Early Sunday Mornings

Mine has long blonde hair. Beauty evades her only because of the hardened authoritarian look in her eye; a cold anger that smart strippers have.

I never know what to say to them. Some guys talk to them like they're just another girl at the bar. I'm never quite sure how they do this.

- Yes, yes, I'm here from Belarus.

- Oh really? For school? A semester away? Parents sent you to experience a new foreign country through your young eyes before you settle into your corporate life?

- No, silly! I'm here to rub my tits in nameless American faces and give handjobs in the backroom.

- Ho, ho! Of course! What was I thinking? Apologies dear.

-But of course.

It's ridiculous really.



A blonde stripper with a huge beak and straight hair decides my thighs look like a great home for her ass. I'm not going to argue, but I always feel a bit bad when the ugly ones come by. I'll hit on an ugly girl at a bar for drunkeness and wingman-isms, but I will not PAY an ugly girl to dance for me. It goes against everything America stands for. She eventually asks me if I want a dance, and I shoot her down. They always get so damn angry when you do this.

After ten minutes, another one sidles up close to me. This is my hard-eyed girl with a body that I can't take my eyes off of. She turns her head to me, says something.

Who knows what she said. How do I reply?

"So... uh... where you... from... honey?" I ask.

I always throw "honey" in there because I'm drunk and thinking I'm smooth and it sounds good. (That's right. I'm smooth.)

She says something, mentions the Ukraine or Belarus. Immediately I think of that Russian war , and I wonder how far the countries are apart. Does she have family near there?

"Ah...they got a war goin on-" and I cut myself off.

"Vhat?" she asks.

"Nothing. Forget it. Give me a lap dance."

"You vant lap dance?"

"Yea. Let's go," I say, getting off the bar stool. 20 bucks left in my pocket on a Saturday night to blow, and it may as well be on her.

"You vant go in bak room? It's 120 vor an houver and-"

I can only roll my eyes. "No. That's not what I asked for. Let's go."

Even when you're actually paying women for their company (or their breasts), they still try to dog you out of more money.

She gives me a phenomenal lap dance, pushing her breasts in my face, then going straight down between my legs. She looks up and into my eyes, like the girls who give the best blowjobs do.

- You know, I used to feel sorry for strippers. For ones like you. I used to think you had nothing to do with what happens in these places.

- No you didn't. You said that to yourself because you were a stupid white kid from the suburbs who never felt comfortable in these places. Now you feel comfortable, so now you hate us, just like the rest of them.

-That isn't true. I felt bad. I hated coming here. I hated these places. I still do.

- Yes. But you come. And you demand lap dances. And you don't care. Because you have learned that we are vultures. We will come and take your money, and if you're one of the unfortunate souls who women disdain, we will rob you blind and leave you naked and duct taped in the gutter. You have learned to take from us, because we will take from you. The only difference is that you still think about it.

Her knee rubs against me, breasts back in my face before she goes back down and looks up again.

- It's a cruel world.

- You have no idea.

She finishes seconds after the song dies, and I stumble back to the barstool. It will be another half hour before my friend gets out of the backroom with red eyes and lighter pockets.

"She gave me her number," he says.

"Burn it."

China P

When I walk into China P. alone around 10:30, there are four girls at the bar, two of which I slightly know. One says hello to me, and she is a beautiful Italian looking girl who just broke up with a guy I went to high school with. She's outgoing enough to always say hello to me, which takes a lot because I'm not the most approachable guy.

An older couple rests at the end of the bar, but they're not saying anything worth listening to. I'm kind of pissed- even my bartender buddy Bill is gone, as he embarked on a two-week trip back to China to see his wife and four girlfriends, so I'm ordering Miller Lites and shots of Jagermeister from the substitute bartender, ironically named, "Johnny". I always wonder who tells these fucking guys what American name to take, being as most of them barely speak English in the first place.

