back. “Come on, dude, it’ll be fine.”

Steve finally decided after some soul-searching, that it would be OK. I stressed to him that this was something natural, that God had placed upon the Earth to be used. (I didn’t believe in the existence of God, but this was hardly the time to bring that up.)

“God put this here on the Earth for me and you. Are you calling God a liar?” That was the closer.

At our break while Jim watched over the front, Steve and me smoked in the cooler, leaning against the beer kegs. I had fashioned a pipe out of a potato and some tinfoil in the time honored stoner tradition and Steve was merrily puffing away at it.

At first, he kept saying he didn’t feel a thing. But by the sixth or seventh go-round, he had got a visit from the giggly fairy. He laughed at a jar of mayo. “Ha! That’s the biggest jar of mayo I’ve ever seen in my life.” He hooted at an avocado. He guffawed hysterically at the growing pile of dirty dishes. It was a high-pitched, squeaky kind of laugh too. His eyes were the color of pimentos, and he looked like an unhinged maniac.

Jim came back in from bussing the front tables and took a good look at the raving and drooling Steve.

“Damn man, you baked! You better just wash dishes, Steve, you too messed up to handle cutlery and the grill.” Steve wandered over to the bus tubs, giggling insanely at everything that passed in his way.

I walked over to the stereo and the small, greasy box of cassette tapes we kept by it.

Music is very important to a line cook, it puts a sense of rhythm in your movements, and helps keep your sanity on a busy line. It can also come in handy for annoying customers with. If you are trying to close, and there is a group of Bible-thumpers drinking coffee and gabbing about how way cool Jesus is that refuse to leave, for instance, I recommend playing Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality at top volume. Or some Slayer, preferably Reign In Blood if you can find it. They will not come back.

But they won’t tip you anyway, so who gives a flying fuck? What are they going to do, report me to God? Go ahead.

“Our little boy is baked. First timer. No Dead or Phish crap for you, B, we’re going to dig out the good stuff.” I couldn’t fucking stand the Dead or Phish, But I was alone in this regard. That’s Colorado for you, I suppose. Jam-band heaven, and every throwback stoned hippie with access to an acoustic guitar thinks they can play. After some fruitless pawing, I found my prey- a black tape with glowering skulls drawn on it in silver pen. ‘Time for the killer comp. Best mix ever.” I held it up proudly for all to see.

Jim clapped. “Yeah! The ultimate mix. Oh, man! You called it. This is gonna blow your mind wide open, Steve.”

I explained to a bewildered Steve “You see, it’s the ultimate mix. Can’t play it too much, but every now and again. you can get a little taste. Don’t want to overplay the magic.” I slipped the tape into the player and pressed the grease-covered volume buttons up as far as they would go.

I was responsible for the creation of the ultimate mix. I was a DJ on the college station and had a huge collection of vinyl and CD’s, and fancied myself quite the music snob. It was relatively easy in a town that had never really progressed musically beyond 1976. The tape itself was inspired by a heady amount of booze, pot, and boredom. Sometimes you make a mix of songs, and it just has a natural flow, sense of transition and groove- this was that tape. It started out slow with an old scratchy Flaming Lips song from my vinyl collection, you could hear the hiss and ticking pops of the record. But those actually became part of the song in a way. The song was called “Ode to CC”, and was a mellow little head cleaner before venturing into the bulk of songs. That is the unknown immutable secret to mix tapes- start out with a short, obscure song before entering the body of the mix proper. This throws the listener off balance and leaves them unsure what to expect. Other unwritten rules of mix tapes: you cannot have the same band on the same tape twice, or it’s not a mix tape. Sorry, but these are the rules. Tapes like that aren’t mixes, just random clumps of songs. You should also start with slower songs, peak with the fastest tracks about two-thirds of the way in, and slow again for the last two or three songs. It’s amazing the amount of people that don’t know this stuff.

Steve turned his head as the music filled the room, cocking his head like a dog listening to a faraway whistle. He had never really listened to a lot of music growing up- his parents were very strictly religious and never would have allowed it. The most he heard was maybe some Christian rock, which he never really liked but pretended to because his friends were all into it, and some Bob Dylan, which was apparently OK because he had converted to Christianity. He liked Dylan, but thought the older, less preachy folk was Better than the more didactic gospel stuff, which was just flat out boring.

But this music he was hearing now…this was something else entirely. It was akin to living your whole life inside a brick, windowless, featureless building for years and years, until one day a crane knocks one of the walls down. Suddenly, you can see the green grass and blue sky of the outdoor world, you can hear strange birds wheeling in the fresh air, and feel the heat of the sunbeams coasting down on you from above.

And the world is fresh and new and vast and untamed and you wonder to yourself, “Why the fuck was I even in that building?”

“What is this song called?” Steve yelled out, his hands buried in filthy gray water thick with suds and dissolving food particles.

“This is “Rudie Can’t Fail”, by the Clash.” I yelled from behind the ice machine.

Five minutes later, he called out again.

“This is “Summertime Rolls,” by Jane’s Addiction.” I grunted from inside the walkin as I tried to hoist out a replacement keg.

This went on, song by song, until finally Pete gave up answering him and pointed him in the direction of the track listing. He dried off his hands and studied the battered case like it was some ancient runic text that needed parsing.

“Hey Steve, “ I yelled, “ When you’re done with that can you go bus some tables?”

We were starting to get busy again and there was a line of smelly hippies growing longer by the minute. I should make note of the fact here that our café had an attached stage room where we often had bands play. Most of these were either jam bands or bluegrass bands, both genres I loathed intently. There was a band playing that night called, I shit you not, Granola Funk Express. Their name alone made me want to round up all the musicians and strangle them with piano wire. But their fans were something much, much worse. If you could imagine the sort of person that would willingly pay money to see something called “Granola Funk Express”, multiply that by an obnoxiousness factor of ten.

And then, the singer was standing there, in all his patchouli-reeking glory, in my kitchen. Barefoot, I might add. His dreadlocks tumbled down past his shoulders, covering his vintage tie-dye. He had a look of stupefaction coating his smug, pugnosed face, and bloodshot eyes that hinted he was medicinally altered.

“Hey dude, I’m with the band. You saw our order right?” I wanted to reel back and punch this dreaded douche bag. Of course I saw your order. I saw your smug, pussy face walk up to the counter and order. I saw the kitchen printer cough up your ticket.

Of course I saw the order. But with hippies, what he was asking wasn’t the real story; there was always something else they were angling for. They were masters at getting something for nothing, or as it used to be called, the grift.

“I just wanted to ask if, you know, you could make those Tempe Burgers, like, extra fat?” He grinned and revealed his yellow furry teeth.

“What does that mean?” I stared at him impassively with dead eyes. I wasn’t hip to the hippie lingo and resented when people threw it at me expecting reciprocation. Do I fucking look like a dude? I’m from Nebraska, for fuck’s sake.

“Y’ know, hook us up with some extra stuff, maybe throw some avocado on there?”

There it was. “I want you to give me something for free because I said so.”

Assessing the situation, I decided that giving this gasbag what he wanted would get him out of the kitchen quicker.

‘Whatever you say, dude. But you have to go. You can’t be in the kitchen barefoot.”

“Cool beans, Bra.” He attempted some complicated hipster handshake, which I faked my way through.

He left, whistling some granola little tune as he went, trailing stink behind him.

I tapped Steve on the shoulder. “You see that guy?”

He nodded his head yes.

“That’s what happens when you smoke too much pot, and you don’t have a job Because your parents pay for everything. You become a simple-minded jerk-off who thinks the world will provide everything you need. You quit washing and bathe only in patchouli and start smelling like ass, feet, and patchouli. Pot is a wonderful thing, Steve, but remember, everything in moderation. Don’t turn into that guy, whatever you do.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. He smelled like my dog’s basket.”

I laughed at that. “Good one, Steve. You’re a funny guy.” I slapped him on the back, and the contact was nice. I felt the strength of his back and shoulders and was a little surprised at how muscled they were. I didn’t want to take my hand away.

After we closed up the café that night, Steve came along with Jim and me to our apartment for a few beers. He essentially never left after that point, only really leaving to pick up his stuff and dump it in his new room. We all bonded pretty well that first night, Steve getting tits-up drunk and regaling us with stories of his time spent in the Marines and Bible Camp.

“Which was tougher?” I asked him.

“Bible Camp, definitely. Those nuns will fuck you up.” He told us one tale of a Sister Bernice who left red welts across his hands with her ruler that was hysterically funny and sad at the same time. Preacher’s sons know how to tell the best stories.

He was working through some ideas about his religious underpinnings. Some guy had come into the café and left a book about Zen Buddhism, which Steve devoured eagerly. We had daily philosophical discussions about free will and the nature of evil and good. I liked to argue that people were inherently evil and selfish while Steve took the opposite tack. He was fundamentally positive about the world where I was fundamentally cynical, as was the fashion at the time.

None of the three of us had a car, so if we wanted to go anywhere we generally had to walk. Public transit in out little college town was a joke. We eventually moved away from the café to cheaper digs on the far end of town, which meant that we had more room, but were now out on in the middle of nowhere. It came to about a four-mile walk for us to work, which we did daily 5 days a week (sometimes 6).

We usually took frequent detours and shortcuts as we learned the optimal, quickest path to and from there. This involved cutting through a playground, a park, and a cemetery. The cemetery was about two blocks from our apartment, which was the marker we used to say that we were almost there.

It was pretty secluded on these walks. This was a place with wide, tree-lined streets, where people were home from work by 6 and in bed by 9. There was no foot traffic and the path on the second half of the walk didn’t have many streetlights, either. It was usually dark and quiet.

I knew I was attracted to Steve from the moment that I met him, But I became quite fond of him on these walks home. We would be discussing our latest philosophical discussion- he turned out to be a philosophy major, that most fatally unemployable of career paths- but all I would really be thinking of is covering his body with mine in a long, slow embrace, and falling down to the ground, rolling through the crunchy orange leaves.

Back in those days I knew I was gay, but miles away from admitting it to anyone. I was a pretty manly acting guy anyway, not given to overtly flamboyant displays, so no one suspected, or in any case the subject was never broached. I had not yet acted upon these desires, just a series of masturbatory fantasies that were just so much vapor. I certainly didn’t know that Bears existed and I was one at this point.

Steve fit the bill for everything I would have wanted in a lover. Tall, bearded, burly and handsome, he was also thoughtful and kind and intelligent. He was also straight, which was the main sticking point. Like so many things in this life, there was a catch.

As it grew closer to Christmas, Jim and Steve decided to go out of town for the holiday on a trip. Steve wasn’t speaking to his family at the moment, and Jim’s didn’t really take Christmas all that seriously (they considered Thanksgiving the bigger holiday, which would have rendered my relatives red with apoplexy) so they got tickets to San Diego.

“Why are you going out there?” I asked them on the line one night.

“Never been there before. Got round trip tickets real cheap.” Good enough reason, I supposed.

I wished I could have gone with them, But I was locked into plans to be with my family in Nebraska. There was no getting out of it. I had already bought nonrefundable tickets, and as I had missed the previous year due to bad weather, not being there would have broken my mother’s heart.

When they got back in January, they looked tan and exhausted, but clearly eager to tell everyone about their trip. Everyone crowded around them in the kitchen.

“How was it?” Wendy, the newest and cutest cashier asked.

“Fucking crazy,” Jim said. “Steve said he knew these people out there we could stay with but they weren’t there. So we had to go sleep on the beach all week.”

“Just like being in Hawaii,” Steve said. “Didn’t even need blankets.”

“So you went cross country to do that? You could have slept in the park for free here.” I scoffed.

‘Well, we walked all over the place during the day. We brought back all kinds of pictures.” Steve tossed a package of photos onto the counter.

“Yeah, and get this, “ Jim said excitedly. “We ended up at this gay bar on Christmas drinking 40’s cause that’s the only place we could find that was open that wasn’t a Chinese restaurant. So we head in their and its packed, right, with this like weird Euro dance music playing. And these two big hairy dudes are making out on the seat right next to us. I mean, full-on going for it, tongues and everything. And Steve says, have you ever wanted to experiment, you know, with a guy?”

I nodded my head. Where was this going? I didn’t like it, wherever it was headed.

“So I said, sure, whatever you know? I mean, can’t say that I never thought about it.

So we kiss right there in the bar. Full on, you know? Tongue and all.”

I felt like I was going to pass out, but stood there regardless. This news was like being smacked in the nuts with a hammer, while the guy who hits you stands there and smiles at you expectantly, as if waiting for a tip.

“And it was…OK, I guess. Wouldn’t want to do it again. I didn’t really feel anythingyou know, there were no bells and whistles going off or rockets flying.”

Steve smiled, replaying the moment in his head.

“Our beards got tangled up. It was very scratchy. But now we can say we did it, right?” They laughed heartily, recalling the moment.

I laughed, weakly. I knew there were no God and no justice in this miserable fucking world because if there had been, it would have been me and him kissing, and me and I wouldn’t have played it off as a joke. I would have made you like it. And it wouldn’t have stopped as a kiss, either. You can be sure of that. I would have made that man feel things that he never felt were possible before. I would have given him carte blanche to do absolutely anything he wanted to do to me. I could not have refused that beautiful man a thing.

I couldn’t think about this right now. “Let’s see those pictures,” I said, desperate to change the subject to something, anything else.

“Oh, look at this one!” Jim said. “This is that same day, after we left the bar, we found that church with the crack alley behind it, that we smoked that bowl in? That was crazy. We’re hiding out behind this church, trying to smoke somewhere out of sight, and this priest sees us and invites us in.”

“What?” I said, trying to keep the story going, “Yeah, I guess he felt sorry for us. We told him the whole story and he lets us sleep in the church that night. I mean, it wasn’t too bad on the beach, But you know, it was Christmas. He let us sleep in the chapel. It was super cool, all old oak wood and huge stained glass panels. And gave us some bread and cheese, too. Nice guy.”

“He probably thought you were two homeless dudes.” I said, petulantly.

“Well, we basically were.”

The owner came down from his upstairs office then and saw the pictures on the table.

“Hey, you guys are back! How was the trip?”

“Pretty crazy, dude.” said Jim. A man of few words.

“Wow. Reminds me of Spring Break 1980, when I met Jimmy Buffett.”

The owner was always trying to ingratiate himself into our conversations, usually with some story about how he did some stupid drunken thing and slept with some random girl. We must have heard about the time he had margaritas with Jimmy Buffet at least 50 times (and the story changed a little bit each time.)

He was an interesting, complicated man. He’d moved to Colorado from Connecticut in the early 80’s and bought this place. His parents were disgustingly rich, which kept the café afloat a few times in the lean months. He had many interests, like mountain climbing, camping, rafting, skiing, snowboarding- all the stuff people come to the state to do. Aside from the first two, I had done none of that stuff. I was really a flatlander at heart.

What he didn’t realize is that his efforts were totally wasted on the likes of us. He was a nice enough guy, but he wanted to be more of a friend than a boss, and that is always a problematic arrangement. Plus, he simply tried way too hard to impress us, and we were jaded, cynical Gen- X’ers. We don’t respond to stimuli like that. We can sniff out when someone is putting way too much effort into something- and we don’t like it. Being cool is something you shouldn’t have to try to be- you simply are, or you are not. Much like being a Bear.

He started chatting up Jim, and Steve and I quietly snuck out the back for a break.

There was a gap between two of the exterior buildings where we sometimes snuck bowls. There was no one outside now. I crouched down in the dirt, with my head in my knees, and closed my eyes. I could see Jim kissing Steve, see their lips meet and connect. I cried, for a good five minutes or so, and then went back inside.

We had some good times together, the three of us, but I was always drawn closer to Steve than Jim. We just instantly got each other and would often finish each other’s sentences. We were practically inseparable for several months. The bartender mentioned once that she thought the two of us were joined at the hip as she always saw us together. If only we had actually been physically fused together at the hip.

That would have been fine with me- sharing the same body.

And then the cracks started to form. Steve’s libido got the better of him and he started to become interested in dating one of the cashiers. I could not figure out what he saw in this girl, and to be honest, I still don’t. She was a shorthaired Ani-DiFranco listening loudmouth with a temper and an ability to drink that rivaled most grown men.

Her name was Karen, and she sidled up to me after work one day in the bar.

“Hey.” She offered me a weak little smile and sat down in the booth across from me.

She stared at me, obviously expecting me to say something.

I had just been sitting there uneventfully reading my Lester Bangs book and nursing a lukewarm Greyhound. Steve wasn’t there that day; it was one of the rare occasions Jim and I closed. He was on the other side of the bar getting loaded with the Ultimate Frisbee team. They were all loudly and animatedly discussing the Broncos playoff chances that year. And as the cold Fat Tire flowed from glass to glass, the discussion was getting more animated by the minute.

“Hey, Karen, what’s up?” I belatedly replied.

