Ghost Town

She told me I wasn’t crazy anymore.  This was 10 years after we had met.  She said I wasn’t crazy like I used to be.  I’m just a lame bore.  All I wanna do is read & write.
I said I’d much rather write a poem than be a human being.
She told me I was asking her to love a poem but she can’t love a poem.
I told her the only thing she was really in love with was the past….

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​She remembers the first time we met  : : :  there was a group of us and I suggested we make ether.
I remember the first time we met  : : :  there was a group of us and a homeless man bought us all bananas instead of the booze we had asked him to buy for us, so then I must have suggested we make ether instead—although I don’t remember that, exactly.
 
 
One night we met up with her and her new college roommate in Harvard Square.  It was a typical wasted night.  I was 18 and I was going through my all-nighter faze that summer, when I would spend all night outside with a group of friends and in the morning we’d sit down by the tracks and watch the sun rise over the empty early-morning ghost town.
I invited her to come along the following night.
I didn’t know she’d say yes.
She said sure, sounds fun.
She was always up for having a good time.
She met me at Park Street and she wore these tight white stretch jeans and her hair was colorful and spiky.  All the Bostonians in this underground train station stopped and stared at her and so did I.  Although I wasn’t staring because I thought she looked kinda freakish like I assume the rest were.  I was staring because I thought she looked beautiful in her denim vest covered in band patches and studs.
We rode the train back to Newton, MA.
This night we did not do ether, in fact.
But she taught me about Triple Cs.
Cough & Cold Coricidin.
You ever hear of Robotrippin?
It’s the same concept, only Triple Cs are even more dense with DXM than that of their sister medication, Robitussin.
I tripped like a bastard and she vomited her college cafeteria dinner out by the Newton Center train station.  I knew I was stricken with something powerful right then.  We were a match—surely a match made for destruction.
After she vomited, we spent the night together roaming and watching the stars and mingling with the other late-nighters heading home from the bars, or the other kids that squandered these lame city streets, until we were the last humans left alive and the sun was so beautiful as it rose like fire and we smoked our cigarettes and talked and laughed and some amazing energy was happening between us.
It took a while for us to ever make out.
She said she could only hook up when she was drunk, and by hooking up she meant make out and she loved to make out with people when she was drunk, but just not fuck them because she was weird about that.
I asked her to be my girlfriend one night but she said she doesn’t do relationships.
We made out in a park in Harvard Square the night before she went home for Thanksgiving vacation.  She laughed the whole time and it made me insecure and when I pulled back from her and asked why, she said because she was so happy.
A few weeks later, the day before she went home for the Holidays, we went into Harvard Square together and got drunk.
 
I remember we sat down by the Charles River in Harvard Square and drank whiskey and we left our mark on the side of the bridge with spraypaint.  Then we walked to Central Square and we spraypainted fuck religion on every church and I scrawled fuck Hollywood in Sharpie on the wall outside of a Blockbuster movie store.
She had to use the bathroom and we went into some fancy-ass hotel and found the bathroom and inside the lady’s room there was a nice couch which the men’s room did not have and I hung out on that couch while she peed and some woman walked in and took one look at me and she looked like she was about to jump out of her skin.
I said: It’s okay, I’m just making sure my friend doesn’t get raped.
The woman darted out of the room and I laughed and when she came back, I told her all about it.
We were rowdy.  The night was alive.  We were mischievous and I wouldn’t see her again for another few weeks and suddenly it hit me.
 
We got back to her dorm and I was pouting.  I was always a sensitive boy.  She told me once I was too emotional.  She was going home soon and she’ll probly meet someone else because I was just not good enough for her.  She told me to quit my wining.  I told her to be a human being for once.  She mocked and insulted me and I felt degraded.  This was the girl I was yearning for, and she was a cold-hearted bitch.  I was so upset.
We got back to her room and I crawled into her roommate’s bed.  She had two roommates and one of them was never around so I crawled into that roommate’s bed and curled up and sulked.
Her roommate’s bed was elevated and she was screaming at me to come down.
No, I said.
Come down, she said.
Fuck you! I said.
What’s your problem? she said.
I didn’t know why I was so upset, really.  I just was.
She threw her keys at me and they split my lip.
I climbed down the small ladder and left.  She followed me out.
What the fuck! she said.
I kept going till I was outside.  Once out there I lit a cigarette.  She found me there and I was puffing so fast and shaking even faster. She came over and hugged me so tight.
She said: Come to bed.
Why? I said.  So you can harangue me some more?
She said: You can sleep in my bed tonight.
My eyes lit up and I flicked the cigarette into the cold winter sky and she took my hand and led me back inside the building.
I climbed into bed with her and we cuddled and made out and her other roommate was there and she was under us, on the bottom bunk, and she kept yelling at us to shut up, but we kept giggling and kissing and rolling around on each other and we were just so drunk.
She asked me to be her boyfriend.
I told her to ask me again in the morning.  I didn’t want her decision to be solely because she was drunk.
 
In the morning she asked me to be her boyfriend again and I said yes and then she told me I better leave now.  Her dad was coming to pick her up soon and I wouldn’t want to meet him.  He was like Robert De Niro mixed with Al Pacino and trust her on this, I didn’t want to meet him.
I left immediately and my smile didn’t fade for the whole next month.

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​I was so in love———only the next few years brought me through such levels of grandiose torture that I became a devil and so did she and this love became our hell.

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​I was lying on the curb crying, covered in blood, and all of her tires were slashed and I held the knife in my hand.  This would be my way of saying I wanted nothing to do with her anymore.  I was 22 and I was done and it was her fault that those two assholes had jumped me earlier in the night.
Earlier I was stumbling and staggering down the street in Central Square when I got a phone call.  It was a number I didn’t recognize.  I answered.
Hey, said the strange voice.
Who’s this? I said.
The voice said: I’m gonna rape your girlfriend.
What?  Who is this?
The voice said: The police!—and the whole time I heard her laughing in the background, like this was some kind of sick fuckin joke.
I eventually found her after looking all over the place.  She was hanging out with two white boys who wore baggy pants and slanted Red Sox baseball caps.  They three were all alone in a large, vacant lot and I wanted to fight but was too drunk and she stepped in the way and told us to break it up and I pushed past her and left.
The ground was moving in spasmodic waves.  I stared downward and tried to remain balanced as my feet refused to cooperate.  I was zigzagging now, swaying and staggering up the street.  Past cars that shined their lights outward and plowed past me with a flurry of force.  Past drunks and shoppers and bums.  Past street corners and alleyways.  As I walked alone, I saw a quick flash zip toward me and a fist knocked me in the head.  I stumbled back and took another to the gut.  I fell and there were two boys stomping and punching me and stomping and punching me and when the cops showed up they took off running.  The cop loomed over me and I wanted to plead for him to help me up off the street but he just guffawed real nastily and left me there lying in my own blood.
A friend lifted me up and I could feel a trail of blood dripping out of my left ear, and he helped me onto the train and my upper lip was soaked with blood oozing from my nose.  I could taste the warm copper.  One of my eyes was swollen shut.  The whole train ride home I didn’t once look up because I was afraid of what I’d find out if I saw my own reflection in the window.
When I got home, I pulled out my knife and slashed all four tires of her car and then fell on the curb and bloody tears burst from my eyes.
 
It had been five years.  Five frikken years.  I wasn’t about to do this anymore.
And I thought this would be the end of it.  And it was … for a short time\\\