The Italian broad is talking about some club she went to last night, and her three fat friends are emphatically "oooing" and "ahhhing" about whatever the hell the she's saying (it must suck to be the fat friend(s) and live vicariously through your hot friends). Apparently she's dating a black dude, but her stories are boring, so I switch between eavesdropping on their conversation to watching that UFC show on SpikeTV.

Drinking alone is tough business. It's not like I was doing it because I had to... yea, I bet you believe that. Seriosly, it's not bad once in a while because it gives me quiet time to explore the insides of my own head. Shane McGowan had a famous quote about this, but I'm not going to quote it, and if you're that interested you can look it up for yourself. Either way, you sit there, and everything someone says reminds you of something that went on in your own life at some point. It reminds you of a girl, a situation, a time when you were doing blah blah blah and whatever happened. Those girls mention the Shannon Rose a half dozen times, and my mind wanders.

There is one fat one that keeps talking about Bill, and I somehow feel like I'm cheating on him by buying drinks from this new guy. She's asking Johnny about himself.

"So, were you married?"

The bartender says something that I can't understand, holds up his bare fingers. She says something else, and he concedes that he is.

"Where is she?"

"Back in China. I have two son also. 8 and 11."

"Ohhh... you have girlfriends too, like Bill?"

"No, no... I no cheater," he says, but with a smile. He also doesn't explain why he ain't wearing his wedding ring, but he still claims that he isn't a cheater. He badmouths Bill's drinks a little, saying that he doesn't make them taste good enough. I'm about to say something, but then I realize 1) Bill will be back in a week, fuck this guy, and 2) He still controls how much I pay tonight, and he's given me a couple shots for free. I hold my tongue.

Another broad comes in. She is nice looking, but has a voice that makes you want to rip her throat out. It's a combination of a Long Island accent and a nasally banshee wail, and every time she comes here I want to throw her down the stairs.

The hour is getting late, and two of the fat ones get up to leave. A half hour later, the rest of them get up and say their goodbyes to Johnny. He is laughing, yapping, saying something in ChineEnglish that I can't understand. They start walking out, and the beautiful Italian girl looks over her shoulder, stops, and walks over towards me.

"Where are you going tonight? Anywhere else?"

"Nah, this is it." Talk about feeling fucking pathetic.

"Oh, you should come to the Shannon Rose! It's just like Thatcher's, but a lot bigger, it's an Irish place."

"Ahhh... I heard that place is expensive."

"Oh yea, I think the last time I was there I blew like a hundred bucks. I don't remember if it was all on me, or I was buying everyone shit because I was drunk."

I smile. "Well, maybe. We'll see."

"Alright. Goodnight, honey." She gives me a kiss on the cheek and walks away. She's a good girl, and I wonder what the fuck that guy from high school was thinking letting her get away.

I look down at my beer, and my mind immediately wanders to my certain blonde who fucking loves the Shannon Rose. I pay my sixteen dollar bill (good man, Johnny) and stumble out of the bar and into the night, under the streetlights of this same old town. I think I'm going to petition Bill to get a piano in there, so when I sit on those quiet nights I can tell Sam to play it again.

"Not tonight, Italian broad. I am thinking of someone else... and it will take a hell of a lot more than you to get her out out of my head..."

The girl....

It occurred to me tonight that the four or five people in other parts of the country that read this fucking thing might wonder why I have these random posts relating to Johnny Cash, or missing someone, or missing a "certain blonde". I think it's time for me to lay these things on the line, because I realize how off the wall and confusing my posts are.

Last year, I had a good thing going for a long time. I was with a good girl for three years, and I thought, "Well, this is it. This is the one. This is the last girl I'm going to sleep with, the last girl I'll ever be with". I was close to settling down and being done. I really did love her, and God bless her for putting up with all my shit over the years, all the drunken mistakes and asshole behavior that I am prone to... but it was not to be.

My life changed one day in early October when, in a writing class of mine, I was forced to do a profile on a subject in the class. I remember the professor sitting at the head of the squared tables, picking who was to interview whom. She said my name first.

"Steve... why don't you interview..." Her eyes searched across the class. "Alexis?" (Name changed to protect the not-so-innocent).