She had a look of concern on her face that I had never seen before. This was the most thoughtful I had ever seen here. Usually she was screaming at the top of her lungs or cackling with delight. This threw me a bit. Clearly she wanted something from me, but what did I have that she wanted? Nothing came to mind.

“Do you think Steve likes me?”

Oh, there it was. Use me to get to him. I should have seen it coming. Well, guess what? He’s mine. Mine. Mine.

“I don’t have the slightest idea. Why don’t you ask him?” I took a long sip of my drink.

“Well, he’s not here.” She gestured along the length of the bar to illustrate this.

“He’ll be in tomorrow.” I turned the page of my book and tried to ignore her.

“I just….really think he’s cute and nice and I want to go out on a date with him.”

“Wow, a date? You sound very old-fashioned. “Care to go on a date with me, to the malt shop?” I said this last part in a cod-English accent. This was lost on her.

“I know, I don’t date a lot of guys…but I’m lonely.”

Sounded like bullshit to me. If she was really lonely, there were certain obvious remedies she could pursue. Breeders were so blind sometimes. Things were so fucking easy when everything can just be out in the open. I wish I had half the advantages she did.

“I’m sure he likes you. He likes everyone. And he is a nice guy.” What was I saying?

“Will you ask him when you see him?” she pressed. She was not going to let this drop, much to my chagrin.

“Look, I don’t want to get involved in this. If you like him, just call him and ask him.

I’m not a matchmaking service.”

“Yeah, But don’t you guys ever talk about girls? Does my name ever come up?”

It’s true, we did talk about girls, but it was a topic I always had to fake interest in.

Usually it was nothing more than “She’s hot” or “She has big tits.” I wondered about Karen. Did she have any real ideas about what guys were like? Did she think we all sat around in a sewing circle, playing Canasta? Guys don’t talk like that. Girls jabber and jabber endlessly about nothing. We only talk about things we consider important.

Like football. Football was very important. And beer. And weed. And also whatever video game we were playing at the moment. These were the supporting pillars of any proper conversation.

“We talk about a lot of things,” I said, trying to appear inscrutable.

She scoffed and huffily said, “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, he’s mentioned you before. He thinks you’re cute, but really loud.” How loud was she? One night in the bar, she and two of her friends had been so loud that people in an apartment building across the street had complained. This never happened, not

even when we had bands playing. She was louder than a Marshall stack at a Spinal Tap concert.

She glowed upon hearing this. It made me really sick to see. I had been fairly indifferent before, but now I found myself really actively hating this girl now. How dare she try to take my friend away from me? I knew it had to happen sooner or later, but why not later? He was all I had. I couldn’t conceive of his absence, and it made me feel sick to even try.

Everything he touched became sacred to me. The smell of his towel in the bathroom, covered with his heavy musk. The blanket he slept on. I couldn’t even sit on his side of the couch for fear of disturbing the crease his body had carved out. Anything that he came in contact with became imbued with his essence.

Sometimes, if he got home late, he would sleep on the couch, and I would head out there in the middle of the night, framed in the dim light, and just stand there listening to him snore and the odd little noises he would make. Sometimes he talked in his sleep, too. Just hearing those noises made me feel closer to him.

Soon enough he found out that she liked him, they went off on their first date. That night I was so despondent I drunk like a fool in the bar and set off home on foot by my own. I could barely see straight, but I had walked this path so often I could have done it with my eyes closed, which I did, in spots.

When I got to the cemetery, I lie down in the grass and fell to my knees, and was copiously sick. After that, I found a quiet spot where the headlights of the street couldn’t find and laid back, squinting up into the inky sky and the scattered stars.

There were no streetlights so you could see everything, stretching back as far as one could imagine. It made me feel like a tiny little dust mite floating in space.

I realized that this was the beginning of the end; this was just like what always happened. What always would happen. A girl would always worm in and take my friends away from me. Slowly at first, then eventually it was like they had always been there, and I was always on the outside, always waiting for a call, perpetually the third wheel. The polite little mouse, scraping around the edges of their golden and perfect relationship.

The only way I could see out of this was to admit that I had feelings for him. But that would only make things worse. Things would become way too awkward at work. My friends would feel like they had been had. This was a decent arrangement we had, and I didn’t want to fuck it up. That would have killed me.

Or maybe I should go out and try to meet some gay people? Well, I’d been down that road before. I went to the one gay bar in town once, a while ago. It was horrible. I was the heaviest guy there by far; everyone else was a clean-shaven buff little gym clone, with expensive clothes. The music was awful, the kind of empty-headed Top 40 fluff that Steve and I would have ridiculed mercilessly if we’d heard it on the radio. And Jesus, the cattiness. The drama. I don’t want any part of that bullshit. The whole night I drank by myself in a corner while the queens pranced around and made snide comments about me within my earshot. If the freaks and the outcasts don’t want me, where do I go?

I passed out on someone’s grave and woke up a few hours later, as the first rays of sunlight started to snake their way through the pine treetops. I unglued my face from the ground and walked the rest of the way home. My leg had fallen asleep so I had to drag it alongside me, tracing a clumsy arc through the dirt and grass as I stumbled down the early morning streets. Sparrows flitted through the trees above me, singing their simple songs of love to all that could hear them.

As I passed by Steve’s door, which was closed, I could hear snores from what sounded like two people inside. Great, so now she was here in the house. She had fastened her talons deep inside him and now she would never leave.

Was I being selfish? Of course I was. But what would you do? I needed him, desperately. I wasn’t thinking about what was good for him, only what I needed. But he had far more options than I did in this shitty little town. I had a goddam handicap and I needed all the help I could get.

We had arranged to get tickets for the Rage Against The Machine show that was coming to Red Rocks. At first, Steve was not a fan, but eventually the grind of working on the line in the kitchen had transformed him into a fan. It was the perfect music for working on a line in the kitchen- loud, angry and rebellious. When you were up to your ankles in tickets spitting out of a kitchen printer without end, and there’s a endlessly growing line outside that refuses to stop, filled with over privileged children and their idiot parents, complaining that they’ve been waiting five whole minutes for their order of ten different sandwiches, each marked with multiple red substitutions on the ticket, then a song whose chorus is “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” seems like the only appropriate response. All of their albums were staples around the kitchen, though we saved the first album for the direst of kitchen emergencies, as that was far and away the best one (and the angriest.) Nothing makes you fling orders out of a kitchen faster than unadulterated hostile energy. Say what you will, hippie, hate is a fantastic motivator.

Steve was beside himself with excitement the whole week before the concert. Then the day of, he stumbles outside of his room at 11 in the morning, wearing sunglasses to inform me that he was not going to be able to go.

“Why the fuck not?” I demanded. I could still hear Karen rustling around inside his room. No doubt this had something to do with her.

“Well, Karen brought me some mushrooms last night.” He muttered, sheepishly.

“You what?” I demanded.

There was a small and muffled giggle from somewhere inside of his room. Well, that had explained it. Soften him up with drugs and then fuck him. I couldn’t have thought of a better plan myself. In fact, I had come up with that plan. She had beaten me to the punch completely.

“No, no, it was great. It was a real amazing experience. I felt things that I’ve never felt before, it was like being born again.” He was still tripping, the bastard.

“Well, I know how you feel, but let me tell you, you weren’t born again, Ok? You didn’t time travel to the beginning of the universe to watch the Big Bang. You just

got really, really fucked up with your girlfriend, right? Now tell me why you can’t go see this show that you’ve been talking about for the last month.” I stood there fuming with anger and betrayal, waiting for an answer from him.

Steve clucked his tongue in disdain. “I didn’t think you’d understand. I am just too fragile right now to be confronted by so much hostility and anger. I just want to be around peaceful things.” It sounded, word for word, like something Karen would have told him to say, dripping with psychobabble buzzwords and cloying feminine sentiment.

“Do you realize what a fucking pussy you’re being right now? Did she tell you to say that shit?”

“Look, here’s the ticket. You can take someone else. Take Rob.” ‘Our boss? You want me to take the boss to a Rage Against The Machine concert?”

‘Well, he told me he likes them. And you can take his car, and give him the rest of these.” He held up some powdery fragments and stems of mushroom in a dirty plastic bag, and let them dangle there in the light.

I stood there for a minute, contemplating the possible ramifications of giving my boss mushrooms and taking him to a Rage Against The Machine concert. But since Jim was out of town, and I had no car, this seemed to be the only way that I was going to get to see them. So why the hell not, I decided. At the very least it would Be an entertaining story to tell my non-existent grandchildren.

So I went to the show with my boss, who had a fucking blast, dancing to every song and generally acting like the 25 year old he thought he was. When they did “Killing In The Name” he even dove into the mosh pit and escaped relatively unscathed. I was stone cold sober, and although the show was great, I couldn’t help thinking that this had to mark some kind of turning point. I was no longer Steve’s best friend. And our time alone together was coming to an end rapidly.

The day came when Karen asked him to move in with her. He accepted, and a week after that all his stuff was gone from the apartment and that was it. He moved into her tiny house and became foster father to her young daughter, which I suspect was really what she was looking for in the first place. The father had long ago absconded when he discovered that their drunken late night fling had ended up in a pregnancy.

He moved out of town, left no forwarding address and was never heard from again. I suppose I should have felt some sympathy for her at this situation but there was none in me. In fact, the further she took Steve away from me, the more intensely I despised her.

I started fantasizing of her painful death. I would imagine her body being riddled by a hail of bullets, or her being flattened by a runaway passing bus. I couldn’t have a conversation with her anymore without imagining twisting a knife into her back.

When I saw her face I imagined it pressed up closely against Steve, and I had difficulty looking at her. Steve noticed this and confronted me on it.

‘Don’t you like Karen?’ he asked me flat-out one night in the bar after a few beers and a round of tequila. He stared at me with a determined look that I was not used to seeing from him.

“I like her just fine. What the hell are you talking about?” Oh boy, here we go.

“She thinks that you don’t like her.” He took a tentative pull of his beer.

“Well, she’s your girlfriend, not mine. What does it matter what I think?”

“Because I want us all to be friends.” He said this like it was the simplest thing in the world. Christ, if he only knew how complex it really was.

I couldn’t tell him that there was no possible way that was going to happen. It was just a fundamental truth that I resented her existence, and nothing she could do (short of breaking up with Steve) was going to make me change my mind.

‘We are friends,” I finally said. “Tell her she’s being ridiculous. Of course I like her.”

He didn’t seem wholly convinced, But the answer made him drop the question for the moment, anyway. I was relieved not to have to discuss her anymore, but then the next week, the bottom finally fell out from underneath me.

Karen had decided that I needed to come over for dinner at their house. I was reluctant but accepted, just for a chance to see Steve. Karen fretted around the kitchen while the two of us smoked bowls in the living room and watched football. It was almost like the old days for a second, if I closed my eyes and ignored the fact that his girlfriend was hovering a mere fifty feet away from me.

Her cooking was awful, far too drenched in salt and spices to have any flavor. I said nothing and told her it was wonderful, of course. I was nothing if not diplomatic. She smiled proudly. I drank two full glasses of ice water in an attempt to wash the wretched taste from my mouth. Steve munched his food obliviously. Apparently he was already well acclimated to this poison.

I forced my way through dinner and on through the dessert, which was supposed to be chocolate cake but had the distinct look and consistency of a chocolate-flavored shoe.

Again, I was obliged to choke it back and marvel at its wonderful flavor, when I really wanted to spit it in her face.

After dinner, she and Steve sunk into the sofa in the living room and called me in there. I sat down in their uncomfortable wooden rocking chair. They looked at each other expectantly; like they had something important they were dying to tell me.

“We want you to be the first to know.” Karen said.

“Know what?” I tensed up.

“We’re moving to California. I have family out there we can live with for free, and Steve already has a job lined up out there.” She grinned. “We can live right by the beach, where it’s warm all the time. Isn’t that awesome?”

I said nothing, just stared straight ahead. I couldn’t move. What the hell was happening?

Steve cleared his throat. “Yeah, we’re going to finish out the last month on our lease and then go. It’s going to be a real adventure.” He nuzzled Karen’s neck as he said this, and she responded by laughing softly.

I still sat there, saying nothing. There were plenty of things that I could have said, but none of them would have been taken well. So this was it. This was how it all ended up. Booted to the curb, out of their perfect golden bubble.

“Congratulations.” I managed to croak out. I stood up and headed for the door. The walls felt like they were closing in on me. I felt oppressively hot. I knew I had to get outside or I was going to have a panic attack. “I got to go.” I inched closer to the door.

Karen made a disappointed noise. “Aw, do you have to go so soon? It’s only 9 o’ clock.” She looked at me expectantly, and I turned away quickly. I was too furious to look her in the eye.

“I gotta go. Congratulations, you guys, that’s great news.”

Karen came over to me and gave me a hug. Touching her at that moment was fucking agony, but I stood there and endured her reptilian embrace. Steve gave me one as well. That made it well worth it.

I walked outside. A light snow had just started to fall, and a chill wind was blowing in from the north. I flipped up the hood of my coat and started walking in a daze towards home. I got as far as the alley across the street and fell to my knees and started vomiting. God, her food was horrible. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my coat and stood up. My legs felt like rubber and I had no idea how I was going to find the strength to make it home. Then the reality of what I had just heard hit me, full on.

Steve was moving. Out of the state. It was very likely I would never see him again.

I couldn’t take it. I fell back down to the ground and buried my head in my hands and wept. Why was this happening to me? What was I being punished for? I sat there and cried until my eyes were red and sore and there was no more. The snow was coming down harder now, and beginning to stick to the street.

I shakily got to my feet and stumbled, grabbing a trashcan for balance. There were some bottles sticking out of the top of the can. I grabbed one and hurled it to the ground, sending glass spraying everywhere. I grabbed another one and did the same thing, screaming all the while, “Why? Why the fuck did have to be her instead of me?

What the fuck is wrong with me?”

After the third bottle I stopped and looked around at all the broken glass. I decided maybe it was a good idea to get out of there, as there were lights all around me flickering on, to get the hell out of there. I quickly made my way out of the alley and back towards the apartment.

When I got home, I was alone. I sat down in the couch and looked at the indentation Steve had made in the couch. I sighed and laid my head down in that sacred spot and fell asleep.

Steve moved out of town not much longer after that, and I watched him go impassively. I tried to convince myself that it was ok, I’d meet other people, and

things could change. We e-mailed each other for a while, but that tapered off eventually as well. He had a whole new set of Karen-approved friends and was busy with them. In time, he would grow to forget the people he had worked with as his new life took other. And I would become one of those forgotten people, just another faded photograph shut away in a drawer and forgotten about.

A few months ago, he got on FaceBook and friended me. I hadn’t heard from him for about a year by this point. He was doing well, he said, working for an organic grocery store and living right by the beach. Karen was in graduate school and finishing up her thesis. Their daughter was in sixth grade and doing quite well with her new circle of friends. Everything was going great in his happy little family. I felt a pang of sadness when I looked at his daughter’s picture; she was smiling and holding tightly on to Daddy’s arm. She felt the same security I used to feel and it was like a serrated blade carving through the walls of my heart. But how could I have ever said that without seeming like the worst kind of selfish bastard?

Now there’s always the risk of coming home really drunk and getting on FaceBook and typing out some message that I would live to regret. About how I truly missed him every day and I wished he was here and it was just he and I again.

Except that’s really not true, because in a way, he never left me. His ghost colors everything I see, everything I do. I still see his kind, smiling face every time I close my eyes, he stalks through my dreams at night, and no amount of alcohol or drugs can erase his presence from my thoughts. He is a constant, like the sun rising or the wind blowing. A watchful presence that constantly taunts me, hinting of things that might have been, or were in some alternate timeline. How can I forget the only time in my life I was truly happy? How can I be expected to just let go of that, and watch it tumble downhill into the darkness?

I can’t. And that is why he will remain in my head forever, until I find some way to replace him. Is this possible? All I can do is wait for some kind of a signal.

Something to lead me from this cave into the light of day.

David’s Flashback

Stephanie left in a hurry, while David was sleeping. This left him no opportunity to say the speech he had prepared. He thought that he could say the right combination of words and something would click in her head and she would love him again and stay.

But he was wrong; there was nothing to say. She had been gone for ages; her actual physical body just left this time.

The things that she left behind (and they were few) he was afraid to touch for a long time. There was an ankle sock discarded in a corner, some of her unopened mail, a hair scrunchie in the bathroom. He let these things grow thick with dust, unwilling to disturb them, to shake her essence from them.

Because now, these things were all that he had left to remind him of her. All the furniture was gone, along with all her clothes and books and quite a bit of his things as well. David didn’t care about that.

Now that she was gone, all the things that he could have said to her floated through his mind. All the perfect things he could have said that would have made her stay instead of “What?” and “I don’t know” and “What are you talking about?” Things like “I totally agree” and “You couldn’t be more right” and ‘Yes, dear. Whatever you say, dear.”

