Fucking up - September 25, 2006

People always say I'm the nicest person ever, and that's not true. Sometimes I fuck up.

Andy was my only friend. I had a few so-so acquaintances on the perimeter, I suppose--people I went to college with who weren't totally repulsed by my fits of hysteria and my violent critique of their work. Wrong, wrong wrong, all of it. Trite. Stupid. I was right and you couldn't argue with me. There was a loose bevy of people I occasionally went out drinking with, but that lot was dwindling for several reasons. I was afraid of sex, wasn't polite, offered little peace to the atmosphere and was so intellectually condescending, so unable to cease being condescending, that I more often than not got trashed to quit harping. I regularly drank myself into blackouts, another unfortunate habit, and the worst of all my habits was this: I had a knack for waiting until I'd passed out naked in a strange bed to puke. I was a rancid human being. On purpose.

Andy was the most creative student in my major, and a harmless pup of a man. He was beautiful. Tall and blonde. Blue eyes, perfect body. We had lunch every day. We booked classes together, stole software from the RIT bookstore together, went for runs together. He had a wild sense of humor. Childlike. Everything that came to his head was of use in some class, everything funny. He dropped things all the time. He forgot things. He once spilled a gallon of milk on my kitchen floor, while spinning in his socks, and then got on his stomach to sop it all up. He built a snow fort in my back yard, and refused to come out of it until I played with him. He rolled in every pile of leaves. I don't know why Andy fell in love with me, because I wasn't worth his time, but he did, and for the last two years of my life at college, I kept him close, fucked him every few months and then disappeared for as long a period of time it took for my feelings to fade away again. I convinced myself I was being humane, because Andy didn't understand how repulsive I was.

He was a brave pup. He wrote me poems and played me songs on his guitar. He sat outside my window and serenaded me. He cracked that shell of his wide open and let me fuck with his clam, and just when I thought I had hurt him for the last time, that I had lost my Andy, he'd come tripping back into my life with a smile. Except for one time.

It was spring, but cold. Those last years of college were the coldest of my life, the years that Rochester, NY clinched the US snowfall title from some shithole spot in Alaska that always wins because it's perched upon a berg. We had worse weather than Alaska. At the campus, ropes were tied from building to building so that students could pull themselves to class. Students wore ski goggles on the quarter mile. The wind and cold seemed to seep through the walls of my house by osmosis, and when I was out of groceries, I had to cross country ski to the store to buy more. Less than a minute's exposure to the cold turned your flesh white and dead, or so the newsman said.

I had fucked Andy at a New Year's Eve party up against a wall in a closet, drunk as fuck, though I'll never forget that on the other side of the closet, twenty people were screaming, "I'm not your lover...I'm not your friend...I am something that you'll never comprehend." When it was over, I passed out in his arms on the floor. I woke from the cold, and left. Andy didn't bother calling because this had happened so many times before, always the same way, but this time was different. I didn't merely take a break. I slipped into the most intense depression of my life, attempted suicide twice, and by failing both times at it, I somehow reignited myself. Adrenaline maybe. A month later, I was calling Andy again, not saying anything about what had happened, just wanting to be in the same room as him. Eventually I wanted to play again--go to the arcade, sneak liquor into the movie theater, get kicked out of Darien Lake Amusement Park for spitting at people from the top of the ferris wheel--but I could start at just being around him again. That was okay.

He was apprehensive, as he should have been. I picked him up on a cold night and we went driving around Rochester, fighting about what had happened and making no progress in mending our friendship. My Jetta couldn't make enough heat to keep the cold that fell through the closed windows from chilling me to the bone. We got lost and ended up on a little road in the country seemingly meant for Amish carriages, as they were the only vehicles on it. My eyes were orange because I had been throwing up three times a day, and because of this, he said I looked like the devil. I told him to fuck off. He burst into tears and asked me why I didn't love him, and all I could do was stare at him. Then, because he was the most clever boy ever, he told me to look away. He hated my stare for the same reason the "Amish hate cameras." Clever, clever boy.

After that night, he more or less became a part of the bevy I puked upon, literally and figuratively. When we graduated college (a ceremony I did not attend, of course) I began moving about the country, and Andy stayed in Rochester. Years later, he married a nice girl we went to school with. I was invited to the wedding but couldn't bear to go for a myriad of reasons, the one most closely resembling an ending to this story being: I really fucked up.

Posted by The Bunny at 4:28 AM

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Posted by: raj at September 25, 2006 04:56 AM

Posted by: jen418 at September 26, 2006 05:09 PM

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