I wrote this story years ago and posted it elsewhere. Upon reading MsCherylTerra's "Bookworm" I was reminded of myself and that time in my life when I was a young bookworm, shy, twice burned and totally lacking in self confidence. So I'm posting it here now and dedicating it to MsCherylTerra for reminding me of a beautiful woman I once knew.
Most of us have times when nothing goes right. During those times we couldn't hook up or find romance to save our lives. There aren't even decent excuses or good explanations for it. I was in a blue funk like that once. It lasted way longer than necessary.
*****
Linda, a cautionary and not particularly edifying tale.
When I was in my early thirties I had a quiet contemplative time of sober reflection, re-assessment and re-education. It was miserable. I was not yet thirty five and had two failed marriages behind me. As radical as my thinking might be the radical part didn't extend to marriage. Marriage was supposed to be forever and you were supposed to like each other. Mine didn't pan out that way. I was not yet forty and I had two divorces under my belt. I did place the blame squarely on my spouses, but I was the one who chose them and I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with what that said about my intelligence.
I was alone in a big old two story house with my two dogs and in a poor economy I was chronically short of money. That first winter I closed off all but three rooms to save heating that barn- the kitchen, bedroom and a big formal dining room were where I hunkered down to hibernate through the dark months of winter. I burned candles a lot, but not for lighting and not for brooding while listening to the somber music of the acoustically lovelorn. I had begun meditating again, and practicing yoga. A dimly lit room helped to clear my mind and suppress distractions- I wasn't doing transcendental or candle meditation, I was just trying to turn down the volume on the harsh light of that somewhat incandescent room of cheap panelling and crummy fiberboard ceiling tiles.
I lived in a small midwestern town and I worked by day in a brickyard so clearly these were activities I kept to myself. I had enough fucking problems without alerting people to the idea that I might have an intellectual or an emotional life. Some things just aren't done in certain locales, and I was in one of those locales.
I started re-reading the beats...Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg- and I studied the writers they referenced too, like Spengler, Spinoza and Kant. I read Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud and I felt better educated...but not exactly better. There's a reason beatnik women dressed in drab black and brown and grey and ironed their long black hair- they were fucking depressed from reading the stuff written by the men they were fucking. There's light that shines through Kerouac, especially in little books like "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerard". Those two are his best books but not his most acclaimed. What makes them stand out is the love he kept in himself for those two characters, and that he was so eloquent in sharing it with the reader. But Kerouac is also morose and there is a grieving that runs as a constant theme through all his writing. Ginsberg too is giving voice to a lament, and Burroughs of course is one sardonically blunt son-of-a-bitch. He called it like he saw it and he saw a riotous decay into chaos wherever he looked.
So these were the perfect literary companions for me at that time, bound to help me wallow in my isolation and alienation. I had enough sense of self not to style myself as a brooding poet or writer though. Low as I might feel, I couldn't indulge my self-absorption that much.
Even though I was habitually broke and spiritually bereaved I allowed myself one more indulgence, one luxury. I ate all my meals out. There were two spheres in my world, work and that dark and empty old house, and I needed to at least be in the same building with other people daily, so I frequented the only restaurant in town, a national chain that served breakfast around the clock and had pretty much run all the little greasy spoons out of town, except for a couple of hangers on down by the river and near the factories.
It was an unlikely and an incongruous place to carry a copy of "Une Saison en Enfer". Rimbaud would not have cared for the place and probably would have broken the dinnerware, shit on the floor and masturbated into the bleu cheese dressing. There weren't any dark and brooding coffee houses where I lived. But it was brightly lit and had a crew of pretty waitresses and while I wasn't actively shopping for one I did like to look at the shiny menu. Anyone who noticed my reading material might be either intrigued or confused...I'm not sure exactly what I hoped for. Mostly I just got indifference.
A woman in her late forties also dined there often, with her on-again off-again companion. The bright lights of the place didn't flatter her- she was pale and cynical, with a brown page boy and she looked oddly French- she chain smoked Camels and exhaled smoky, sour and disinterested responses to anything said to her. She was Linda.
Linda had been beautiful and she was broken. She was still beautiful, in a seedy and jaded way. She had some hard miles on her. The friend she showed up with was getting a bit longer in the tooth than her- shabby and disheveled, grizzled and ill tempered- probably a lot like I look today- and they bickered back and forth just audibly enough that everyone could overhear. What was embarrassing was that whenever I saw her there her face lit up and she spoke to me in a soft and sultry contralto. That barely husky voice was all kinds of sexy, and Linda was sexy- but she looked and sounded like trouble and a pain in the ass. She emanated warnings. She might have been wearing a sandwich board blasting "Danger, Will Robinson!" She gave me the feeling that she might go off at any time for no discernible reason. I didn't overtly encourage her, but I didn't exactly discourage her either. I am not an atypical male, I don't care how this story makes me sound. I was just going through a rough spot. So, like most typical males, I'd have done Linda, if I thought I could get away undamaged and unattached. But she WAS scary.
There was an exquisite young Latina girl waiting tables in that place. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and I was terrified of her. She had flowing long black hair and deep dark eyes that oozed seduction. Even in my current melancholy I was still able to talk to other folks, and to women, but I couldn't talk to her. She would speak to me and flash that glittering smile, having said something clever, or mysterious, or simply incomprehensible- we all know how young women are- and she walked away leaving me wondering what she had just said. I was barely able to coax a word out of my own mouth. My brain and all its speech centers locked up when she looked at me and I was paralyzed under her gaze. I had sworn off beautiful young women, and she was much younger than me, and exhilaratingly pretty. If you need a firmer diagnosis of my unhealthy condition, I don't know what that might be. But I knew if I could get it together to even speak coherently to this diosa I was a goner.