David quit going to work and could barely drag himself outside of his apartment, unless it was to the bar across the street or occasionally to the library, where he could drag out his Mac and pretend like he was working. Even this didn’t work, as the wanna-be thug kids who hung out on the downtown mall liked to congregate there during the day to leaf through magazines and plan out their drug deals for the day. It made him feel even more depressed and fantastically old, so he soon stopped doing that. Who the hell was he trying to impress anyway? It wasn’t like she was going to turn up there. The bar was the place for him. That was where guys whose girlfriends left them belonged.

Before Stephanie had left him, she had told him “I just wish you’d tell me the truth for once. Just once. You think that I’m so stupid I can’t tell when you’re lying, But it’s so fucking obvious.” He hadn’t realized it at the time, but he grew to realize that she was right. He had difficulty telling the truth most of the time. Because the truth was so boring. But the truth wasn’t really what she wanted, anyway.

Women tended to gravitate towards him more when he was already in a relationship.

It was bizarre, like there was some invisible sign above his head that only these women could see that read “Hit on me.” This drove his girlfriend up the wall, of course. Whenever they were in a public place together, she would count the number of women around them that would wink or stare at him, or make fluttery eyes. She then would outline each and every one of these infractions in lengthy detail later that night.

“And what about that redhead that gave you that look when we were in the parking lot?” Stephanie hectored him as they drove back to their shared apartment.

David never knew what to say to her when this litany started up. Sure, women looked at him. What was he expected to do, walk around in public covered up in a potato sack? A Burka? He knew it was only her deep, deep insecurities that made her feel this way, But how was he supposed to tell her that? If he had just came out and said, “You’re just insecure,” that would have been followed by another round of threats and screaming and “You just don’t understand me.” He was scared of talking too much anyway. When you started talking too much about your relationship, that was a sure sign that there was trouble afoot. If you just didn’t talk, there was no trouble, right? Still waters are calm waters?

Sometimes Stephanie would pull crazy moves, like wake him up at four in the morning holding a pair of scissors to his chest and screaming that she was going to kill herself, because he didn’t love her and he didn’t deserve her and he didn’t

understand her. She never would have done this, but there was no way around it. It was just another trigger for hours of endless talking. All this “I want, I need, I demand.” All this constant talking made him angry and uncomfortable. Why couldn’t she just be satisfied with the way things were? Why couldn’t it be like when they had first met?

When they had met at that party in Montana, back at the end of high school, it was the easiest thing in the world. She thought he was sexy and interesting and the best person in the whole of the universe, and he was full of keg beer and didn’t disagree.

Things were simple. She talked a lot then, too, but it wasn’t this demanding noise that she had been cranking out lately, it was more lighter fare about how cool he was and how lucky she was to be with such a wonderful guy like him and wait until you meet my parents…. yadda yadda yadda. She talked loudly and frequently about her favorite band, or some television show she had seen, and it was all pleasantly innocuous noise.

When her friends met him, Stephanie thought that one of them was looking at him in a way that displeased her. He should have known that was just the tip of the iceberg, But he was too oblivious (and high) at the time to notice. She erased this girl from her phone list, blocked her on FaceBook and MySpace, and pretended like she didn’t exist if they were in the same room together. She had been a friend with this girl for fifteen years, but suddenly she was persona non grata.

David asked her once why she was treating her friend like this. She laughed, as if the very question was patently ridiculous.

“I didn’t like the way that she was looking at you. That girl is so desperate; she only has one thing on her mind. She’s not a friend of mine.”

“Yeah, but did you talk to her about it?”

“Why do I need to talk to her about it? She knows exactly what she did.”

Reason was not the path to follow to exit from this forest, clearly.

Then they had made the decision to move out of Montana, which they both were excited about. They decided on Colorado one day after they had watched some snowboarding video, and began packing the next day. This was a quick process, as neither of them had much to pack. They said their final farewells and hit the road.

Those first days were good ones. They were very much in love and constantly in each other’s presence. They laughed and smiled all the time, and any arguments they had were quickly forgotten. But time has a way of eroding happiness, and the grind of time eroded her pleasant façade and he gradually grew complacent with the status quo of the relationship. But as her jealous side started to surface, this quickly changed.

David became reluctant to leave their apartment; because she would always see some girl she thought was giving him inappropriate looks. He bought an XBox and started playing online in his spare time. He thought that this would lessen his problems But it just ended up making her more resentful. Now it was, “Why don’t you take me out anymore? Are you ashamed to be seen with me?”

Stephanie became convinced that he thought she was ugly now and purposefully avoiding contact with her. He assured her that this was not the case.

“You’re beautiful. I just don’t feel like going out.”

“Well, I have needs. I have to get out of this apartment sometimes. I have to live my life.” She said this theatrically, as if she were in some dinner-theatre production of a Tennessee Williams play.

“No one’s stopping you.” David soon learned that this was perhaps the worst thing that he could have said. She was trolling for attention and she wanted him to pacify her ego by feeding her endless compliments until she was satisfied. Instead he pushed her away.

“Oh, no one’s stopping me? Good, I’ll just go out right now since you don’t care!”

She stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door loudly behind her.

“Hey, wait!” he yelled after her, but she was already gone. Oh well, time to play some Call of Duty.

Several hours later, she stumbled back inside. She smelled like she had been drinking, her hair was disheveled and her makeup smeared like she had been crying. David was still playing XBox, and didn’t look up. He was sniping off a German platoon from inside a church bell tower.

“Well?” Stephanie said. “Aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been?”

He cleared his throat. “Where have you been?”

“Down at the bar…looking at cute guys.” This was clearly designed to wound him, but it didn’t work, because he simply didn’t care. In his mind, she was free to do whatever she wanted, and so was he. In her mind, there was nothing but the two of them.

“Oh yeah? Was Harry there?” Harry was a buddy of his who liked to hang out at the bar. He frequently bought pot from him. As dealers went, it was fun to go to his house and hang out, because he had a phenomenal record collection and a really cool Akita dog that would do all kinds of tricks. Last time he was there he had gotten really baked and listened to the Clockwork Orange soundtrack while Harry’s dog had fetched them beers from the fridge. He wondered what Harry was up to.

Stephanie’s eyes turned black with fury. “NO! I DID NOT SEE HARRY! I’ve been flirting with other men! That doesn’t bother you?”

David nodded at her. “If you want it to.”

Boom goes the dynamite. She screamed and ran to the bedroom and started to sob, again. David supposed as a boyfriend, he was obligated to go in there and hold her hand and tell her how sorry he truly was for what ever it was that he was supposedly responsible for. But he really wanted to finish this level first.

He fell asleep in front of the TV, with the controller still gripped in his hand, held tightly like a king’s scepter.

When he woke up, she was gone, but there was a note on the table in front of him. He picked it up and read it.

“I’m mad at you.” It read. “But you can make it up by taking me dancing tonight.”

He grimaced. This meant he was supposed to take her out to the club she liked. It was just a few blocks away, so parking was never a problem, but the cover was at least 20 bucks a head, drinks were expensive as well, and he would be expected to shave, shower and wear his nicest clothes while listening to brain-deadening house music. It was the formula for an excruciating night, but David guessed that he was obligated to make her happy. It seemed like that was his role in this relationship, to always be the one apologizing.

But, whatever. He could deal with it for one night. When Stephanie came back, he was all spiffed up and ready to go out, which pleased her no end. She actually smiled and kissed him on the forehead. Of course, she was not ready to go, so this meant waiting for her another two hours.

They arrived at the club. The exterior was quite impressive, as it was an old Protestant church with huge spires and stained glass windows. It was an inspired idea to take that and turn it into a scene of nightly drug abuse and debauchery, and was amazingly successful. They paid and went inside, to a wide-open area with flashing disco lights and a lot of young, aggressively dressed types. The air was busy with clashing colognes and perfumes designed to entice and snare. Stephanie saw a girl that she knew from her work, and ran off to talk to her, leaving David standing there alone.

He wandered to the glass and neon bar and attempted to order a drink. They didn’t have PBR, so he asked what their specials were.

‘We have tequila shooters for $5, and Heinekens for $7.” said the overly- made up bartender with enormous breasts that fought and strained to release themselves from her too-tight uniform. “$7 for a beer?” David thought, but tried to imagine the night without alcohol and paid it.

He wandered around sipping skunk-water from the green bottle, and observed the traffic around him. Being an old church, there were plenty of dark nooks and crannies for people to make out in, and he nearly tripped over one couple slobbering furiously by a stairwell. Where the hell was she?

David found her out on the dance floor, flailing around to some bass-heavy Miami booty track. She was laughing with her friend and looked happy for the first time in ages. He was almost reluctant to go over and talk to her, because his presence always seemed to make her angry. So he leaned up against a post and watched her from a distance, drinking his beer. She was enthusiastically chatting with her friend and pointing out attractive looking men that passed by them as prospective candidates.

He felt a hand tapping me on the back and spun around.

“Hey, dude!” It was Harry, his drug-dealing friend. He was an affable, short and squat man, with a sloppy mound of brown hair and a disarming smile. He was very good at his job. They shook hands and slapped each other on the back.

“Hey, Harry, what’s up? I thought you hated house music.”

He laughed, a hoarse braying sound. “I know, right? This music sucks balls. But fuck man, two-thirds of my customer base is here. I already paid for my cover charge and first three drinks and I just came in two minutes ago. So what are you doing here?

Your girlfriend finally get some sense and dump your ass?”

“Actually, she’s right over there. She insisted that we come here. She’s more than a little pissed off at me.”

“Over what?” Harry poured back his drink in one healthy gulp and licked his lips in satisfaction.

“She accuses me of everything she can think of, she’s crazy fucking jealous. Any girl that even looks at me she thinks we’re sleeping together.”

“Well, you are a good looking dude. I mean, I ain’t gay or nothin’, but if we were in prison, you know…” He trailed off into his barking laughter.

“Thanks, dude. Nothing I do seems to make her happy anymore.”

“That guy she’s chatting up at the bar seems to be making her pretty happy.”

David turned to look. Some meathead frat boy in a Polo shirt with an upturned collar and wearing a backwards Yankees hat was huddled in close to her telling some longwinded story, and she was drinking him in with her eyes, hanging on his every word. Every so often, she glanced back towards where he was standing, and then back to Johnny Quarterback again.

‘That’s all bullshit. She’s trying to make me jealous again. She’s only doing that because she knows I can see her from back here. See, that’s the thing: she can flirt with anyone she likes and it’s OK, but if she even thinks I’m doing it, she goes apes hit.”

Harry let out a low little whistle. “That’s bad news, man. I don’t think she likes you anymore.”

“Of course she likes me, why else would she bother with all these ridiculous games?”

“All women play games. I think she just likes to torture your sorry ass.”

Harry spotted some rave kid sucking a pacifier entering the room, and excused himself. “Pardon me, fella. I just figured out what I’m gonna do with all this E.” “You have E? Give me some.” He greedily extended his palm.

Harry wagged his finger. “Uh uh. Gotta pay.”

“Don’t I get the friend discount?” David pleaded with him.

“Oh, all right. $15 for a hit. I’m gonna charge Rave Boy twice that, so I’ll make it up.”

Actually, he would end up charging the rave kits $40 a hit, which he justified to them by claiming it was the same stuff that Paul Oakenfold had once DJ’d a set on in Ibiza.

Complete bullshit, But these kids were suckers for anything trendy.

“Is it clean?” He held it up to the light. There were little pictures of the Cat in the Hat on it. Ravers love anything to do with Dr. Seuss.

“Clean as you’re gonna find in this town. It’s pretty good shit.” I paid him the money and took the hit.

Half an hour later, David was succumbing to the mood of the drug. The music, which he had previously found annoying, sounded amazing, with every bass beat and drum hit tickling some buried and forgotten part of him. He found an unoccupied corner and slumped back into a furry couch and started to feel the fabric. It felt amazing, like every fiber was shooting soft tendrils of heat through his fingers. He could have sat there all night rubbing this amazing-feeling couch until Stephanie suddenly appeared in front of him, arms crossed and wearing her coat and gloves.

“I’m ready to go,” she announced. David could see red waves of light, like focused beams of hostility bouncing off her. It was difficult to look in her direction and feel the negative energy.

David didn’t like it. She was harshing his buzz and he said, “No.” “What?” she repeated, as if not understanding what he said.

“I’m not ready to go.”

Stephanie looked suspiciously at him. “Are you on drugs?”

“Yeah, so what? I took some E to amuse myself while you dumped me here all night.”

“I didn’t dump you-“ she started to protest, but was quickly shut down.

“Oh please. You ran away the minute we came here, to go drool over that frat boy.”

“He’s a friend of mine from school. “ This was true, in the sense that they had attended the same school. But they had never actually met before, nor could they be considered friends in any legitimate sense of the word.

“Whatever. I don’t want to be around you right now.” David turned his face away from her.

She got good and angry over that and grabbed him roughly off the couch by the arm.

‘Enough of your bullshit, I want to go home now.” Stephanie started dragging him towards the door. They got outside and he removed her hand from him, and felt the words come out of his mouth. “ Fuck off, you bitch. Get the hell away from me. I never want to see you again.” It was like a revelation. It felt liberating. He looked up at the stars in the sky and they were insanely bright, and glowing. Tracers shot past his eyes as he turned his head. Her face was manic and distorted with angry red streaks.

She weakly stared at him, tears welling up in her eyes. “ You don’t mean that.”

“Like hell I don’t. I’m sick of your bullshit. I can never do anything right. You always suspect me of shit I never did. I can’t take anymore of your negative, crazy, vindictiveness.” David was talking louder and faster, like some valve had been released from within, and years of trapped toxicity was rising quickly to the surface.

“That’s the drug talking.” She looked vulnerable in a way he’d never seen her before.

The passing headlights of cars bounced off her and gave her a sad little angelic halo.

Her eyes were moist and pleading and she was looking for him to forgive her. For a second he was almost suckered, but then he simply said,

“Fuck that, this is me talking. I want you out.”

She started crying and running down the block. Crying, hysterical girls running around with their make up smearing are not uncommon sights in this neighborhood at 1 in the morning, and the crowd ignored her. They were all too concerned with advertising their presence to notice. Her crying and screaming carried and reverberated down the street. The noise got quieter until it was inaudible.

David went back inside to his couch. Fuck, it felt amazing. It was like feeling the fur of some magical, mythical creature that surfed rainbows and shit ice cream. He rubbed it until the bar closed and they kicked me out. I wandered back to the apartment and walked in. She wasn’t there. He passed out on the kitchen floor, and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and so was all the furniture. He couldn’t remember what had happened the night before; there were huge gaping holes in his brain. David remembered going to the club and seeing Harry, everything else was blurry and patchy. He didn’t remember telling her to fuck off. He remembered seeing her stomp off angrily, but that happened all the time, so it offered no hints as to her motivation.

He walked around, looking at the empty rooms. She really was gone this time, and she wasn’t coming back. Should he have been happy? He wasn’t, just numb. Now that she was gone, the thought of her presence was almost comforting. David missed her just being there, like an actor in the background of a scene.

He poured some water and tried to piece together what had happened. Did they have some blowup argument? Nothing was rising to the surface of his memory. He couldn’t figure out why she would leave me. Then David saw the note she had left before, still sitting there on the table buried under some mail. “I’m mad at you,” it said.

“OK, so she was angry at me, and I took her dancing. But I still don’t remember what happened after that.” That was the only thought going through his head.

He decided to call Harry, because he remembered him being there and Remembered taking the E. He answered after the fifth ring.

“Yo.” The voice was gravely and sounded half asleep.

“Hey, Harry.”

“Hey, Bud, what’s up?” He probably couldn’t remember his name as his clients numbered into the hundreds, so David proffered some info to prod his recall.

“Remember, in the club last night you were talking to me about Stephanie?”

He hooted with recognition. “Oh yeah, I remember.”

“Well, she’s gone. All her shit is missing from the apartment. And I can’t remember what I did.” David rubbed my temple in contemplation. It wasn’t helping.

“Yeah, you were pretty fucked. I thought you were going to rub a hole right through that couch.”

“So you were there. What do you remember? Did I say something to her?”

“Fuck, man, you were screaming at her in front of the club. Everyone was watching you guys; it was like real live Melrose Place shit. You were screaming that she was a crazy bitch and you wanted her gone, and she was crying and wailing and running up and down the block hysterically. You don’t remember that?”

Now he remembered it. He thanked Harry and hung up the phone.

She had left all the pictures behind, and there was a framed copy of her graduation picture in their bedroom. He stood there in the morning light examining it. Her smile was genuine and she looked happy. He remembered that she had been happy, once.

He wondered what had happened to make her so angry, so vindictive, and so joyless.

