All the girls of December

We’re all at this bar for some year-end party and I think Maddie’s coming on to me you know all whispering close to my ear and the touching too— especially the touching but the power’s out because of a fallen light pole or something— the power’s out on the entire goddamn grid and the bar’s dark and the free drinks amount to nothing and she ends up brushing me off even though it’s not even what, eight or nine in the evening and I think I’m drunk already. So then I leave— I really do.

But before that I was sort of saying this whole amount of crap not to Maddie but to the tall brunette with the implants but we were just laughing it off but this is De-cem-ber for chrissakes and I’m supposed to have lots of great sex in December but December, 2010 sort of carries the same bad vibe as the rest of the year and this just sucks man. So I get nothing at all— and just leave.

I walk home the whole hour-and-a-half— thinking all kinds of trash even though I’m quite prone to text-messaging Dennis and begging him to take me to a nightclub, any nightclub really as long as there’s enough champagne and loud music but I don’t.

I don’t because all of a sudden I’m walking by that same burger joint I once went with you and Paola and Paola’s boyfriend like a decade ago and Paola’s boy-toy was named after Italian food even though she was two-timing him with Luke, good old Luke with the sideburns and the attitude and all the pot he kept stashed in his refrigerator I think for moisture and whatever befell that crazy old kid anyhow?— It was in the same night I met your brother, then 12 and it was the fist time I ever heard of Harry Potter because he was reading it and it made such a big impression on me because he was only 12 and reading it in a foreign language, and after that your mother told me I had a firm handshake. We made out on the couch at your grandma’s then went over to Paola’s where we made out on her mother’s couch too. But that was ten years ago and memory blurs, fact becomes fiction becomes fact.

Also right in front of the burger joint— you wouldn’t believe the coincidence— else Jung’s synchronicity — lies Helga’s loft, one of those cool, expensive two-story apartments entirely in off-white and Helga is this tall, blue-eyed girl from Norway— from honest-to-god Norway where trolls live whom I met walking down the street a December some three years ago and we went out for a short while then she started with madcap ideas about moving in together and I simply disappeared, man.

Then a few days ago...

Then a few days ago I was browsing Leon Vickers’ profile on Facebook and there was this note from sweet little TJ— Leon’s friend from a few years back with whom I went out also in December but she dumped me by phone on Xmas eve and it kind of sucked. There was this particular Sunday in December, 2006 that sweet little TJ and I stayed in bed from dawn to dusk and only stopped fooling around to eat (in bed) and to watch Sid & Nancy on DVD (also in bed) then she finally told me she was up for everything, anything but a few days after that she called me up and told me she was going back to her fiancé. I asked her if that was that and she said it was indeed. Merry Xmas I told her back.
Later on when I was having dinner with Jimmy he asked why the back of my hands were all marked and bruised and I just smiled in return. But there in Leon Vicker’s profile in Facebook a few days ago sweet little TJ looked so old, so miserably old and married and soiled and she was just 19 back then: Maybe it was the make-up but she looked so goddamn old and her smile just seemed to curve at all the wrong angles it just killed me, Lyla. It was so sad my heart just sank.

Then there was December last year when this former girlfriend, Jimmy’s cousin the dead-ringer for the ghost-eyed hot chick from the vampire flicks stood me up on New Year’s Eve at Dennis’ and I think we never really spoke again after that even though there’d been this passionate kiss in the rain the month before when we attempted to reconcile.

Looking back there was also that New Year’s Eve at the turn of the twenty-first century— necking with Gwen in the dark, on a mattress on the ground— at her rich dad’s time-shared apartment at some beach wherever where rich doctors time-share apartments for their daughters to take lost boys and make out on mattresses on the ground just before dawn, with that dope Harvey Apollo snoring on the bunk-bed right next to us but dopey Harvey Apollo never said a word about it during breakfast the next day, whatta pal.

Then of course there were also all the gloomy, dark Decembers wasted away with Franny, with poor doomed Franny whom I guess I might have loved or not either way all those Decembers amounted to nothing at all in the end either.

But it’s December all over again and it’s warm and stuffy and I’m supposed to get laid a lot not sulk. This one’s been such a fucked up lousy year and I can’t even remember the way you look like anymore— I can’t remember the sound of your voice or which movies you liked not even the smell of your sweat— All I wanna do right now is slip on that iPod, Sinéad O’Connor singing The Last Day of Our Acquaintance, pop a couple of pills, turn off the lights, turn on the A/C to make the world of my bedroom so very cool and I want to let go hey Lyla one of these days I’m gonna cash in what little I have and pack my bags and just go, man— disappear— sublimate from this goddamn world else simply slash my wrists, jump off this eleventh floor window, blow my damn head off, because I’m so jaded— so sick of wearing this same old wrongskin, so bored, sick and tired of waiting for the world to end but it never does:


To hell with tomorrow: I need my fix of today right now, tonight, and I don’t even like it in here that much anymore.