A truth, by Tommy Blue-Genes.
There have been so many airports this year.
First Phoenix, then London, then Glasgow—-and finally, Boston. Travel like I'm running away from something, or like I'm finally free. Or maybe it's the same thing.
Tonight is a bad night though, and the voices in my head won't shut up. I can't sleep, so instead, I'll sit here at this computer and write.
My father died holding a gun to his head. My mother is a writer. I'll try her method first.
Boston. It is a place where modern buildings line cobblestone streets, and graveyards skulk between skyscrapers—-and everywhere, there is the memory, the smell, the idea of the ocean.
I can see why she loves it there. Every guy has that one she, doesn't he? The one girl who doesn't, necessarily, need to be named. For me, that girl lives in Boston.
I have perfect recall of her at the airport; I can still see the expression on her face as we made eye contact the single time I flew out to visit.
She pulled up to the curb in her red Cherokee and got out to hug me. She's tall, almost my height, and kissing her has always felt different than kissing other girls—-I don't have to bend down, and when we step back, we're looking eye to eye.
I won't describe her more than that. You don't need to know. She was still married then, and she's still married now, I think. I won't write her name here. Even her first name. Not yet. She told me she reads these stories sometimes, and I'm not ready to write about us yet. So I'll write about other things, until enough time has passed that I can write about her.
Does this seem strange? That I'd start writing about her and then skip to something else? It's only strange if they are just stories I'm writing. But, of course, they aren't just stories—-they're different aspects of a single, unified life. They're the truth, and the truth is always stranger than fiction.
Everything I write here will be true, because I honestly don't see the point in staying up late tonight to write about something I made up.
There's so much that's happened, and every part connects to every other part. I've had a very unusual life—-and it all comes down to where I want to start. So, of course, sitting here at the computer, I started with her, my girl in Boston. And on some sleepless night when I'm again weighing the benefits of my parents' respective forms of panacea, I'll probably end with her.
Tonight though, I'm going to write about the night Ron introduced me to Lisa.
Ron met her on his trash route. That's all he'd say at first as we drove through the rain to meet her. It was a wet night, a few degrees below freezing, and the heat in his old Chevy wasn't working. The windshield wipers beat the slush away while I rubbed my hands to keep warm.
Ron is my oldest friend. We came up together, as close to brothers as two friends can be. We'd taken different paths for awhile after high school—he'd spent a few years in Texas—-but now that we'd settled into our early thirties, we hung out pretty regularly.
"You're not going to believe this chick," he said.
"You saying she's that good-looking?" I asked.
"No, it's not that."
I looked at him.
"I mean, she's cute," he said. "She's got a nice face but that's not what I'm talking about."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"You'll just have to see."
I studied his face in the green dashboard light. Like me, he has dark hair and blue eyes. Some people assume we're related because we've got the same coloring, and we're about the same height. But I've got a bigger nose, a bigger jaw—-a bigger, more rectangular face. I'm a blockier version of him.
"You fucked her, didn't you?" I asked.
There was a pause, the tiniest pause. "No, of course not," he said. "This is just business."
I cocked an eyebrow but questioned no further. Ron had called me a half hour ago. He'd gotten me out of bed. Ron was a garbage man who used to be a business man—-and who now wanted to be a business man again.
He'd worn three-piece suits to work when he first got married. He'd run an office for Motorolla. Then came the lay-offs. Now his wife watched him got to work with a name tag sewn onto his shirt. For some kind of women, that wouldn't have mattered. The best kind, I think. Hey, a job's a job. But Ron's wife wasn't the best kind. And he knew it, even if he'd never admit it. Ron loved his wife, and in a fucked-up way, he was doing this for her.
"Porn," he'd told me a dozen times. "Is a billion dollar-a-year industry."
I had a good video camera. As his oldest friend, that made me his partner. We'd talked about it before, but we'd never done it. Ron had never been able to find a girl willing to fuck on camera.
We pulled up in front of a little duplex that sat just off the main square of Crown Point, Indiana. You could see the clock tower of the courthouse from the front yard. It's the kind of duplex that's wedged between shops and restaurants and probably will end up being an antique store at some point, once downtown has a few more years of sprawl under its belt.
"Her name is Lisa," Ron said. "But don't mention I gave her real name, okay?"
"Sure," I said.
"Sorry I got you out of bed so late, but she's married and can only do this at certain times."
We walked up the stairs to the second floor and knocked.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but Lisa wasn't it.
She answered the door with a huge smile, looking for all the world like some conservative doctor's receptionist.
"I thought you guys would never get here," she said and ushered us inside. Ron did the introductions.
She was smiley and bubbly, mid-thirties, with dark hair and a pleasant, oval face. She was a little heavy in that curvy, sexy kind of way that makes a little heavy look good. She looked like somebody's wife, or somebody's mother. Not the kind of fake-sexy you'd see on T.V., but the more lived-in kind you might come across in a grocery store.
The small front room was cramped. The furniture was dingy and worn. A poster of a huge body builder armed one wall. It looked like the home of a frat boy, not the home of a married couple.
I gestured to the posters. "So you're husband likes working out, I take it?"
"Brian? No." She smiled. "Oh, you mean the posters. This isn't my house. Lord, no. I wouldn't live here for anything. This is my boyfriend's place."
"I thought you two were married."
"I am. Do you boys want something to drink?"
"Sure," I said. Ron declined. I think he was nervous.
"So when is the guy supposed to be here?" Ron asked.
Lisa looked at her watch. "Any minute."
"So we're going to be shooting you and your boyfriend?" I asked.
She looked at Ron. Ron gave me an apologetic look. She turned back to me. "No, honey, my boyfriend would kill me if he knew I was doing this. He's an old-fashioned guy. We're only using Kevin's apartment because your friend," she hooked a thumb in Ron's direction. "is too cheap to spring for a hotel room."
"Oh."