He wondered this for a while until the realization that he was the answer. He was the reason she had become so cold. He had treated her like a piece of furniture because he expected here to be there for him always. Her shrewishness had been a direct reaction to his apathy.

And now she was gone, and never coming back.

He walked out to the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor, and turned on the XBox. He felt a pang of regret in his heart and dismissed it out of hand. Emotions only led him into trouble- best to glaze over that part of him and never speak of it again.

Part Three November 1st Ian pounded on the door furiously. He knew she was in there, he could hear her unmistakable voice all the way down the hallway. He was covered in sweat and panting furiously, as he had ran most of the way here from the scene of the accident.

He began to realize what an error in judgment he had made, but he was so drunk last night that it had sounded like a good idea. Leaving the party, he had seen a car parked with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. He had seized the day and stolen the car, because he lived on impulsivity (especially when drunk) and people had grown to expect it from him.

He hadn’t expected it to be snowing and icy, and he certainly hadn’t expected to go sliding through that light to cause that six-car pile up. And even he didn’t think it was a good idea to run away from the car while the cop was trying to get the guy that he had hit to come around, but once his body had committed to the act of running, his brain yelling for it to stop was too little, too late.

And as he was crouched in an alleyway, panting desperately and wondering what to do next, he remembered what Molly had said before he had left her party: “Hey, we might be going to this guy’s house later- he lives in those apartments across from the Lamplighter Bar on Colfax. You know where that is, right?”

He did, although the Lamplighter wasn’t the sort of place he frequented. Too depressing, a bunch of old smelly sad sacks drinking watered down beer at 10 in the morning, spending their Social Security checks. He wouldn’t be caught dead in such

a dive. He much preferred the sort of place where he could see and be seen, and make a mental list of all the women he planned to score with. All he had to say he was a DJ, and that was his in. Everyone wants to know a DJ. The fact that he had never DJ’d in his life, nor had he owned any records or turntables, was incidental in his mind.

Image was the important thing in his world.

After an hour or so, he found the Lamplighter, and what looked like his underwear resting in the gutter across the street. This clearly had to be the place. He walked up the stairs and put his ear to each of the doors until he heard Molly yelling about something or other.

Now he was pounding harder on the door, yelling, “Hey, I can hear you in there!”

From within the room, they stared at each other. David gestured to Molly to hide all the pot. She started that process while he swung the door open.

“Can I help you?’ he said.

“Yeah, I need to talk to Molly over there.”

Molly turned her head. “Ian, is that you?”

He yelled, “Yes, it’s me. Can I come in?”

Molly gestured to let him in. David uttered a deep sigh and opened the door. Ian quickly rushed inside and approached Molly.

“I’m in trouble, Baby. I fucked up big time.” he said. Nervous flop sweat was pouring down his face.

“You must be, otherwise you never would have turned up here.”

“I stole a car out of the parking lot.” he said, matter-of-factly.

“You what? You bad boy.” She laughed.

David was still standing in the doorway. “Pardon me, buddy, but who the hell are you?”

“My name is Ian Davis, OK? Happy?” he sneered.

Molly spoke up. “Ian was at my party earlier.”

Ian coughed. “ But listen, listen, I caused a crash. And I ran away..”

She looked down at him. “What the fuck? Are you running from the cops?”

“I guess so, yeah. Got a smoke?” She handed him one from her purse, eying him warily.

He lit it and continued. “I just ran…there were a couple of cars looking for me. But they lost me.”

She looked at him sourly. “You fucking idiot. And you bring this shit over here?”

“I had nowhere else to go.”

“Bullshit, Ian. You always have plenty of fuck buddies to leech off of.”

David spoke up.

“Whoa, whoah. I don’t want this guy here if the cops are hunting him. I got a lot of weed in this room right now, and that’s enough, thanks. I don’t need this.” David did not want to go jail. Jail was not a pleasurable experience for people like himself.

Small men like him tended to become playthings for larger men and nicknamed things like “Betty.”

Ian frowned. “That’s a nice attitude.”

David looked at him incredulously. “Dude, I don’t even fucking know you! You just came here because of her! She’s a goddamn drama magnet!”

“You can’t stay here, Ian. But you can stay at my place. All right?”

Ian shook his head. “All right. But Jesus, can I just sit on your couch for like five minutes? I walked like ten fucking miles to get here.”

David relented. “All right. But you have five minutes.”

“Thanks, bra,” he said, and slumped down onto the couch.

‘So, Ian, dear, explain to me the situation in a bit greater detail, if you don’t mind.

You stole a car-“ ‘A Mercedes.” He pointed this distinction out with not a little pride.

‘A Mercedes, yes, from the parking lot of the hotel, and you were involved in some kind of crash. Did you kill anyone?’

‘No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, you don’t sound too sure. Are you sure no one was hurt?”

“Well, I saw the cop check out the guy I hit. He was OK, though, just in shock. And the other cars behind us managed to stop.”

“OK. OK, Ian, that’s good. And you just left the car in the street?”

“Yeah, with the motor running.”

“OK. I think it’ll be all right. You didn’t kill anyone, and they’ll call in the plates of the car and it’ll be listed as stolen, whoever you took that from will get it back. So just lay low for a while and try and wait this thing out.”

Ian nodded, with an exasperated look on his face. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Jo then piped up, from the opposite end of the couch.

“May I be so bold as to offer an observation?” she said.

“By all means, “ said Molly.

“All right. It strikes me as to the fact that Ian, here…” she gestured to him across the room, “this delightful young criminal chap that we have in our midst here, has just

confessed said crime to us, implicating us all in this room. Which leads me to one question.”

“What is that?” Ian asked.

She stood up and yelled, “Why the fuck are you still here? I’m a Limey, brother, I don’t need my Visa revoked because of this shite.”

Molly attempted to placate her friend.

“Calm down. I said I’d take care of it, and I will. We’ve been in bigger trouble than this before.”

She turned her attention back to Ian.

“Ian, honey, you made a phone call to me, a few hours ago, do you remember?

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“Was that before or after all this happened?”

“It was after I stole the car, but before I crashed it. I was still in the DTC when I called you. I just wanted to ask for my underwear back, but I saw them outside in the gutter.”

“They were in my purse, you nasty boy,”

“Uh, sorry, that was a joke.” He chuckled weakly.

“A joke.” She repeated. “You hid your dirty underwear in my purse as a joke.”

“Yeah. Sorry if you didn’t think it was funny.” His tone indicated an honest bewilderment that anyone would think that this was anything but a hilarious joke.

David stood up. “All right, Ian, I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Molly grabbed Ian by the arm and headed for the door. “I’ll be back.”

Not two seconds after they exited the door, they came back inside red-faced.

“Holy shit. We are not going anywhere, guys.” Molly whispered. “There are about six cop cars down there and cops crawling everywhere.”

Jo erupted. “Goddammit! If I lose my visa over this shite I’m holding you responsible.” Her eyes lit up with fire and she sat fuming on the couch, staring daggers at Molly.

‘Ian, get in the bathroom and hide in the shower. Lock the door behind you.”

“But I-“ “Listen, you little turd, just do as I say or I swear to God I’m going to knock you out right now.” She growled this in an uncharacteristically deep voice, which frightened Ian into action. The door clicked shut.

“Open up those back windows and air this place out. It smells like a fucking opium den in here.”

David promptly did as he was told.

“OK, all the pot is in my purse, so that’s mine if they find it. Let’s just chill out and not get too paranoid, OK?” There was another knock on the door, a sharp staccato rapping.

“That sounds like a cop knock if I ever heard one.”

Molly walked to answer the door. David looked worried but Molly simply said, “I know how to deal with cops. Turn on the TV so it looks like we’re doing something.”

“It’s like 11 o’clock in the morning.”

“So? People watch soap operas, don’t they?”

She opened the door and fluttered her eyelashes in mock surprise.

‘Why, hello, officer, what can I do for you?” she trilled, in a honey-sweet voice-or the sweetest and honiest possible for the amount of cigarettes she smoked, anyway.

“Are you the renter of this apartment?” the cop demanded.

‘Well, that would be my boyfriend over on the couch there,” she pointed. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a fugitive in the neighborhood and we’re just trying to track down if someone has seen him.”

“Oh, my! What does he look like?” she exclaimed in her southern-belle voice.

She looked at the mug shot of Ian. The picture looked oddly familiar, until she realized that it had been taken at one of her parties. This worried her a bit.

She shook her head back and forth. “No, sir, I don’t think so. Hey, Babe?”

David realized that was him. He got up and stiffly examined the picture. “Ah, no… can’t say that I’ve seen this person before.” He handed it to Jo, who dismissed it quickly. “Nope, don’t know him.” she said.

“What are you all doing home in the morning?” the cop asked with a raised eyebrow.

Molly laughed. “Well, I would be at work, But my boyfriend and my other friend here all have the swine flu.” She hacked a bit to punctuate it. “Much better now than

before, but still- yikes! I have trouble sometimes keeping things down.” She let out a sickly little retching belch.

The cop had one foot inside the door, he now withdrew it. He had no desire to catch H1N1 and cast a suspicious eye about the place.

“Yep, just watching the soaps. I was about to put some coffee on, would you like some?”

The cop shook his head. “No, ma’am, that’s not necessary.”

“OK. Is there any thing else you need, officer?’”

“No, you’ve been very helpful. Thanks for you time and have a nice-“ Just then, there was an enormous sneeze from inside the bathroom.

The cop tensed up. ‘What was that? Who the hell is in there?”

AM Pete I was walking to the break room today when I saw the bear for the first time. He was laughing by the coffee machine with my boss, smiling and high-fiving. I ducked behind the copier so I could look at him from a distance. Beefy arms and legs, a handsome face with full beard, and beautiful green eyes. My pulse started racing and I could no longer look in his direction. His beauty was blinding me and I quickly walked back to my desk. I was shaking and sweating and the display on my computer monitor was blurry.

My boss walked by me. I casually asked him who he was talking to in the break room, trying to push down the excitement and nervousness that I could already feel bubbling up inside me.

“That’s Shaun, he’s a new temp, just started today. Nice guy. He’s over in the IT section.”

I nodded in assent. Thank God, he works here. I can see him again.

“Why do you ask?” he said, curiously.

Panic mode. What I can I tell him that won’t completely give the game away? What won’t make him think that I’m into this guy and want to make out with him by the humming of the Coke machines? Think of something, goddammit!

“Oh, no reason…. I thought he looked familiar.” Weak, but it should be enough.

He grunted and gave me an odd little look, then walked back to his office.

I exhaled after he left. All right, that’s over….and now all that’s left is his face in my mind. Great, another face to torment myself with. He’s probably not even gay. He’d probably laugh right in my face. Why do I do this to myself?

Suddenly I saw him walking out of the break room. I turned back to the monitor and pretended not to notice him, but my eyes were glued on his reflection against the screen as he passed by me. I caught a whiff of his scent; it was musky and earthy with a coating of bar deodorant over the top. That was good anyway. Nothing disgusted me more than someone who leaves a pheromone trail of Axe everywhere they go.

Back to work. Save those thoughts for later.

************************************************************** I walk home for lunch today, and there’s like a million cop cars in the parking lot.

There are also cops on foot, poring over every apartment. It’s like every one of those acronym forensic investigation shows that I never watch is filming right in front of me.

There’s a cop peering into my apartment with a mag-lite. Strike that, a really cute beefy cop, probably my age or younger. Pale Irish complexion, short blond hair, and green eyes. Five-eleven and not a pound under 280, I’d bet. I admire his chiseled profile, his Romanesque nose and the way his uniform pants showcase the roundness of his thick butt for a while before I politely announce, ‘Pardon me, officer, I just came home from work for lunch. What’s going on?”

“There’s a fugitive we think might be holed up in there.” He pointed to the apartment next to mine. His voice is lumbering and deep, which makes my crotch tingle.

‘Great, right by me, huh?”

“This is your apartment, huh? Then I guess so.” He handed me a flyer.

“Do you recognize this guy?” I look at the picture. Looks like any typically douchy 20-something- hair mussed up in bedhead spikes, those ridiculously huge tribal piercings in his ears, smug look on his face. Then I look again.

“Hey, I do know this guy. He caused a big accident today- this is the guy you’re looking for.” I get closer to the cop and catch a whiff of his musky scent. Old Spice.

My god, how old school. I imagine him emerging from the shower before his shift, looking like a hosed bear. The thought lingers and I make no effort to push it away.

“Yes, he ran from the scene of the accident. “ The cop raised a beefy paw to scratch his neck. Mmmm, yes. I would like one of those, please.

“Well, I saw the whole thing. I saw him run the red light.”

“OK, sir. You should just wait in your apartment, we’ll get you if we need an ID and a statement.”

“Well, is it safe to go in there? I don’t want to be killed by a stray bullet going through the wall.” I wanted to ask, “Can you wait in there with me? And then do some strip-poker and a little Irish jig?” But I didn’t.

“It should be fine, sir. We have no indication that the suspect is armed.”

“Er- all right. I’ll just go make some lunch then.” I entered my apartment and held my ear up to the wall. There was a lot of indistinct shouting and noises. I sighed.

“Figures that the one time I want to listen to them, is the one time I can’t hear anything.” I went in the kitchen to make myself a baloney sandwich.

“What the hell is that?” yelled the cop. “I thought you said you were the only ones here?”

“Oh, God, “ said Molly. Jo suddenly stood up off the couch, with an exasperated look across her face, and directly walked up to the cop.

“All right, I’ve had enough of this. Officer, he’s in the bathroom. The guy you’re looking for? I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want my friends to get into trouble, but I just don’t care anymore. He came over here about 10 minutes ago and hid in there. I hardly even know him.” Jo remained there, pointing at the bathroom door.

‘You fucking bitch!” came the voice from inside the bathroom.

“Ian, it’s over. Just come out of there already.”

“No way.”

“Sir,” the cop said, in his most reasonable tone. “You’ll make this all a lot easier if you just come out of there right now.”

‘Goddammit Ian!” yelled David. “Don’t make the cops knock down my bathroom door! Come out of there now!”

No reply.

The cop pulled out his walkie-talkie. “We have the suspect inside the residence.

Repeat, the suspect is inside the residence.”

Some more cops came into the room and pounded on the bathroom door.

“Come out of there right now!” they bellowed.

“What happens if I do?”

“We arrest you for leaving the scene of an accident and take you downtown.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Look, kid, you’re going to jail no matter what. Just come out now and make it easier on yourself.”

“I want my lawyer here. Let me call my lawyer.”

One cop gestured to another. “Get the battering ram.”

David winced. “Hey, is that really necessary?”

“Sir, you could have avoided this by telling the truth. Now this is what’s going to happen.”

Four cops lined up the pole and took a running leap at the door. It buckled and filled the air with the sound of splintering wood. David groaned loudly.

“One more pass, guys!” yelled the beefy cop in front.

They ran at it again, and this time the door gave way and swung wide open.

Ian was not inside. However, the back window was wide open.

‘Suspect went out back window. Secure back area, secure back area!”

David rubbed his head and fretted about his door, although there was now not much left of it to worry over.

Pete sat there at his table, eating his baloney sandwich with chips and idly looking at the newspaper, thinking about the shit going on next door, But mainly about work. He didn’t want to think about work, it was just foremost in his mind and pushed all the other thoughts behind it in line.

The job had gone on for longer than the initial three weeks that he had committed to, and although it was still mind-numbingly boring, it had become routine, and he had always found safety in the routine. He had actually gone to the office Halloween party. Since it was during the day, he actually got paid for an hour to be there- he showed up at 4. Some people had actually worn costumes to work, he would never do that. He couldn’t imagine riding on the bus in a ballerina outfit. People gave him enough funny looks as it was.

The party was in the conference room, a rectangular shaped cube occupied mainly by a long, cherry-wood table and leather-backed chairs, and some dry erase boards on one end, and a wall mounted plasma TV at the other. Whatever this company did, exactly, it was clearly profitable.

There was a keg and some munchy treats laid out. Two ad division guys tried in vain to hook up the karaoke machine, but mostly stared at the mass of wires and plugs in abject confusion. He mingled around for a while, trading some idle chit chat.

Everybody wanted to talk about work. There is nothing more deadly than talk about work at an office party. If all you can talk about is work, why are you even having a party?

Then Pete saw the Bearish fellow he remembered from the other day sitting by himself on the other side of the room. The idea of having a Bear pal at work made him very happy. The idea of having any Bear pals at all made him happy as well. He forced his self-consciousness and paranoia down as far as they would go and went over to introduce himself.

“Hi, are you new here?” Pete croaked. His voice sounded ancient and a thousand miles away.

The Bear, who said his name was Shaun, had a floppy mop of brown hair, striking green eyes, and the padded burly body of a NFL lineman. He was another temp, working on a project on the other side of the building, something to do with viral marketing that sounded vaguely illegal.

“Huh. So you’ve been here the whole time and I’ve just now met you?”

