Half-Ass

Half-Ass

There were supportive girlfriends and there were bitchy girlfriends and Joy Michelle was something in between. She thought of this as she stood in the back of the bar by the doubledoors with her arms crossed and pressed against her chest, watching Michael make a damn fool of himself.

He had gotten the notion to be a stand-up comedian when they had gotten cable. He said comedy “awakened” him, and he was awake alright. Staying up all night to watch comedy specials; angry men talking about dull things and swearing. Joy Michelle hated them. She liked sitcoms. Michael did too, before they got cable. It was a string she pulled with her dad, a little thing to make Michael happy and add a little flair to the home life. Cable is nice to come home to when you work long days. In theory, you get more choices. In reality, you get more crap. This is what Joy Michelle ended up thinking of cable.

When Michael had announced one night while stumbling into bed that he was funnier than half the people on TV, even David Letterman, Joy Michelle had said: Prove it. She’d said it into the pillow, and was mostly thinking out loud. She loved Michael, and she thought he was funny. She laughed when he acted goofy with her. She laughed when he laughed. She liked to hear him talk. But she couldn’t remember a time he had ever cracked an honest joke. She could remember a million times he had told her he could. She could remember a million more where he had blanked out everything around him, soundly focused on whatever angry man had caught his fancy this week, shouting comedy to him from the flickering flat screen.

He had blown up at the Prove It. It exploded his heart. It terrified him, but of course this he did not let on. Instead he laughed meanly and said, I will. Fuck yes I will. They went to sleep with him thinking he would Prove It, and her thinking he used to swear less. He used to be more pleasant. He used to seem happier. He used to make her laugh.

For two days he seemed to prepare to prove it. He sought out an open mic night. He invited their friends. He bought a pack of index cards and a bottle of whiskey. He wrote notes and smoked cigarettes and did not ask Joy Michelle about her day at the hospital. He used to like to hear about the babies on her floor, the names people gave them, if any of them had young brothers and sisters who pretended they were theirs.

But here they were at O’Hallorans and there he was on the stage not looking at his notecards. Not saying what he may or may not have written. Not saying anything, really, except what a drag girlfriends are. Not much more than that. And something hardened in Joy Michelle that she never had expected to. Something stuck in her side. Here she was, wasting her time, watching Michael make a fool of himself and not even having the decency to try.

tea + whiskey

I'm sorely unpracticed at writing short stories, but I want to get into it. My challenge to myself is to write one little story a day, and eventually get to a point where I write a bit meatier of a tale a month. Because I'm the precious type that likes to name everything I do or make, I'm gonna call these little guys tea & whiskey tales...because they were probably written while consuming a cupful of one or both. I present tea + whiskey tale 1...

Places You No Longer Fear

1. The drum closet in the Band Room.
2. The car, pretty much anywhere.
3. The back of the away-game bus when parked.
4. Your own house at night.

There is still something terrifying to you about the school parking lot. First off, it’s lit up like a 24-hour grocery store. And there is almost always another car there. A janitor, someone from the team, another band kid. There’s a girl in all AP classes who is rumored to never leave the school. They say she sleeps on the rolled-up wrestling mats, stored away on the stage…or with Coach Lanza in the Pool Office.

The parking lot is small but open. The forest preserve stretches out behind it, endless wooded black. Neighborhood homes stand watch just across the street, dark and quiet but full of people you know. Maybe sleeping. Maybe seeing. The place stirs you up and you try to avoid it.

But if you’re there long enough after a game and you’ve managed to wait out the crowd and see the band room exit open, you start to feel good. And those times when you kiss her you pretend you are a soldier defying a general’s command. Advancing instead of falling back. Or just quitting the war. Because you found something better. Even if it’s something you’re still a little afraid of.

My hair looks awesome today.

There is one thing left to think when you don’t want to think about how you were just caught making out with your boyfriend’s best friend, and it is not: I wasn’t that into it. That is in fact the last thing you want to think when you get caught breaking the man you love’s heart, in the most trite, trashy-TV re-run sort of way.

And if you aren’t going to think about all the ways the man you love moved slowly away from you, withdrew into band practices for shows he would never play or studying for classes he would never finish or simply just smoking up with friends that flew in from exotic locales like Bowling Green, Ohio and Poughkeepsie, NY just to smoke in the living room of the apartment you have both lived in for the past nine months; you definitely shouldn’t think about the way you used to be, back when you met in that hip-hop dance class he took on a dare from a colleague and you took because you wanted to be able to move like Beyonce, or at least like one of her far-back-stage backup dancers.

Because back in that class when you were both looking as stupid as possible in front of each other and the very fit, very pretty, very Beyonce-jointed instructor who probably had more important things to do than watch a bunch of stiff white people try to move with some rhythm for three hours every week for six weeks, you fell in real love. The kind of love it takes lifetimes to access and build, because there is so much fear and stiffness to work out before two people can show their true colors with confidence. Failing to pop and lock and booty bump bonded you both in ways no one else could understand, least of all the jerks he worked with at Ernst and Young who spent their time drinking and making money for other people to buy them off with. Or the artists you tried to befriend while working as a receptionist in the Medical District and the coffeeshop and the writing center and the experimental theater/screenprinting studio. Unless those people were ever in real love, they just weren’t going to get it.

And since you can’t dwell on how much momentum you two built up, and how it lasted months after class ended, and brightened your heart in the dark days of the day-job grind and gave him hope that he could maybe do other cool stuff in his life that didn’t involve sucking up to someone all the time, and maybe you could actually make and keep friends that were not another carbon copy of a carbon copy of an idea of a successful art kid in the city. The talking, the kissing, the hanging out and laughing and spending all night playing board games or planning road trips...all that has to be put right out of your mind.

And since you can’t bear to think of how he slowly gave up on anything but giving in, or how gave up on getting through to him and didn’t know how to end things gracefully or if you even should because what would it mean if you let this person go, who is supposed to be the proof in the pudding that people are people are people no matter what mold they try to form themselves to, and people need people, and people like him could be with people like you and people like you could be with people like him and people all over the world could lay their guard down at each others’ feet and be happy...

You shouldn’t think of how you just got too drunk and his friend made a move and you took it, and you ran with it. How you kissed all the rhythm in your body into a slack face that probably felt like he was scoring. How it felt wrong, but not sexy wrong or really liking a dumb R&B pop song wrong but empty, stupid, pointless, heartless, desperate, inevitable, too little too late.

So you stand where you stand in the bedroom, and he stands very still between the bed and the door. And the face says “Man, I’m sorry.”

And all you can think is:
My hair looks really good.