I cringed.

She came to me after class, and we set it up for a Thursday, I think. Oh, how I dreaded this motherfucking interview! It was going to suck, because not only am I terrible at talking to people I don't know, but I'm even worse at talking to girls that I think are attractive and don't know. To compensate, I figured she was a ditz and I would be able to con my way out of it by claiming it was her fault the interview went terribly. I figured the professor would see my point- we were absolutely mismatched. This broad was completely different than me in every way: tall, gorgeous, dressed in expensive clothes, and utterly cheerful in way that normally makes me sick. I remarked to a friend of mine that she was hot, but didn't seem like she was all there, if you know what I mean (It was only later on that I figured out that my professor likely knew how opposite we were, and that's probably why she put us together.)

On that fateful day, I walked up and saw her sitting on a bench by the student center, talking on her cell phone. I passed from a distance, and saw her gaze over at me. She did not look happy about doing this, either. I held my index finger up in the universal sign for, "Gimme a minute" and went down into the building to get myself a drink. I bought a pink lemonade, then went outside and sat down to get this goddamn thing over with.

It started off as any interview with me would likely start- me being difficult. It's a defense mechanism; people have to prove themselves to me before I give them the time of day. Show me you're not an asshole, show me you're not stupid, and then we'll talk. She asked me where I grew up, when my birthday was...standard fair. I gave curt one-word answers. Then, she made the mistake of asking me about my childhood. I did an arrogant half laugh, shook my head... "We're not going to go there." It was at that point that I think she got pissed off, and closed her notebook.

I took over the interviewing, since I was being such a pric and we both knew this would go nowhere if it depended on me. I began asking her questions, and she answered them all with charismatic laughs and giggling answers, frequently flashing a smile that could put any man on his ass. I watched the golden eyeshadow on her eyes as she looked away while talking, flailing her wrists that held a few gold bands... she talked with her hands constantly. Every time she got up to throw something out, I would steal a quick glance at her ass, because... well, that's what I do. She wore a black shirt and silver shoes, and her hair tumbled down her shoulders in a careless way that I knew took hours to achieve.

She was cheery in her answers, and yapped on about anything I would let her. She talked about her family, her father, her friends, her hopes. Begrudgingly, I realized that I couldn't not like her... and I just couldn't be a pric anymore. It was somewhere around then that we began to actually talk. Not interview... just talk. She disarmed me with her prescence, her lack of anxiety or fear. I marveled at her. She was sexy, but classy; she didn't show everything she had, but she still made you want her. She wasn't a girl you just wanted to fuck- she would be far too difficult to deal with for any man just after sex. She was that girl you fell in love with accidentally, the girl that you pined after because she is, unlike so many others, fun. She was the girl that had all the looks but never needed to use them, because she was too busy making you laugh with goofy noises and sound effects for her stories. A glance from her eyes and a smile were enough to make me want to fucking die.

When I asked her what star she thought should play her in a movie, she mentioned Debroah Messing. I had no idea who this was.

"Well, she's on Will and Grace. Have you ever seen that show?"

"Ahh...that's the one with the two queers, right?"

She looked at me in half amazement. "Yea, the two gay guys and the girl..."

"Nah. Never watched it. I'm not much for those shows."

She laughed at my blunt crudeness, and flashed her smile again.

"Well, how about Reese Witherspoon? I've heard people say that about me, too."

She struck a nerve. I was on a Johnny Cash kick at the time because I'd just seen Walk the Line, and I had literally fallen in love with Witherspoon's June Carter.

"Yea... I could see that." She reminded me a lot of her. A tough chick who didn't take any shit, but genuinely could care about people; it was too ironic. She'd never seen it, but she took my word for it.

She had a boyfriend of years. They were set to get married, and she had it in her head that it would be inside of six years; it seemed an odd number to pick, but at least she was aiming for something. I figured that being as she had a boyfriend of that long, she was safe, because I would never get anywhere with her (no matter how hard I tried). She wanted to own a personal relations company one day, but recoiled at the idea of being just a career woman.