‘Small world, huh.” Shaun chuckled lightly.

“Please don’t be straight, please don’t be straight” were the only words circling around inside Pete’s head.

Pete looked closer at Shaun’s chest and saw that he was wearing a Bear Flag pendant, with all the colors of the Bear Rainbow (which are mostly brown.) He did a double take just to make sure that he didn’t imagine it.

“Uh, I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird Shaun, but…are you a Bear?”

“Oh, you saw the necklace, huh? You’re the first one in here to get it. Not a very woofy crowd in here. There’s a gay guy in IT, but he’s strictly an Abercrombie and Fitch Boy, you know?” He chuckled. It was a warm, comforting laugh, like flannel sheets.

His head grew swimmy. Galaxies surged and exploded in eye-searing Technicolor around me. This was it, this was the moment. He pressed on. It was time for the million-dollar question, the question that every future happiness hinged on. Pete cleared his throat and felt the words fall out.

“Yeah, well, I’m a Bear too.” Well, there it was, at last. There’s no turning back now.

“I can see that. A cute one too.” His twinkling eyes blinked at Pete briefly.

Pete blushed fire engine red instantly. This was like being in junior high again.

“Shaun, I would love to have a talk with you about Bear stuff- but I don’t think this is the proper venue.” They both looked across the conference room to see a code writer with a lampshade on her head, waving a half empty beer bottle around crazily. Swear to God, she actually put a fucking lampshade on her head. Who does that? Is this the Mad Men office party from 1962?

“Agreed,” he said. “So, here…”

Shaun pulled some paper from his pocket and scribbled on it furiously, tongue sticking out in furious concentration. That combined with the shock of hair standing straight up on his head made him look even more adorable, if that’s possible.

“Here’s my number, give me a call. We’ll get together sometime, OK? I know a good restaurant to go to.”

He handed me the paper and I stood there looking at it like it was the Holy Grail.

“Awesome. I don’t know very many Bears here.”

“Yes, they are thin on the ground here, aren’t they? No pun intended. There’s a Bear Bar over by my apartment, we should go to the Beer Bust sometime.”

“Oh yeah, that place over on Logan? I’ve heard it’s awesome.”

I didn’t really want to tell him that I had never gone in the door there, and had been too absorbed in my own self-persecution and paranoia to force myself to, so I just smiled and agreed to the plan.

After that, I called him and we chatted on the phone for a while. He moved here from South Carolina (explaining the slight accent and tendency to say “fixin’”) a year ago with his boyfriend, but they broke up when he caught him cheating. He likes horror movies and loves World of Warcraft. He likes to listen to indie rock, but is the farthest thing from “emo”. He also likes Star Trek, but I like Doctor Who so it cancels out. A cute geeky Bear, how did I get so lucky?

So we are supposed to go on a “date” this Friday. The concept of a date is so foreign to me, but it can’t turn out any worse than my last experience venturing into the Bear world. There was an ad I answered on Craigslist when I was feeling particularly vulnerable and horny- not a good combination, I can assure you. It was a Bear couple out in Lakewood looking for play partners. I was a little weirded out by the idea of making out with a couple, but they assured me it was ok, they were open and polyamorous- a big word I discovered actually means, “will fuck anyone.”

We met, had dinner at their place, and then got down to business. I took off my clothes and got down to the boxers, while one of the bears did the same. The other, bigger one sat in a computer chair facing the bed watching us.

“Aren’t you going to join in?” I asked him.

The smaller, cuter one explained that he liked to watch new people first- if he felt like it he would join later. OK. Sorry I asked.

We started feeling up each other on the bed; the cubbish bear rubbing my back and bottom while I felt his belly and let my hand slip down into his crotch, which I felt stiffen. He let out a little yelp of pleasure. We continued like this for a while, until eventually he moved over and pulled my boxers down and pulled out my cock. He started lightly flicking it with his tongue, which felt amazing. Then he took it in his mouth and pulled his head up and down rapidly. I shuddered a little and hoped that I didn’t come in his mouth.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about that. No matter what he did to me, I couldn’t come. I don’t know why, certainly if I was home in my bed thinking of this very scenario, I could have tossed one off in under 30 seconds. But nothing was happening. I don’t know if it was just me being nervous (the last time I had sex before this was oh, about six years ago) or the fact that I was being stared at by a bear in a chair through this whole thing, with an impassive look on his face.

We finished up, and little bear went over to ask big bear something. Then big bear left the room. There was some muted conversation between them in the hall I couldn’t follow as little bear left to discuss recent events with him. Then little bear returned to the room.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“He wasn’t really into it. He thought you were a little…selfish.”

“What? I’m sorry I didn’t come, but I’m just nervous, you know? It’s been a long time.” I was starting to feel panicky and paranoid.

He reached over and patted me on the head. “I know. Don’t worry, we can still have fun.”

I hugged him, full-on. His embrace was soft and warm. I wanted to stay in there for a long time.

All three of us slept in the same bed that night, with me at one end, Big Bear at the other, with cub in the middle. They fell asleep quickly and both snored loudly. I lie facing the window, knowing that I would not get any sleep tonight, and that was fine.

Cubby had his leg wrapped around mine and I felt his beard fur nuzzling into my back. It felt absolutely wonderful, cozy and safe and warm and unimaginably satisfying. And it wasn’t going to last, I already knew.

I just lie there, trying to soak up the experience, the closeness. I didn’t feel comfortable fooling around with a couple. Cubby was cute and nice and I could have totally fallen for him- but what was the point? There was no future there. He was already with someone, and that someone was not impressed with me in the slightest.

So I just watched the sun slowly creep up and the early morning sparrows start to sing. And filed away the memories of what closeness felt like, for soon enough I would be back in my cold and empty bed, yearning for a moment like this and trying to reconstruct it in my mind, a simulacrum of a time when I felt loved.

That was four years ago. And I haven’t been with anyone since then. I can’t bring myself to go to the bars and every attempt at dating online has been a total disaster.

Being alone is so familiar to me at this point it seems like the natural state of the universe. And who am I to question the way the universe functions?

Anyway, me and Mr. Bear from work are supposed to go out tomorrow, and I am as nervous as a third-grader at a Christmas recital. This guy is super nice and really cute and I desperately want us to click together. I always self-sabotage myself in these things, because I usually just get so nervous that I am not myself. I get flustered and blank out, or worse, I can’t stop talking about everything and nothing.

As these thoughts go through my mind, I notice that there is a shadowy figure crouched behind my TV set. I blink to make sure I am not seeing things, But sure enough, someone’s there. I can see tufts of his hair poking out over the top of the set, and hear his shallow and rapid breathing from my kitchen chair.

I slowly creep over to the figure, and tap him on the shoulder.

“Hey!” he turns around quickly, startled to see me there.

“Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in here?”

“Hey, dude, chill. It’s all cool,” he says, nonchalantly as you please.

This response infuriates me, and I start to yell at him.

“I’m not your dude, and it is certainly not all cool. Wait- I know who you are, you’re that dick I saw cause that accident!”

His demeanor changes instantly. Before he was Mr. Casual, now his face turns to stone. His eyes scan the room for a place to conceal himself.

“Get the fuck out of here! You can’t hide in here.” I scream.

He pulls a knife from his pocket. ‘Oh, I think I can.” He flashes the blade threateningly at me, and tries to stare me down.

“Oh, for Christ sake, put that thing away.”

He continues to stare me down, attempting to exude menace. It is a difficult thing for someone who has never really suffered in his or her life to portray convincingly, and he fails.

‘Are you going to stab me? Is that your fucking plan, is that it? Well, then fucking come over here and stab me then, let’s get this over with. Come on, you little douche bag, fucking stab me!” I scream at him.

He lunges at me; I step to the side and grab his arm, twisting it back as hard as I possibly can, which is pretty damn hard. He winces and shrieks in pain and drops to the ground, along with the knife. As he falls I kick him squarely in the kidneys with my steel-toed boots. He screams again and coughs up some blood. He whimpers and falls to the ground. He doesn’t look like he’ll be moving anytime soon.

I walk to the door and open it. “Hey, Cops!” I yell. ‘He’s in here!”

Instantly a half-dozen police swarm in through the door, and yank him roughly up off the ground. An officer quickly slips a pair of handcuffs on him.

“He was hiding in my living room and came at me with that knife, so I had to defend myself,” I tell the cop closest to me. He nods and writes something down on the white pad he carries around. I finish explaining what just happened until the cop closes his notepad and walks away. My eyes follow him as he does.

They drag him out of the room and down the outside stairs. Shortly the cops are gone and it is quiet again. I am too weirded out and amped up to go back to work right now, so I call in and tell them my home was broken into and I am dealing with the cops. They don’t need to know the whole story, that’s why they’re work. The receptionist who answers my call utters cries of horror as I give her a quick outline of the tale. She gushes apologetically and says she will relay this information to my boss. I mutter some words of thanks and switch off my phone.

I sit back down and finish eating my baloney sandwich. It tastes good.

Later that night, I lie awake in bed and think about the day’s events. It surprised me that I faced that guy unafraid even though he had a knife. I wasn’t even thinking about it- I just reacted. But what if he had stabbed me? What if that fucker had pulled out a gun and killed me?

I can see my parents walking through my apartment, faces grey and heavy-lidded with grief, throwing my clothes in boxes and recoiling at my porn collection underneath the mattress. And what would I have to show for my life? Very, very little. I’m a temp- no one would notice if I disappeared tomorrow.

Right then and there, with the dim streetlight flashing through my blinds, I decide that things have to change. I have to engage myself with the world. I have to make a tangible effort to meet people (for people, read Bears) and get myself out of the

house. It’s all to easy to cocoon myself away in here where it’s safe and moon over B, But that shit has outlived its usefulness. The happy memories have become nothing but an anchor dragging me down. I am going to go out with Mr. Bear and have a great time, and make some new memories. And I am going to stop looking backwards.

Shit’s got to change. And I’m the only one who can change it. ******************************************************************** *************** Molly and Jo exchanged angry looks from across David’s disheveled apartment. The bathroom door lay in great splintered chunks at their feet and the black, muddy footprints of the cops covered the wooden floors.

“I have had enough of this shit for several life times, Molly, I am out of here.”

Molly attempted to placate her. “Now, C’mon, calm down. We are all OK, right?”

David angrily snarled at her. “Speak for yourself, you crazy bitch. What about my fucking door, huh? Who the hell is going to pay for that, huh? When my landlord sees this, he’s going to turn about eight shades of red and kick me out on my ass. He already suspects me of smoking pot in here, when he sees this he’s going to hit the fucking wall.” He stalked around in a circle reciting this tirade, angrily waving his arms towards the hole where the door used to be for effect.

Molly sighed. “Look, I’ll pay for your door, OK? I have plenty of money saved up.”

“That’s not the point! I fucking barely know you, and you invite that maniac over here that’s running from the cops and brings them over here? I don’t need that!”

He agitatedly tried to light a cigarette, but had difficulty doing so because of his trembling hands.

“Look, you’ve got me shaking so bad I can’t even light a cigarette.”

“Here, sweetie.” she said, leaning in to light his cigarette with her pink lighter.

He grunted in acknowledgement.

Jo headed for the door. “I’m going for a walk. I have to get out of here. I’ll call you later.” She rushed through the hallway and was soon gone.

“She’ll be back,” said Molly.

“I hope not,” said David.

“Don’t be mean to her. She didn’t do anything to you. I can understand why you’re pissed off at me, but she did nothing to you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If she would have kept her god dam mouth shut, my bathroom door would still be on its hinges.”

“Oh, the door, the door, that’s all you want to go on about. Can’t you shut up about the goddamn door for a minute and look at the larger picture here?”

David looked back at her. “OK, so what exactly is the larger picture?”

She sighed wearily. “The big picture is that you and I are fine, and nobody went to jail. The cops didn’t find the stash. So just calm down here and breathe for a second.”

“OK, fine. I don’t even know what to say to you anymore. This whole thing is like some bad dream that just refuses to end.” He sat down heavily on the couch and looked around at the ruins of his apartment with resignation.

Molly sat next to him on the couch and gently put her arm on his back. He didn’t push it away. She inched closer to him and rested her other hand on his thigh.

“So much stress, I know. I know something that can take away all that stress,” she purred suggestively.

He lifted his head. “What might that be?”

Molly whispered something into his ear. He squinted at her for a minute then stood up.

“All right,” he said, “Let’s do it.”

“Really?” said Molly.

“Why the hell not? It would make us both feel a hell of a lot better, you’re right.”

‘Do you have condoms?”

“I always keep a bowl by my bed.”

“Let’s go.”

They walked arm in arm into the bedroom and shut and locked the door behind them.

David hastily cleared the various layers of debris off his bed and they rolled across it, hastily removing each other’s clothes with a grim determination. Soon they were naked and he was atop her. David grabbed a colored condom out of the wooden bowl at his bedside and stuck it on, hastily. He hated wearing the goddamn things, but this girl had been around the block more than once- no need to have his dick fall off.

Molly felt a certain sense of pride that her plan had come to fruition as he noisily and messily entered her. This was not exactly the way she had wanted it to happen, true, but they were together now and that was good enough for her. All things worked out in the end, she thought. She lie there soaking in the moment as he messily grunted atop her.

David wasn’t thinking of much of anything, apart from imagining that one Sports Illustrated model’s face superimposed over her face while he was banging away at her. She had an alright body, he supposed, although her ass was a bit dimpled and fat and she had some weird looking mole on her inside thigh. He tried to put these imperfections out of his mind and concentrate on the perfect girl, like he always did.

Nothing ever matched up to it, but nothing really could.

Molly muttered some groans of pleasure and he muttered something abruptly in acknowledgment that she didn’t hear. He came in a great gushing arc and rolled off of her, panting heavily. She lay there, unmoving. He removed the now-full condom and threw it into a trashcan at his desk, where it landed with a wet splatter.

She finally spoke. “Feel better now?”

“Actually, yeah. I do feel better.”

She smiled and moved closer to him, rubbing his back. “I’m glad. Now we can start to think about the future.” Time to lay out the groundwork.

“The future?” he said, confused.

“Our future.” she said, stressing each word equally.

“Oh, we don’t have a future,” he said, getting out of bed and pulling on his least smelly pair of sweatpants. “I thought you understood this was just a little fun.”

“Well, I thought you liked me.” she said.

“I do like you, but that doesn’t mean we have a future together. I just met you yesterday. Come on, don’t start getting all clingy and weird.”

“I’m not. I just thought we had something more than that,” she pouted.

“Well, that’s your fault, not mine. Now what are we going to do about that door?”

David walked to the counter and found a toothpick, which he started to clean his teeth with. She scanned his face for some kind of tenderness to cling to, but there was none to be found.

“You’re a fucking bastard,” she yelled.

“Oh, what is it with you? This was your idea, and now you’re all pissed off because I didn’t fall in love with you. Its just sex, like you said. It doesn’t mean a god dam thing; it’s just a physical release. Your problem is you don’t know what you want.”

“I do know what I want,” she said emphatically.

“And what is that?”

“I want you.”

“You can’t have me.” David walked out to the living room and Jo was back, sitting on the couch expectantly.

‘What are you doing back here?” he said.

“I came for my friend.” She lit a cigarette and smoke tendrils surrounded her face.

“Ah.” Jo eyed him suspiciously.

“You guys fucked, didn’t you?”

“Is it that obvious?” He knew it was, but for some reason asked anyway.

“I can smell it on you. You realize that was her plan from the beginning, right?”

“Yeah. I didn’t care.” David shrugged noncommittally.

‘Typical man.” She made a disapproving, but unsurprised, face.

Molly entered the room. “Hey, you came back!”

“I’m sorry. I just needed to go take a walk to clear my head. I’m sorry we fought, girl.”

They hugged theatrically and patted each other on the back, exchanging chatty female apologies.

David sat down on the floor, turning on the TV. “I’m going to sit here and watch the Broncos game. You two can stay if you want, I guess.”

“All right.”

Molly’s phone rang. “Who the fuck is calling me now? Oh, it’s Clark.”

“Is he still alive from last night?” asked Jo. ******************************************************************** ***********

Thursday night Pete had a strange dream that stayed with him even after he woke up.

In the dream, he was in a large enclosed area the size of an airplane hangar. The light was very dim, and he had to feel along the walls to make his way through.

“Hello?” he called out into the inky blackness.

“Over here,” came a muffled voice in return.

“Where are you? I can’t see anything.” With that, the lights inside came on at full wattage, temporarily blinding him. When he opened his eyes again, Steve was suddenly standing before him, dressed in t-shirt and jeans with a chef’s apron across his chest.

“Hi there.” He was grinning a toothy, mischevious smile.

“Steve? What are you doing here?”

“I’m not Steve. I’m your memories of Steve. Or rather, your brain’s recollection of Steve. “ “Ah. Well, that explains it.”

