If we lived in the same city, we would still be together, if only for convenience’s sake. Maybe tonight you’d do the chivalrous thing and pull up in front of my house with The Gun Club on your radio and a little magician’s hat full of condoms and shooters and roses. I’d climb in and we’d end up picking over the bones of new construction deep in the hills. I come away with a slab of pure white marble, you a baseball bat. From the lip of the highway we’d witness a car strike a small animal in the road. You would put the half-breathing possum out of its misery with the bat and make me cry.
On other nights we might end up taking long walks in Hollywood or San Pedro, anywhere so long as we had no reason to be there. I’d squirm as we passed a decommissioned inn lit up in bottle-green, precipitating my urge to break in and make love. You would have things on your mind presumably more noble than sex. You would stop to face the sky and say something like,
“There is a great heaving failure blowing its breath over this valley, where I lay dying. There are children dancing in meadows laced with parting, there is life going on, and on.”
I would wonder aloud why you talk about life this way with so little life behind you. I would do my best to remind you that you are a comet whose trail is time, but you, savant in the art of making yourself miserable, sulking behind a puffer jacket in the scalding spring, would close your ears to your wife as had so many ill-fated men before you. I would hope silently that one day we might find it more fashionable to flirt with life than death, to get it into bed successfully every single night in any seventh-story penthouse or filthy motel we could find.
At my behest, you would watch the road so that I could watch you. I would already be familiar with the way space warped in the periphery of your body: how televisions glowed brighter, clovers straightened their stems, businessmen pulled meekly at their collars and waitresses softened their voices in feeble attempts to rise to the occasion of your presence. You would pull the whole world into you, the sinking star. We would soak chips of wood in bourbon and chew them to pulp. Our hair would grow lighter, our teeth whiter and sharper with every night spent charging under the moon. You harness the light like the love of a good horse, your word is law among the stars and the sand, patron saint of all things misunderstood in the daytime.
If we lived in the same city we would not see each other any more than we ever did. One night we would drive over to Jonah’s house together to play poker and watch Friday. You and Jonah would make the best of friends, perhaps clandestine lovers, which is why I am mildly grateful we never lived in the same city. You and Jonah would get into a heated argument over something slightly beyond my intellectual grasp and it would make me jealous. Abruptly you would tell Jonah we were taking off and before I could interject we’d be speeding down Route 66 towards one of our houses with your serpentine hand running up my thigh, and we’d stumble through the door though we hadn’t drank and I’d get naked for you, and you would bite back your laughter and close your eyes and slip into me and try to forget I’m there. I would try to forget too. I still don’t know whose house we’re in.
If we lived in the same city you might have flowers after a fight. You would dispense apologies like the cheap plastic paraphernalia of quarter machines, little golden necklaces and erasers shaped like butterflies. I would collect them and, like any good hoarder, patiently await the day they might mean something to me.
If we lived in the same city, we would still be together, I am sure. I blame it all on the latent panic that pools in the legs of a body moving sixty miles an hour six hours a day, flying still, awaiting a crash that never comes; the freeway grinding our soft nerves to rubble, keeping my eyes on the road, I can see you, keeping my hands on the wheel, I can hold you, 99 miles from LA, I kiss you. Lord, I’ve missed you. Please be there.