"No! I want kids. I want to see something I made grow up... to treat them as well as my parents treated me."

She freely admitted that she was spoiled, and I would later learn of other traits that were not so flattering, such as a tendency to be selfish, or to disregard the feelings of others. Even being aware of this, however, I knew she had a good heart, and good intentions, and was just wary of letting herself get fucked over. The reasoning for this became clear later- her boyfriend had cheated on her once, and it tore her apart. Rarely do I feel sympathy for people, but this time it tore me apart for her, because even though I'd been through all the shit I've been through (that you've read on this here blog), I've never had someone so close to me absolutely betray my trust like that, and I couldn't imagine what it felt like. Count me among the lucky few that have not been cheated on... I hope never to be in that spot, because I would likely react terribly. I could tell she was still bitter about it, no matter how hard she tried to hide it.

Much of the interview is a blur now. She poked fun at my tough guy image, my incessant smoking and black Harley t-shirt. "What kind of tough guy drinks pink lemonade?" The thing lasted nearly two hours, and it ended with me telling drinking stories (of course). When we both decided we should go, a strange feeling hit me that hadn't been there in years: I don't want this to end. Alas, it had to. We got up, I lit a cigarette, and we said our goodbyes.

As I walked away from that thing, I was in stunned silence on the way back to my truck at what had just happened. Over the course of two hours, I had fallen completely in love with a girl that I should, by all means, have completely despised. I broke up with my girlfriend soon after.

It was much later that I would tell I was in love with her, when she pushed me to the edge and I feared losing her so much that I was forced to reveal how I really felt. On our coffee dates on the blistering cold days of November, there was a thick tension that one could slice with their hand if they moved too fast. We first kissed in a parking lot at the college, and it was one of those heart-stopping moments that people dream about and writers put into movies while "Boys of Summer" plays in the background. As I held her white soft white hand in my calloused, sun-raked paw, I realized that something inside of me had changed. My heart melted when I looked at her, and there were times that I could not talk for fear of losing my composure. I'm typically a hardened stoic... but around her I was made of clay.

There were many coincidences, things I used to tell her were "signs from God." Both of us were supposed to be graduated already. We both took that class though neither of us required it to graduate, and both of us were in our last semesters of our college careers. We both had other relationships, and seperate lives to deal with. And, of course... we both thought we would hate each other. It was only later on that I would find out that she figured I would hate her, and so she immediately disliked me- she thought I would think of her as a "dumb blonde with small boobs" being as I had once made a remark about Playboy in class. She figured me for a womanizer and an arrogant bastard (she was right on one, at least.)

Before I knew her, I thought she was a ditz, a dumb blonde, a high-maintence, unsatisfiable whiner. What I found was a girl that stole my heart from my chest in the first seconds, and has held it in her grasp since then, holding on firmly despite my half-hearted attempts to take it back.

What has blossomed between us is an intense love that is so fucked up and strange, but so real, that neither of us could explain it hard as we try. Never once in those first minutes did I ever think that I would be looking back on this the way I am now. When I looked in her eyes, never did I think that I would still be with her, around her, eight months later. I never dreamed of the passion and despair that could come with loving such a woman, and I never realized that my emotions for someone could run so deep.

In those eight months, it has been up and down, always incredibly passionate but never anywhere near stable. There have been countless dissapointments, moments of absolute joy, and hours of lust. Through all of this, she remains scared of me, somehow. She fears something that I cannot understand, some type of feeling that she has never had before or does not want to deal with. It is tearing me up because I simply don't get it, and I guess I never will. She still keeps me at arms lenth, never quite letting go of her inhibitions, and we go through frequent trauma that is not helped by her tendency to blow things out of proportion... and then there's always my drinking. We go through long periods of not talking, bare bones contact... only always end up back together, if only for a little while.