The Dream-Steve took his arm and said, “Let’s walk.”

Suddenly they were in the graveyard on that one summer night, his favorite and most cherished memory of them together. They had stopped there one summer night while walking home from work again. They sat on the cool soft grass, their backs leaning against tombstones while Steve loaded a bowl from out of the zippered sleeve on his backpack. The only light was a lamppost across the street and the intermittent flash of lightning bugs lazily coasting through the breeze. Steve had more than his usual number of beers that night, so he was loose and sloppy and leaning up to Pete closer than normal as they huddled around the lit pipe. Pete exhaled and looked at the stars moving above his head and felt that familiar tingling buzz stretch from his mouth into his brain. Steve laughed and clumsily brushed his hand across Pete’s back as he fumbled with the pipe. His touch made the bottom drop out of his self-control. He was just about to say those words scrolling through his mind at all times: “Steve, I have to tell you something,” when he suddenly said, “Wait, I think I see headlights.”

And then Pete remembered somehow that he was in a dream, and this moment had been preserved in amber forever in his mind. How he had seen the lights of a car passing, and they suddenly went quiet and dropped to the ground, not moving. The lights got closer and they were together in the stillness, lying flat to the ground, hoping the trees would obscure them. For a moment there was nothing, just them together in that vast and immeasurable space. Pete could hear his quiet shallow breaths and gravel crunching under tires, amplified by the paranoid effects of the weed. He knew that this moment was the closest they would ever be, and he basked in the moment and carefully absorbed every aspect of it.

And then the lights passed, and they began to talk again. In the real world, we had gathered our things and left quietly, finishing our trip home. But not now. This would go differently.

“Steve, get up, they’re gone.”

The Dream-Steve stood up and briskly shook the dirt and leaves off him. He stared at Pete with black and empty eyes.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” he grunted.

“I’m in love with you.” Pete said those words and then everything around them vanished- the graveyard erased itself and at once they were back inside the vast emptiness of the hangar.

“You’re in love with me?” he repeated, expressionlessly.

“I have been in love with you from the moment I met you. You’re thoughtful, and gentle, and kind, and smart, and beautiful. You’ve treated me better than anyone I’ve ever known. And I was so scared…..so scared to say anything to you ever.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I didn’t want you to hate me…I couldn’t take the thought of you not being my friend anymore.”

“Why would you think I would hate you for that? You know I’m not gay.”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t feel the same about you. But I still think you’re a good friend.”

Pete’s eyes were welling with tears. “You do?”

“Of course. Look, you knew this would never work. You knew from the beginning that we could never be together.”

“Then why are you here? Why do I keep turning us over and over again in my head?”

The Dream-Steve smiled. “I’m here so you can say goodbye.” A large wooden door opened at the other end of the building, with a translucent light behind it. He reached out to Pete and held him in his arms for a long moment. Then he started to walk towards the door and was soon gone.

Pete woke up drenched in cold sweat and fumbled for the light. He sat there for some time, turning the dream over and over in his thoughts.

After a few minutes, he said, out loud, “Goodbye, Steve.” Then he turned off the light and went back to sleep.

November 2nd.

Pete It was Friday afternoon and Pete was at work, doing his usual cut and paste magic on an Excel spreadsheet. He was also a nervous wreck as his date with Shaun was later that night. He had briefly seen him earlier that day in the break room, when he had gone on a search for bottled water. Shaun was perched on the edge of the kitchen counter, nonchalantly munching a jelly donut and taking slurps from a massive Starbucks cup. He recognized him and waved an enormous paw in his direction.

“Hey, bud.” Shaun said in that gruff but caring tone that reduced Pete to quivering jelly. “How are ya?”

“Oh, hi, Shaun.” He opened the fridge door and scanned the contents for water. “How are you?”

“Just chillin’,” he drawled. He lowered his gaze to meet his eyes when they looked up from the fridge. “Looking forward to tonight.”

“Oh, me too. You still want to go out to that Brazilian steakhouse?” Pete asked.

Shaun laughed. “Do Bears like to eat steak? Of course. You have reservations at 7, you said?”

“Yep.” He had never called in reservations for a restaurant before. His evening meals normally consisted of microwave pasta and whatever he could grab from the corner 7-11. The idea of a nice table with several types of forks and cloth napkins and candles and china plates intimidated him. But it was a challenge he was ready to meet.

“See you then, Buddy.” He blushed a little when Shaun said this. He liked Shaun’s habit of taking those 50’s style words like buddy and pal and using them as terms of endearment. It was really kind of hot. He walked back to his cubicle singing a happy little tune. This evaporated when he returned to his work, but the flame of his happiness was still alive, waiting to be rekindled that night.

David David opened his eyes. He rubbed them, and then looked at the clock. 6:00. Not very helpful. AM or PM? He pulled back the bedroom curtains and looked outside. Dark.

That was not helpful either. He was adrift in a black, soundless oblivion.

He moaned, stretched, and turned on the TV. The Simpsons were on, so it must be PM. He padded in his sock feet out to the living room. It was empty. The remains of his door were gone and there was a large sheet flapping in its place. There was also a note on the floor, which he picked up and read. It was blurry at first glance, so he squinted at it until it resolved into letters.

It said, in a dramatic inky scrawl, My friend and me hauled the door out to the dumpster for you. I will send you the money to fix it by the end of the week. Don’t Blame you if you’re angry with me But I would still like to see you again under less crazy circumstances. You have my number, give me a call if you like. It’s been fun.

David looked at the paper for a while then put it back down on the floor. He thought about it for a while. He realized he had not once thought about his ex girlfriend the entire time Molly had been here. That was a very good thing, and more than a little surprising to him.

Did he miss her? That was crazy. Hadn’t he spent the last two days trying to get rid of her? That was true, but as he sat there in the tomblike stillness of the room, he was no longer so sure why he had wanted her gone so badly. He tried to piece the jagged pieces of the last couple of days together but they wouldn’t fit, and the effort caused him some considerable pain.

He lit a cigarette and sat there in the still cool darkness of his apartment, considering his various options. Call her, or not call her. He weighed the ramifications of each in his mind for a good minute or two before he just said, “Fuck it” and called her.

The phone rang. And rang. Finally he heard the recorded message pick up.

“Hi, I’m not in right now. Sorry that I missed you. Leave your name and number at the beep, and I’ll be sure to call you back. Bye.”

“Um, hi, it’s me. I know I was kind of an asshole to you, about the door and stuff, and after we, you know. I was really mean, and a total jerk, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and you should give me a call. We should go do something…. whatever you want. OK. You have my number, talk to you later.”

The phone clicked off and he sat there in the dark, thinking. What the hell was he doing? He realized the truth was that he couldn’t bear to be alone; he couldn’t stand to be alone with his thoughts and himself. He needed someone else there- to take the focus off himself. because when he examined himself, he really didn’t like what he saw. A drunk, self-pitying, short man who wasn’t getting any younger, and whose looks weren’t going to last forever.

Pete Pete stood in front of the restaurant, nervously looking at his watch. It was five minutes to seven. No sight of his date.

He shifted his ample weight from foot to foot. He was wearing a suit for one of the first times in his life and the necktie felt like it was strangling him. He had absolutely no idea how to tie it, but he was luckily able to find an Iphone app to help him with that. He chose the Windsor knot. He felt a bit like one of those circus bears crammed into a vest and fez. If only he had a little tricycle to ride around, he would really look the part.

Pete looked back at his watch again. Four minutes to seven. He sighed. He wondered if he was going to get stood up. He tried to shrug the thought out of his head as being ridiculous, but it dug its claws into his brain and refused to dislodge itself. Self-doubt was his oldest and closest friend.

Then he saw Shaun come ambling around the corner, and his heart soared. He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself.

Shaun nodded at him and stuck out his hand. “Hey, Bud, good to see ya. I hope you worked up an appetite- I know I did.” He rubbed his ample belly in demonstration of this.

They walked inside and were seated at a table near the kitchen, just as Shaun had requested.

“Why did you want a table near the kitchen?”

“Well, I know it’s a little weird, but I like seeing where my food is coming from.

Have you ever worked in a kitchen?”

“Oh yeah.” The ghost of Steve briefly flashed in his head.

“Right. Well, then, you know what I’m talking about. You never want to piss off anyone who’s preparing your food- anything could happen to it.”

“I once served a burger to someone that the other line cook had stuck down the front of his pants.” He smiled to himself at the memory.

Shaun laughed in disbelief. “Oh, my God, that’s hilarious. What did the guy do to deserve that?”

“Well, he propositioned the cashier, ordered food while on his cell phone, didn’t leave a tip, cut in the line- you know, your typical “me first” yuppie prick. He must have liked the burger, cause when I bussed the table later the whole thing was gone.”

“Must’ve liked those extra pubes.” Shaun nodded his acknowledgement of the waiter who was suddenly standing in front of them, regarding them with curiosity. “I would like a T-Bone, medium well, baked potato and salad with 1000 Island dressing please.”

‘Very good. And for you sir?”

“Uh…the same.” Pete didn’t really feel like navigating through the many pages of the menu, most of which featured a barely legible cursive script and contained descriptions of foods that he had no idea existed.

The waiter nodded and left them, mentally calculating his possible tip in his head. He didn’t look pleased with the results as he disappeared into the depths of the kitchen.

“Pretty creative order there, chief.”

“Uh, yeah. I never know what to order at these places.”

“I can tell. You look pretty uncomfortable in that suit, as well.”

“You noticed, huh?” Pete pulled at his collar.

“Oh yeah, you look like a little kid who had to get dressed up for a funeral. Play your cards right though, and we’ll have those clothes off you before you can say “Boo.” “ Pete blushed. “Hah. Well, I’ll see what I can do about that.”

Shaun smiled. “So…what do you think about the job?”

“I hate it. I can’t wait until it’s over. You’re the only good thing about it.”

“All you do, all day, is cut and paste Excel stuff into search engines? Over and over?”

“That’s it, yeah. Eight hours a day, with half an hour for lunch.” It sounded worse when he explained it out loud, he realized.

“How the fuck do you keep your sanity?”

“Well, they let me listen to music- that’s about all that helps.”

‘You’re down on the third floor with the Tech Geeks, right? They’re working on that optimizer thingy?” The project at hand was a WebCrawler that would scout for mentions of certain search terms for clients. All the upstairs guys would have to do is input these words into a field and they would instantly get positions, rank, etc. of these terms, leaving them more valuable time to check their Facebook status and play World of Warcraft.

“Yeah, I get to listen to them talk tech geek all day too. I usually have no idea what they are talking about.”

“At least they’re talking about actual things. All I hear all day long is shitty buzzwords like “synergy” and “co branding” and “virtual share” and crap like that from these skinny little ad majors fresh out of CU. What a bunch of fucking morons.

And they know absolutely nothing that isn’t directly in their field. You try to start a

conversation about art or history or philosophy or anything else, you get stared at like you just asked to massage their grandmother.”

“Exactly. Anything that doesn’t have to do with their work, they have no clue about.

They’re so wrapped up in this narrow little niche that they think is the totality of existence.”

Shaun took a long drink of water and patted down his mouth with the linen napkin as the salads arrived.

“Yeah. Obviously this isn’t what you wanted to be doing with your life. What would your dream job be?” “ I always wanted to be a writer, or editor…something creative. I love to read and write.”

“Really? I always wanted to be a writer too. I bought one of those tweed jackets just so I could feel like an author. I could never find the right pipe to go with it though.

My bong just doesn’t work with it, you know?” He swallowed a thick forkful of lettuce and tomato with gusto.

Pete’s eyes lit up with unfettered pleasure. “Oh, you like to smoke up, huh? Me too.”

“Really? I have some at my place if you want some after dinner treats.”

“That would be awesome. It’s been so dry lately. I considered going down Colfax and trying to get some brick weed.”

“Oh, you don’t want to deal with those jerks. My roommate has a medical marijuana card. He can get you anything you want. Afghani, Kush, Diesel, Blueberry, you name it.”

Pete started to involuntarily drool a little and caught himself, wiping the corner of his mouth. “Sounds great.”

“Yeah, I imagine that’s the only thing that makes life tolerable after doing that horrible soul-destroying work all day.”

This guy totally got him, Pete thought. He understands me. Finally.

“Well, yeah, pretty much. It definitely makes easier, you know. Makes watching TV a lot more entertaining.”

Shaun giggled. “We should get baked sometime and watch Yo Gabba Gabba, have you ever seen that crazy ass show? I swear all the drug dealers from the 90’s ended up working in children’s television.”

The waiter then approached their table with their steaks, and made a show of presenting them before laying them down on the table. They made the appropriate gestures of acknowledgment and the waiter scurried back to his station.

Shaun tucked in with relish, attacking his steak with knife and fork as if he thought it might roam off the table and back out to the pasture if he didn’t keep it from doing so.

Pete ate his steak rather more daintily. He was concentrating on watching Shaun.

Every movement he made was endlessly fascinating- every turn of his head, every

blink of his eyes. Fuck, he was beautiful. Who was this guy? And more to the point, where the fuck had he been hiding? After a moment of reflection, he realized that Shaun wasn’t the one who had been hiding- he had. Lost in an endless mobius strip of self-pity and helplessness, fueled by cynicism and inertia.

And all because of this endless fixation, this hopeless nostalgia for something that never happened. He had it all fixed in his mind how it should be, and when it didn’t turn out exactly that way, he decided the game was over. Looking over at Shaun’s round, kind face with his goofy grin and mouthful of steak, he decided he not only didn’t want the game to end, he was anxious to roll the dice and take his move.

Jo was in a taxi; en route to a new hotel- they could certainly no longer stay at the DTC suite, having left a considerable amount of damage there. She thought she would probably get some cheap Motel 6 by the airport, as her flight left the next day, and her latest escapade with Molly had left her severely drained. Her desire for adventure had been sated, and all she wanted to do now was lie on a hotel bed and watch brain-numbing American television.

Her cell phone rang. She picked it up.

“Hello?” she said. There was a momentary silence on the other end, then, “Uh…. It’s me. What’s going on?”

Jo let out a sharp exhalation of surprise. She recognized the voice instantly.

“What the hell do you want? I thought you never wanted to see me again.”

“Well, I’ve been doing some thinking…. and I would really like to see Molly again.”

“Are you kidding? You really hurt her, bad.”

“I know that and I’m sorry.”

‘So what, you think you love her now, is that it?”

“I don’t know. I just know that I want her to be here.”

“You don’t have the slightest fucking idea what love is. You just don’t want to be alone.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Why don’t you call her?”

“She isn’t answering her phone. I sent her a bunch of text messages and she didn’t answer those either.”

“Well, as far as I know, she’s at her house.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“And I suppose know you expect me to tell you where that is, right?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“God, you’re such an asshole.”

“I have a theory as to why you’re so mad at me.”

“Oh really? Spill it, I’m dying to know.”

“We got interrupted when we were making out on the couch, and you’re upset that I slept with Molly and not you.”

“Is that it?” Jo scoffed.

‘Isn’t it? She got a little piece of me and you got nothing, after you put up with her crazy shit all night.”

“Well, you do have that bad boy vibe going for you, I guess, but I usually never go for that.”

“You seemed to be going for it pretty hard when you were coating my neck with your spit. “ Jo couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, you’re right, I suppose. I guess I was attracted to you at first, even though you repulse me now. God dam you for making me say that.”

“Women tend to have a conflicted relationship with me, it’s all right.”

“Right. So, why don’t we meet somewhere, and I’ll give you her address.”

“Are you kidding? Why can’t you just tell me?”

“C’mon, you owe me this much. Don’t forget I drug your unconscious ass up a flight of stairs. How many girls would do that for you?”

“You’re the first one, I would have to admit.”

“Fine. Meet me by the Walgreen’s on Colfax.”

“Why the hell do you want to meet there?”

“I have my reasons. Just be there in a hour.”

“All right.”

ONE HOUR LATER Jo was standing in front of the Coke machines as he walked up, arms folded and looking as tough as she could. There was a noisy group of teenagers gathered around a Lincoln town car at the far end of the parking lot, playing obnoxiously loud rap and surreptitiously trying to smoke a joint. David ignored them and walked straight up to her.

“OK, I’m here. What, did you need to buy laundry detergent or something? Looks like it’s on sale.” He pointed to a sign saying as much on the front windows in an attempt to bolster his joke, but she was in no mood for it and didn’t bite.

“Shut up. Just follow me.” Without another word Jo started walking across the parking lot, past the noisy youths, and onto the cracked sidewalk. David followed, quickly.

She walked for about half a block until she stopped in front of a dilapidated looking row house. The lawn was brown and patchy with weeds. There was a threatening looking note tacked to the front door discouraging salesmen from stopping there.

“What the hell is this? She lives in this dump?”

“No, she doesn’t live here. But she’s staying here.”

“With who?”

“With her boyfriend, you dope.” Jo sighed in exasperation.

“Wait…what?”

“Well, I don’t know if they’re really friends at this point, but this is the guy who she sleeps with.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why did you sleep with her?”

“Well, she basically talked me into it.”

“There you go.”

David stared down fixedly at the ground. “Does he love her?”

She laughed. “Now how the hell would I know that? Why don’t you ask him?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Because he’s standing in the doorway, staring at you right now.”

SHAUN

He was halfway down the street and driving home when he heard the song on his Itouch that made him think of his old boyfriend come up on shuffle. He felt a sharp little twinge of nostalgia.

“ Perfect Kiss” by New Order, that was his let’s-get-it on song. That was Keith for you. He was a dyed in the wool new waver, down to the floppy hair. Too bad he was born in 1989. Shaun whistled along and struck his meaty thigh in matched rhythm with the song’s signature staccato drumbeat. He thought of the sloppy drunk sex he’d had with Keith on his old dorm futon at that Halloween party with that song playing. His chest had a ring of bright red hickeys from the tongue bath Keith had given him. Good times. It was amazing that futon isn’t just a pile of dust and splinters now with the pounding it got.

He merged into highway traffic, whistling along with the keyboard riff, and soon all movement slowed to a crawl. Aw, the 5:15 slug walk, familiar to all work drones. All around him was a vast, unmoving sea of grim-faced workers trapped in their cars. He turned up the music and let his mind wander.

Shaun found himself disappointed in the lack of bears at his new job. Well, there was that one cute beefy nervous guy over with the spambot drones he’d seen, but he’d just gotten the briefest glimpse at him. That Abercrombie queen aside, he thought he might be the only gay man in the office. Again.

You’ve got to put yourself back in the game, Shaun thought. Keith left four months ago to piss off to Europe and he’s not coming back. I bet he’s stoned out of his mind right now at some little shitty coffeeshop in Amsterdam. Just keep your heart and your eyes open, just like Mom used to say. Who knows what might be out there waiting for you, right? You’re a pretty woofy guy, there’s no reason you can’t get a new boyfriend.

Traffic started to move again, and his mind wandered on to other time-honored classic topics such as “Is There Food in My Refrigerator?” and “Do I Have Clean Clothes For Tomorrow?” The song came to a close as he made the final turn onto his street.

SHAUN AND PETE The two bears had a lovely meal and fine dessert, and adjourned to Shaun’s den for after dinner treats. In the taxi on the way over, Shaun had rested his hand on Pete’s thigh, who was a little shocked by the contact. He made no effort to move it, however.

Shaun’s apartment was in its typical state of chaos. Large piles of books covered every available surface. Encrusted dishes were piled high in the sink, and dirty laundry was heaped in a corner giving off a distinctly funky aroma. Shaun shot Pete an apologetic look.

“I’m truly sorry this place is such a disaster, “ he sighed.

Pete accepted his apology and assured him that it was all right. Truth be told, he really could care less. His place was no different, and he would have hung out with Shaun in a garbage dump if he had asked him. Just being around him made him feel happy. What an odd feeling.

Shaun rustled noisily around in the hall closet before loudly announcing his victorious find. “Aha! Found it!”

“What’s that?”

Shaun pulled out a six-foot high purple glass bong, with a wickedly grinning skull forming the base. It was the sort of device that only serious, hardcore smokers would attempt to use. This was not for smoking ditchweed with your pals in junior high, this was weapons grade material.

“We used to call this baby The Destroyer of Worlds back in college. Haven’t used it for a while, but I felt that tonight was a special occasion, so…”

“Well, it’s certainly reminding me of college. Those memories are kind of fuzzy, though.”

Shaun laughed and opened a side compartment in his desk, revealing a plastic bag full of sticky, crystalline buds. He broke one apart with his thick fingers and started stuffing it into the bowl of the bong. Then he proudly presented it, with lighter, to his guest.

“You get the freshie hit, of course, as the guest.” Shaun demurred.

Pete picked it up. “Wow, thanks.” He lit the bowl and inhaled. The chamber filled up almost instantly with thick, pungent smoke. He lifted his finger off the carb and smoke shot up to his brain. He attempted to hold it in but collapsed into a hacking fit.

“Are you OK? That bitch packs quite a wallop.”

Pete kept hacking. He had turned beet red. Smoke was curling out of his mouth in a cartoon-like fashion as he attempted to speak.

Shaun walked over and slapped him firmly on the back. “Yeah, this baby is brutal.

Here, let me get you a glass of water.” He padded off to the kitchen to attempt to find a clean glass.

Pete’s coughs subsided after a few drinks, and he looked around, dazedly, at his unfamiliar surroundings. He noticed a tattered poster of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust on one of the walls. He was wearing ridiculously thick pancake makeup and staring out at the camera with a dispassionate, inhuman, ice covered gaze. He was the living avatar of detached cool.

“You like Bowie, huh?”

Shaun emerged from the kitchen holding two plastic cups of ice water, one of which he placed in front of Pete.

‘Oh, yeah. I was way into Bowie when I first came out, dude. I was scared that being gay meant I had to listen to shit like opera and show tunes and fucking Michael Buble….yuck. Then I got turned onto Bowie by this dealer I knew – who used to have the most killer Afghani hash by the way, but that’s another story- and it was amazing. A guy that kissed his guitar player on stage, played in dresses, and he wrote the most amazing, legendary music as well. Of course it was disappointing, you know, in the 80’s when he started backtracking on all that stuff. Not so coincidentally, that was when his music started to turn shitty. I mean, what was with that “Glass Spider” shit? And then he got married to some supermodel. Idols will always let you down, man, cause you want to see yourself in them. But they’re not you- you’re you.” He took a large gulp of water.

Pete nodded ferociously. The pot was making him very talkative. “I know just what you’re saying, I felt the same way about Lou Reed. He wrote all these awesome Velvets songs, and “Walk On The Wild Side”, and just produced this huge body of work, a complete antidote to all the hippy flower-power bullshit that was going on at the time, and made it cool to be a fag and do all these drugs I’d never heard of before, and had the balls to release a record that was just god-awful droning feedback, basically saying “Fuck You” to all of his fans, and it turns out he’s not gay, he started doing Honda commercials, and then ends up marrying some New York performance art woman? I was so let down by that. Where are the rocking queers these days?”

Shaun was sucking on the bong through this entire tirade, but exhaled when he finished and said, “Oh, they’re out there, dude. There just aren’t a lot of role models for gay kids, let alone cubs.” Smoke floated above his head like the halo of a wicked angel.

“Who are they supposed to be inspired by, Adam Lambert? That guy makes me sick with his fucking emo-kid haircut and whiny expression. He thinks he’s so edgy, but he’s got as much edge as Phil Collins.”

“God, me too. Is he supposed to be the poster boy for the new generation of gays? If so, then we’re all fucked.” Shaun passed the bong back to Pete, who happily inhaled.

He got a much smoother hit this time. He was getting the hang of this.

Shaun sat next to him on the couch as he exhaled his hit. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, dude, but you can stay here tonight if you want to. I can’t really drive in this state, and besides…”

Pete interrupted. “No, no, I want to stay here. I do. I was hoping you would say something. I’m not too good about making the first move.”

“Well, good.” Pete felt Shaun’s large paw brush slowly across his crotch. “Why don’t we get a little more comfortable? C’mon, take off that monkey suit.”

Pete was happy to hear this as the tie he was wearing was digging into his neck, and the belt was tightening against the steak and dessert he’d had earlier.

Shaun handed him some hangers for his suit and slacks. “You can put these in the hall closet if you want.” Shaun tugged off his shoes and undid the buttons on his plaid shirt. Soon he was wearing only a thin cotton undershirt, boxers and mismatched socks. “Aah. So much better.”

Pete soon was wearing only the undershirt/boxers/socks combo and felt much more at home. The pot’s effects were coming on strong now and he wanted to sink into the couch, which he did. Shaun followed him.

“This is nice,” Pete said. His head was pulsing with manic nervousness.

Shaun smiled but said nothing. He reached over and kissed him softly on the cheek.

“I really like you. I think we have something really good going here.”

Pete beamed. “I do too.” He kissed Shaun back on the cheek, slower this time.

Pete heard himself saying, “I’m so lonely, Shaun. I’m so fucking lonely. I’ve wanted this for so long. So long.” Why was he saying that? The words had evaded the sentry that usually blocked such things from leaving his head.

Shaun said nothing, just nodded his head and extended his arms around Pete, enfolding him in a strong bear hug. Pete could smell the musk underneath Shaun’s armpits misking with the cloud of pot smoke above him.

“Mmmm. You want to see my bedroom?” Shaun purred.

Pete did, very much so. More than he had ever wanted anything else, ever.

Shaun arose from the couch and opened his bedroom door, flicked on the light and surveyed the interior. After throwing a pile of shirts off the bed, he motioned for Pete to join him.

Pete looked around. A large, unmade bed in one corner, and a huge television and XBox set up in the other, with various piles of books, records and clothes placed at random points between them. It was a true bear’s den, smelling of musk and incensemasked pot.

“Sorry it’s so messy in here, dude.” Shaun grunted, kicking some books and clothes hastily underneath the bed with one foot.

Pete was about to utter some polite dismissal of his remark when Shaun was upon him, hands at his back, mouth locked with his and tongue probing. Whatever he had meant to say was quickly lost in the ether.

He exhaled in surprise and then returned the tongue, deeper this time. Shaun’s thick fingers were tousling his hair, and then kneading into his back. The sensation of physical touch jolted him, spurring him further on.

“Oh, yeah, you’re so…oh my God, that feels so good. I….” Pete was trying to speak but the sensations flowing through him were opening long dormant pathways inside his brain, synapses sparking and flooding his mouth with nonsense.

Shaun nodded and gave him a look of animal lust. “I want to blow you, dude. Can I blow you?”

Pete shuddered with delight. “ Oh yes, oh yes.”

Shaun dropped to the ground and reached through Pete’s boxers to find his stiffening cock, already glistening with clear pre-cum in anticipation of its own imminent relief.

When Shaun took it into his mouth, Pete reeled back in shock, like dropping into an ice bath. The sensation was all encompassing and synapse frying, and nothing like his typical mundane masturbation, which was far less about sex than routine and sleep aid. He started yelping sharp barks of pleasure, and when Shaun finished and returned his attention to massaging his back, he was still making the same noises. Shaun got up to drink some water, and when he returned he flipped off the light switch and crawled into the bed, nestling next to him in the warm, flannel-sheeted bed. Pete encircled Shaun like he was hugging a pillow, something he had done oh so many uncountable times, but this was no pillow, it was a real, flesh and blood person…and he was getting hugged back as well, feeling the warm swell of Shaun’s fleshy belly against his. He felt as if he might burst with joy, here in this cave.

They lay together for hours in the sanctuary of the bed making love, and when dim light and muted birdsong crept into the room, they were sleeping peacefully arm in arm.

David The skinny tattooed man at the door looked at them suspiciously.

“Who the hell are you? What do you want?”

“You remember me, don’t you, Mark? “

“Oh, you’re Molly’s friend, huh? Well, she’s sleeping right now and I don’t want to wake her up. Something really upset her.”

David shifted his feet, nervously. He turned to Jo for a cue.

“Well, my friend here has a message for her.” Jo nudged him in the ribs. “Go ahead.”

“Just tell her when she wakes up that I was here, and I’m sorry.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“She’ll know.” He made a face he hoped would be seen as intimidating.

‘Listen, buddy, I can already tell I don’t like you. I bet you’re that asshole she was telling me about. You are, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” Intimidating face ineffective, check.

“She saves your ass from going to jail, and you treat her like a piece of trash. Well, fuck you, why should I do you any favors?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you, why the hell are you hanging out with this douchebag?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m trying to figure that out myself.”

“Well, work this out between yourselves. I’m not getting involved in this crap.”

He slammed and locked the door. They both watched him walk back up the stairs and turn off the downstairs lights.

“OK, that didn’t go so great, “ she said. ‘But at least you know where she is, right?”

David sat down at the foot of the porch. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“What do you want to do now?”

He said nothing. Instead, he began to weep. Softly at first, then louder. He wept with his face buried in his hands.

“I’m such an idiot,” he howled in between sobs. “I’m such a jerk.”

“Yup,” she said, opening her purse to remove a cigarette. She nonchalantly inserted it between her teeth, lit it and exhaled in his direction.

He continued, sobbing relentlessly until she finished her cigarette and stood there watching him impassively.

She started to say something, paused, reconsidered it, and then said, “I’m going to go get a hotel room. Do you want to come with me?” David looked up at her and said yes.

Pete Pete opened his eyes, rolled over in bed and looked at the alarm clock. Five a.m. He moaned and tried to roll over, but Shaun had his legs in a scissor lock and was blissfully and loudly snoring away.

He was taken aback by the sensation of another warm body in the same bed with him.

It felt strangely alien. He lay there on his side basking in the view of Shaun. His messy hair, the cute butt covered by plaid boxers, the little jagged scar on the back of his left ankle (“me being stupid” was the only explanation he received when he asked him how it had happened), his hobbit-like feet with his little sausage-roll toes covered in thick hair.

He stared and stared and realized that he had not thought about Steve once, for the entire night. That in itself was a minor victory to him. Steve was a distant past now, a painful aberration of his youth that was cemented in the far and dusty long ago. The future was laying here before him, in the form of this fuzzy and adorable bear. Shaun emitted another loud snore and rolled over, finally releasing Pete’s foot from his unwitting grip.

Pete padded down the hallway as quietly as he knew how to the bathroom. As he stood there urinating, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His hair was matted and stuck out at odd angles, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was smiling. The sight of him smiling almost made him laugh. He felt afire, galvanized by the amazing sex from the night before. A vibrant and pulsing energy poured through him and filled his consciousness entirely.

As he crawled back into bed, he heard the sparrows outside the window singing their morning call. He felt as if they were singing their simple, lovely song just for him. It made him tear up and he turned his gaze back to Shaun’s slumbering ursine form. He felt like he could do this for quite some time.

David In the hotel room, David took off his shoes while sitting in the armchair, and stared at the ground. Jo came back from the bathroom and looked at him.

“Look,” she said, “We both know that you acted like a total jerk, right?”

“Agreed.”

“And I will admit that I was attracted to you earlier. You’re a good-looking guy, and you have that bad boy vibe…but that was earlier. That would just be too sad now, and it’s not what either of us needs.”

“Wait, what? You let me come into your hotel room but we can’t sleep together?”

“Oh, we can sleep together, sure. No sex, though.”

David was confused. “And why is this?”

“Because,” she said, “ you’re just lonely. Sex with me isn’t going to make you any less lonely, especially after tomorrow when I’m gone. And I have the feeling that sleeping with you is something I would intensely regret. Not that it would be bad, in fact I have the feeling it would be pretty hot. But I’m going to follow my conscience on this one.”

He blinked. “OK, what can we do?”

“We can talk.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“No, I mean really talk.”

“What does that involve?” David began to get a little nervous. This would probably involve discussing his feelings. He tried very hard not to have any.

“Us being honest with each other.”

“All right.”

“Do you want to hear my take on the situation?” Jo walked to the bed and sat down on it, legs crossed.

“Yes.”

“You’re lazy.”

David coughed. “Um, OK, could you expand on that a little?”

“You’re lazy because you’ve never had to work for anything, your whole life.

Women throw themselves at you constantly. That doesn’t happen for every dude in the world. Guys expend massive amounts of energy, money and time to get the same results you could get in your sleep.”

“Go on.”

“So, Molly intrigues you because she decides now, after she threw yourself at her, that she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. You expect her to do whatever you want, But why should she? It’s just your massive ego and selfishness that gets in the way of your seeing this. Everyone else sees it, believe me.”

He considered this for a moment and said nothing.

“Tell me if I’m wrong.” Jo said.

“No, no, you’re not wrong,” he said after a prolonged pause. “ It’s just that no one ever said that to me before.”

“Well, let me say I’m proud to be the first. “ Jo paused and chewed the top of her lip in thought, then continued:

“Then there’s the matter of your drinking.”

“Yes?” “I know you were throwing up blood in the bathroom. I know you drink way too much and that you have ever since your girlfriend left.”

“And?” He scoffed.

“Don’t you think you have a problem?”

“I know I have a problem. I don’t give a shit.”

Jo sighed in exasperation. “What are you, twelve? You can drop the pissed off teenager act now, cause I don’t buy it anymore. If you didn’t give a shit, you wouldn’t be looking so hard for someone to save you from yourself.”

“Wow, Oprah, did Dr. Phil help you with that diagnosis? Since when did you become a psychologist?”

“Do you want my help or not? Because if you don’t, you can just leave right now.”

She pointed towards the door.

David started to protest and then stopped. “Alright, go on.”