During those times of tortured silence, this fucking thing, this blog, is the only way I can really communicate with her, because I know she reads it. So, in essence, when you see Johhny Cash references here, they are messages to her, and her alone. When I say I am missing someone, it means that I am missing her... and her alone. And when I say "I love you" , it means that I am loving her... and her alone.

And no matter how much hell she puts me through.... I don't think that will ever change.

Kiss Me, I'm Shitfaced

It's a mediocre day, the first one in a long while that isn't fucking freezing. The place isn't roaring, but busy enough that I get to stay outside all day and help customers. I'm leaning against the new forklift which has become my ride of choice (it is by far the sexiest piece of machinery I have ever seen) killing time before I get to go home. My Army friend is telling me about how he has developed a terrible addiction to lying to women.

"I was drinking at this bar a while ago, and there was this girl that was pretty hot. I mean, she was decent. So, she starts asking me what I do for a living and shit. At the time I was delivering pizza, and that's a really fucking embarrassing thing to tell a girl. "Yea, I'm a pizza delivery boy." I don't think so.

"I hear that. That's shitty"

"Yea. So I told her I was an investment banker."

I just took a drag from a cigarette and am now half choking on the smoke becuase I'm laughing too hard.

"A fucking investment banker? Are you kidding?"

"Nah. I know they make money, so that's what I told her."

"Dude, I don't think there's many investment bankers that look like you."

"Don't think so?"

He smiles and blows smoke out of his mouth. He's wearing a Red Sox T-shirt, and has fiery red hair that screams, "Irish" like nothing else can. There's tattoos on both forearms, one of which says, "Death Before Dishonor", and above it is a huge scar from a cut he gave himself (that needed eighteen stitches to close) with a box cutter while drunk one night. His pinkie finger on his right hand is probably broken, and there's a huge scab on it from when he punched a brick wall the other night (also drunk, of course.)

An investment banker. Sure.

"Well, anyway, I tell her that, and everything is going smooth. I'm hooking up with her and shit, and she's liking me."

"Right."

"Then she drops the bomb, and starts asking me about my "job". She goes, "So, what do you do as an investment banker?" And I go, "Well.... I, uh, invest. In banks." And then she looked at me and says, "What did you say?" So I said it again. She looks at me and goes, "That's not what an investment banker does."

"Christ."

"Yea. So she says, "What do you really do?" And so I tell her, "I'm in the Army." And what fucking response do I get? "So, uh, you really don't make much money, huh?"

"Hahaha. Good to see she really liked you."

"I told her, "No, I make shit money, and whatever is left I spend on tattoos and beer." She stayed another ten minutes then took off. Fuckin bitch."

"Classy lady. You find the good ones."

"Of course."

Lullabies and Bloodshot Eyes

Don walks into China P, heads over towards me. I'm so drunk I can't see straight.

I look at him through bloodshot eyes, try to focus for a second. I already gave up trying to go outside for a cigarette because I know that if I get off the barstool I will fall over, and then get thrown out. I clench my jaw, as I've been doing all day to keep myself from losing it.

"I'm in a bad way."

"You here alone?"

"Yup."

"How long?"

"Since 8:30."

"Christ, you been sittin here for two hours alone?"

"Well, there's those guys," I say, pointing to the two drunks that are always here. "We been watchin MASH. Alan Alda's my fuckin hero."

He's ignoring me. "Where'd Kathy go?"

"Don't know."

Don just nodded, took a seat, and ordered a drink. He knows that it's a woman that is killing me, and he also knows when it's time to circle the wagons; that if he doesn't help me I very well may not make it through the night. We talked about high school memories, as we always do when something horrific happens in either of our lives. We've both done this before, and he has pulled me out of the gutter and off of the side of the road more times than I can count.

I don't remember anything else.

He gives me a ride home at some point, and I try to drink a beer in my living room but pass out and knock it over. The next day my mother will talk to me about how I'm self-destructing, and how I need to fight this darkness in me. I will nod in agreement, and do a terrible job masking the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing.

Tonight when I take a piss, I watch the blood trail around bowl, rolling over itself like a cloud pouring through the water.