“You don’t want a girl because you want someone to love. You want someone who will do everything for you. See, we’re back to the lazy thing again.”

“So, what do you think I should do?”

“I think you need to be alone for a while.”

“What?”

“When’s the last time you didn’t have a girlfriend?”

David thought back, through college and high school, back into junior high, then elementary school.

“Uh, fifth grade I guess?” Christ, had it really been that long?

‘Right. You have always had girls around doing shit for you. And your girlfriend has been gone for how long?”

He did the math in his head.

“Um, a little over two weeks?” Had it really only been that long?

“And in two weeks of being alone, you have a total breakdown and almost kill yourself with booze? Two weeks out of your entire adult life you’re alone and it brings you to this state?”

“What’s your point?”

“You just have to have someone there to distract you from yourself, because you really don’t like yourself that much. So what you need to do is obvious.”

“Is it?”

“You need to become a better person.”

“Oh, is that all?” he scoffed.

“Yes. I mean, look at yourself. Look at the state you’re in. What girl would want that? I’ll tell you, some self-hating, naïve girl who thinks that she can fix you. That’s the vibe you send out, buddy. And that’s what you’ve always had.”

David wanted to tell her she was wrong so badly, but the fact was she was very effectively peeling down his defenses layer by layer, and he could do little at this point but just nod his head in assent. He felt dizzy and was glad he was sitting down.

“You won’t be happy until you become a better person. And when you become a better person you will find a better girl. Stop your crying about yourself and your romantic disillusionment. People everywhere have it way worse than you, believe me.

Try thinking about someone beside yourself for a change, and see what happens.”

Jo said nothing for a moment. He responded, “Is that all?”

“Pretty much. So, do you agree with my assessment of the situation?”

“As much as it pains me to say it, yes.”

“And you promise to me right now that you will try and be a better person?”

“Yes, I promise.” David pointed at the bedside table. “You want me to get out the Gideon Bible and swear on that?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She sat up from the bed and picked up the phone on the nightstand.

“Hello, room service? Yes. I would like to order some dinner. Can I get some turkey sandwiches and Cokes?” She looked over at the man, and said “Do you like turkey?”

He nodded yes. “Yes, two turkey sandwiches and two Cokes. Thank you.”

“My treat, don’t worry. Besides, you need to eat something. You’ll feel better after you do. And you need to drink something that isn’t booze.”

“Thank you.”

“Now let’s see what’s on TV.”

Molly Molly rolled over in bed and opened her eyes. Daniel was still lying next to her, breathing heavily. She nudged him sharply with her elbow.

He sleepily asked, “What?”

“I thought I heard something downstairs.”

Daniel yawned loudly. “Yeah, that jerk you were telling me about was here with some girl. He wanted to say he was sorry but I told him to go fuck off.”

“He actually came here?” That surprised her and she wasn’t sure why.

“Yeah, they were at the front door. Baby, don’t worry about it, they’re gone and they aren’t coming back, OK? Just go back to sleep, I gotta work in the morning.” He turned on his side, indicating the conversation was at an end.

Molly sat there for a while, thoughts turning in her head. Once again, she found herself at a juncture. After mulling her options, she sidled up to Dan’s body. He made a pleased sound in return.

“Baby, I would love to do it again, but I just can’t.”

“No. I just want to hold you, OK?”

“But you know I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know. I just want to hold you.”

He sighed. “OK, babe, if that’s what makes you happy.” He fell asleep with Molly’s arms encircling him tightly. Her grip stayed that tight until she, too, fell asleep, and even then only slightly. ******************************************************************** ************ Pete Shaun awoke to see Pete staring back at him. He smiled and rubbed his eyes.

“Good morning, cutie.” Shaun said in a voice soft with sleep.

“Good morning.”

“What time is it?” He yawned and looked over towards the alarm clock.

‘Crap, it’s almost 11!” Shaun sat up in bed. “How long have you been awake?”

“I don’t know, awhile.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You looked so peaceful lying there I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Awww. OK. I just had some stuff to do today, but I guess it can wait.”

“We still have plenty of time. What needs to get done?”

“Well, I need to get groceries, and return some movies, and get the oil changed in my car.”

“Is that all?” Pete said expectantly.

“Um, yeah. I think so.”

“That won’t take all day.”

“Well, I have to take you back home as well.”

“Do you really?”

“Sadly, yes.” Shaun got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom.

Pete sat there, apprehension and fear beginning to circle through his head again. Was this it? Was he just a trick? Would he ever see this guy again? Had he been used? Just what the fuck was going on? Panic started to grip him by the heels and drag him back down into that old, familiar spiral.

He stood and stared out the bedroom window until Shaun appeared behind him, tapping him on the shoulder.

‘What’s wrong?” he said, concerned.

“I just….I…I’m feeling a lot of stuff right now I don’t know how to express.” Pete waved his hands in an approximation of his feelings.

Shaun nodded, and wrapped his arm around him reassuringly. Pete felt tingly at the warmth and closeness of him. Shaun rubbed his chin thoughtfully before speaking.

“I understand. When’s the last time you slept with someone?”

‘Do you really want to know?” he winced.

“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

‘Oh, God, don’t make me say it out loud.” His face flushed and reddened in shame.

“C’mon, dude. You can trust me.”

“Four years.” He was ashamed and a little distressed to say this out loud.

Shaun furrowed his brow and refocused his gaze. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. Well, that explains a lot.”

“What do you mean?” Pete said nervously.

“Never mind. Look, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you listen to me very carefully, all right? I just think I should lay all my cards out on the table.”

“Yes.” Pete looked expectantly at him.

“I think you’re great. You’re funny, nice, handsome, you have good taste, you’re easy to get along with- I like you, a lot. I want to see you again. But sometimes I get moody, you know? Like I don’t want to be around people. But when I’m done being moody, I will always come back to you.”

Pete nodded, and Shaun continued.

“And I can’t imagine how it must have been for you being alone for four years. That must have been terrible for you. I’ve never been shy, I’ve always been this in your face, loudmouth dude, you know? I’ve been out since I was 15, and I’ve always been around bears. So I know you’re feeling a lot of weird emotions right now. But, I am not going anywhere. I want to get to know you better, a lot better. But I also would like time to myself as well, you know? That’s not a judgment on you, it just means sometimes I need my space.”

“OK.” “I’m going out with some friends tonight, and tomorrow my parents are supposed to come around for dinner, But the day after that I want to hang out with you, OK? Maybe we can go and try and find a decent Karaoke Bar in this town.”

“Yes.” Pete felt warm tears of joy forming at the corners of his eyes.

‘All right. Can I take you back home now? Maybe swing through somewhere to get a little breakfast?”

“Sure.”

“Come here.” Shaun grabbed him and gave him a passionate kiss that startled Pete a little with its intensity, making his toes curl in his shoes. After he released him, Pete stood up and started gathering his things, whistling a happy tune to himself. It was the song he planned to sing on his first Karaoke excursion with Shaun. He didn’t have any idea how it would be received by the regulars or what his chances of winning were. But it was his song, and he realized that was enough.

Jo Jo sunk down into her plane seat and looked out at the runway tarmac. She had barely made it to the airport on time, having stayed up all night talking. He really wasn’t such a bad guy, but just needed someone to slap him around a bit. Hopefully some of what she had told him would stick.

She was exhausted. It had seemed like the last week had lasted a year, and she anticipated getting back to her flat and subsuming back into her regular routine. She wondered how Molly was. Maybe her days of debauchery were finally at an end.

Sad, really, all that girl has been through. She pulled out her cell and dialed her number.

The sleepy voice on the other end sounded a million miles away, although it was really just a short jaunt down the road. “Hello?”

“Molly? How are you?”

The voice creaked back into life. “Hey, girl! What’s up?”

“Oh, I just got on the plane. I’m so bloody tired. This week really took it out of me.”

“Tell me about it,” she answered.

“You know we tried to come see you last night, But your boy said you were sleeping.”

“Yeah, I heard. So how is he?”

“He’ll live. We had a long talk last night and I think he’s going to try being on his own for a while. He’s going to put the booze away for a while as well.”

“Sounds good.” She was relieved to hear this.

“You know that you and him together would have been a disaster, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” She sounded half doubtful.

“Don’t give me that, Molly.”

‘Yeah, you’re right.” Jo had a knack for dragging the truth out of her.

“You know, you’ve had enough excitement for six lifetimes. Maybe it’s time to quit looking for drama in your life.”

“I know, we’re not in college anymore, right?”

“Daniel is much better for you. He treats you nice and doesn’t give you shit.”

“Right.” Molly paused. “But you know, I don’t think I really love him.”

“Well, that’s never stopped you before, right? The sex is still good though?”

“Oh, God yes.” She chuckled. “Especially last night. He was really, really happy to see me again. I won’t be able to walk right for days.”

“Well, there you are. Good sex outweighs true love any day of the week.”

“Well, what about you, sweetness? You’ve been giving out romance advice for everyone else, you have any prospects on the horizon?”

The image of Cal flashed through her head briefly, before she said, “What, are you kidding? No prospects for me. Back to work.”

“Come on, girl. Time for you to get back in the game.”

“Well, we’ll see. Who knows what might happen.”

“That’s right.”

“OK Molly, they’re making the announcement to turn off the cell phones. I got to go now. I love you and I’ll call you when I get home, OK?” “Love you girl. Bye.” Jo threw the phone back into her purse and scrunched down in her seat. A twentyhour plane ride stretched in front of her. She wished she had brought along a book, or a magazine, or something to occupy herself with. The thought of leafing through the same Sky Mall catalog again did not please her.

She felt a light tap on her shoulder. A middle-aged man with a scruffy, five o’ clock shadow and rumpled business suit was standing there.

“Pardon me darling, but that’s my seat by the window there,” he said in a thick Texas accent that you could practically smell the oil rise off of.

“Oh, go ahead.” She raised her legs up to allow him to pass. He thanked her and collapsed into his seat.

“Damn, almost didn’t make it to the plane. My friends bought me a few too many drinks last night.” He reeked of stale beer and cigar smoke.

She laughed. “Yeah, I know how that goes.” Boy, did she ever.

“You have such a wonderful accent, darlin’. Are you from London?”

“Yeah, I’ve been out here visiting a friend. Going back to work now. What brings you there?”

He ran a comb through his tousled and dirty blonde hair. “Business. Selling. The usual.”

“Oh yeah? What do you sell? Anything interesting?”

“I guess you could say I sell dreams, little lady. But more to the point, I’m in the TV game.”

“TV, huh? What, like reality shows?” She felt a flutter of interest.

“Exactly. Right now, we are searching for contestants for this pilot that we’re shopping around.”

“What’s the pilot?”

‘Well, darlin’, it doesn’t have a name yet, but the basic concept is pretty simple. We put two roommates together, one Brit, one Yank, as a kind of transatlantic Odd Couple meets The Real World kind of thing. We’re looking for really larger-than-life people, who attract conflict. Cause you know, that’s what the advertisers always tell us people love the most about this stuff. They thrive on conflict.”

She registered this and then leaned in closer.

“Buddy, have I got a story for you. Her name is Molly.”

Jo told the story of her friend, and watched amusedly as she saw the dollar signs light up in the Texan’s eyes. It was then she realized that there was plenty of money to be made from Molly’s larger than life antics. She could be a bigger hit than anyone on The Apprentice or Jersey Shore, that’s for sure. It seemed like a more than fair trade off to her. As the plane started to taxi for takeoff, the Texan was excitedly offering her a position as show consultant, and she knew her crappy job would soon become a distant memory. She smiled with wry self-satisfaction and continued to listen to the Texan pitch his ideas. His voice sounded like warm rain on a metal roof. She closed her eyes.

Pete and Shaun They pulled up to the bear bar in Shaun’s car just as the first karaoke singer was taking the stage, eager to tear into his own unique take on “Like A Virgin”.

“I can’t believe you were afraid of coming here,” said Shaun as they walked up to the front door. “I mean, this would seem like the friendliest place in town to me.”

Pete blushed red a little and cleared his throat. “Well, I had no one to go with before.”

He was not quite sure how to adequately illustrate this point, so he decided to just let it lay.

The enormous bouncer who glanced at their ideas was squeezed into a sequined cocktail dress that was clinging to him like a sausage casing. He waved them inside and scratched at his hairy ass.

Pete surveyed the room. At last inside the castle. All around him was a sea of furry, beefy men all talking, laughing, exchanging knowing looks, and some of those men were now looking at him, surveying him from top to bottom, and some even offering growled woofs of approval. That was a new feeling and he liked it, quite a bit indeed.

Shaun recognized the bartender and waved to get his attention. The bartender was a moon-faced young burly cub, with a close-cropped patch of wispy blonde hair that would be entirely gone by the time he hit 35. He recognized Shaun and waved them over.

“Hey, buddy.” said the bartender, shaking Shaun’s hand. “Who’s your woofy friend?”

“This is Pete, we’re dating now.”

Pete extended his hand and the bartender gave him a bonecrunchingly strong handshake.

“Nice to meet ya, Petey. What’s yer poison? We just got some absinthe in back if you really wanna be climbing the walls.”

“I think maybe we should build up to that.”

“Good point. How about a vodka tonic?”

“Make that two?”

“You got it. First rounds on me, OK?” Pete blinked his eyes in surprise. “Really?”

“I insist.”

“Why?” “Oh, ask your friend there, Petey. He knows why.” Thirty seconds later two extra strength top-shelf vodka tonics were sitting there before them on the bar.

“Here you go, buddy.” The bartender then was quickly gone, his attention fixed to the next bear demanding beer.

Shaun handed Pete his drink and they clinked glasses in a toast.

“What are we toasting?” Shaun said.

“This is a toast to us.”

“OK.” Pete took a swallow before he said in a breathy rush, “ I love you, Shaun.”

Shaun said, “I love you too Pete,” before grabbing him in a hasty embrace and giving him a full-throated kiss. Soon the bears surrounding them were growling in approval and cheering them on. They completed the kiss and opened their eyes and looked around, at all the friendly bearded faces surrounding them.

Shaun laughed. “ I think we just insured ourselves free drinks for the rest of the night.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right about that.” Pete and Shaun finished their drinks and headed for the karaoke stage, hand in hand. Pete even felt happy and loose enough to give his butt a sassy little waggle as they walked up. He knew the song they were going to sing together was going to be a big hit with the crowd, because it was his song and Shaun’s song, together. How could a combination like that possibly fail? He picked up the mike and started singing.

Postscript: November 5th Pete and Shaun stumbled into the lobby of their apartment building, laughing and singing at the top of their ample lungs. The bar had been crowded and the two of them had attracted many pairs of eyes as they had staggered around on the dancefloor wiggling their rumps to the latest Gaga remix and pawing each other relentlessly.

They were both giddy on alcohol and each other’s company.

Fumbling for his keys, Pete dropped them on the ground, causing Shaun to laugh out loud, again. He bent down to pick them up but lost his balance and fell onto the carpet with a large thud, which echoed through the whole building, David poked his head out of his door and looked at the scene before him. “What the hell?” he said.

Pete stood and bellowed, “Oh, hey, sorry, man! Did we wake you up?”

David rubbed his head idly. “No…you guys are just really loud.”

“Hey, I remember now. That crazy guy that was in my apartment- he broke down your door, right? That’s what the cops were telling me.”

“Actually, the cops broke down the door, but-“ “So what happened to that guy?” Pete interrupted.

“Still in jail, as far as I know.”

“Ah. Well, we stole this from the Bear bar,” he said, producing a large bottle of whiskey from his coat, “and we’re going to do some shots. Do you want to join us?”

“No, man, I don’t drink anymore.”

Pete furrowed his brow with concern. “Ah. Good man. Good man. But let me ask you this: do you smoke, not tobacco if you know what I’m saying? You know, do you like Denver Nuggets but not the basketball team?” He grinned conspiratorially at his clever analogy.

“Oh yeah.” This dude smoked weed? He never would have guessed that. But he never would have guessed he was gay either, so there you go.

“Well, we want to smoke but I don’t have a bong. Do you have a bong?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Well, do you want to bring your bong over and smoke with me and my… boyfriend?”

David blinked his eyes. “Oh, you guys are dating?”

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“No, no, I just never would have guessed that.”

“You and the rest of the world, buddy.” Pete smacked him on the back.

“Alright, let me grab the bong and change the water and I’ll be right over.”

“Sweet.” Pete unlocked his door. “See you in a minute.”

Shaun followed Pete inside. “He seems like a nice guy.”

“Yeah, I thought he was an asshole when I first moved in here, but he turned out to be a real cool guy. I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Well, maybe he just needed a little help.” Shaun tackled Pete from behind in a tight embrace, surprising him and causing them both to come tumbling to the ground with a loud crash. They were still like that, bellowing and rolling around on the living room floor giggling maniacally when David reappeared with the bong in hand, causing him to bust out laughing, despite his best efforts.