Chapters 1 - 4 *** Before Rose
1
...and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make... The End (The Beatles)
You have to accept, first of all, that I never intended for any of the things that happened, to actually happen. I know I'm still to blame, because I allowed myself to have the thoughts in the first place, and then even more so for allowing those thoughts to become actions. But I swear to you, I started out normally enough. My tastes, my preferences, my sensibilities, were as well-adjusted as the next man, I'm certain of it. The only excuse, the only reason I can even approach, is that the loneliness drove me insane. I mean that in it's most literal sense. I was out of my head with longing and desire, ready to end it all in the cleanest, least painful way I could find. The cure that presented itself, the love I found, did so much to warm the frozen wasteland my heart had become, that I can only think of it as good, as vital and necessary, even as I recognize that I need to be punished for it.
I was 38 and unemployed. I'd really rather not go into detail about how I came to be in that spot. The point is, after eight years of divorce, bitter bitter loneliness, jobs I hated, and other general kicks in the crotch from life, I was at the bottom of the barrel.
2
...stay, don't leave me, Mama, because it's getting so hard... Mama (Genesis)
Okay, let me back up a bit. Technically, legally, it wasn't a divorce, because we were never married. But after three months of bliss and fifteen months of steadily maturing misery, it felt like a divorce. When Lilly finally walked out on me, the day after my 30th birthday, I was a mumbling mess; emotionally damaged, with a newly minted sense of my worthlessness, I knew that Lilly had been my last chance at a relationship. In the years since, my self-esteem just kept finding new depths to sink to, losing me first one job, then another, until I finally ran out of jobs to lose.
I hadn't pursued Lilly, I hadn't even really known her before I found her one frigidly ugly, below-zero January night, passed out in an alley behind the Babylon lounge. We'd been in the same graduating class in high school; she was one of a dozen or so girls I'd nutured a pathetic crush on from afar. Passing in the halls at school, or seeing her sometimes at the mall, I'd wished for the fortitude to approach her, knowing I never would. I had no idea whether she even knew I existed, and that's as far as it ever got.
Now here I was, ten years later, faced with the slowly growing, shocking warmth of recognition as I made my way through the dimly lit alley behind the bar. I learned later that she had just been dumped by her boyfriend and had chosen getting hammered as her means of coping. It looked like she had been urinating in the alley; there was a puddle underneath her, and although she had managed to get her pants and underwear down to do it, she had passed out before being able to pull them back up. As I walked up to where she lay, a wave of equal parts pity, fascination and prurience swept over me, with pity rapidly surging to the fore and nearly knocking me over. Standing over her there in the darkness, with the sound of "Mama" by Genesis seeping through the cracked window above the back door, I knew I couldn't leave her in that alley to freeze to death. I briefly considered the idea of going into the crowded, noisy, smoke-filled bar to try to find help, but I was afraid to leave her unattended while I did. As gingerly as I could, I pulled up her underwear and pants; she never stirred once as I did so, seemingly dead to the world. My official excuse that I have convinced myself to believe is that there must have been some sort of Florence Nightingale / wounded bird aspect to our encounter, which is what prompted me to carry her to my car and put her in the passenger seat; and with no clear idea of what to do with her, started back to my apartment. She woke up halfway back and wondered aloud where we were going; it seemed that wondering who I was or why she was in my car weren't tremendously important to her at the moment. "Back to my place," I had said, wondering at my audacity with just picking up a near stranger off the street, my utter lack of judgment in bringing her home, and a growing sense of trepidation at her reaction to having been picked up like that. I knew I should add, 'but now that you're awake, you can tell me where to take you,' and I was about to do just that, when she interrupted me with a hand on my leg. "Pull over," she slurred, "I'm gonna puke." I'm not sure, but I think it must have been right there, in a filthy patch of snow in front of the Mersey Avenue fire station, as I held back her long blonde hair while she emptied her stomach into the gutter, that I fell in love with her. When we got back to my place, I half-supported, half-carried her up the steps, and I had to prop her up against the wall while I unlocked the door, pinning her in place with my knee to check her unreliable balance. I tried to clean her up the best I could, but when she started complaining that her legs were freezing, I could see she really was shivering pretty hard and needed to get out of her damp things. I steered her into the bathroom and sat her on the toilet, where she tried to undo her pants and found the task beyond her. "Yer gon' havva do it," she said, looking around perplexed and then recogizing what kind of room she was in. "C'n I take a bath?" she said so matter-of-factly that it struck me as hilarious, and I was choking on my laughter as I told her I'd run one, but that I was worried about leaving her alone in the tub, in case she passed out again. "'sokay, you gimme bath, 'm too drunk to wash anyway" she finished. So, after starting the water running, I bent over her and, trying to avert my eyes like a gentleman (and failing miserably), stripped off her slush- and urine-soaked pants and panties, then lowered her into a hot bath (only pulling off her shirt and bra after the bath was over). I washed her gently with a bar of sandalwood soap that had been sitting unopened in the medicine cabinet for months, taking care to avoid any areas that were too private. I left her side only long enough to stretch out her shirt and bra over the back of the toilet to dry out. Hoping she wouldn't mind that I was using my own toothbrush, I helped her brush her teeth (she spit out the toothpaste in the tub as she was getting out), then I wrapped her in a towel and laid her gently in my bed. I was turning to go lay down on the couch when she grabbed my shirt and pulled me back to her, demanding to know if I thought she was ugly. I could tell she was still more drunk than sober, and I was unsure of how to answer. Finally, I just settled for the simple truth. "No," I said, "I think you're beautiful." As she tasted the sincerity and longing in my voice, it finally occurred to her to wonder who I was. "Do I know you?" she asked, but with a curious stress on the word 'you', as if it was really more of a statement that I was somebody different than the brutish hogs who had made her life so evil.
"My name is Brent," I said, and she held out her hand, saying "Pleaz to meetcha Bren', 'm Lilly." I grasped her hand to shake it, intending to tell her about my crush on her from high school. She held onto my hand and squeezed it significantly. "I was in bad trouble, wasn' I?" she said softly, and for a few seconds, I saw her as she was ten years before, the way I remembered her from our school days. "An' ya save me, dinya?" I nodded slowly and opened my mouth, but she pulled me down onto the bed before I could say anything.
"Yer my knight in shiny armor, aincha? Ya pick me up when the goddam bassard throw me down. Think I owe you one, Bren' ol' buddy," she murmured, pulling off the towel, "and I wanna pay up. Here ya go, pal, help y'self," this last said with a lyrical wave of her arm to indicate I should start in on her as if she were a buffet laid out for my benefit.
I know I turned red staring at her naked body, at the almost invisibly fine hair beneath her arms and the blond muff around her crotch, at her beautiful, round breasts; now that my peeping wasn't being done surreptitiously, but out in the open with her express consent, it was more than I could handle. "I can't, I really, I can't, Lilly," I stammered, "you might feel differently when you sober up."
"Mister goddamn boyscout Brent," she laughed, without the slightest trace of heat or anger, "'s okay, rilly. Sher, I'm drung, but I know th' score. Now don't get me mad, boyfren, doff the duds and screw me good and proper." I didn't know how to tell her that, as a 28-year-old virgin, I was terrified of insulting or amusing her with my clumsy fumbling ignorance. She was so damned insistent, though. She finally grabbed me by the waist of my pants and started to take them off, so I backed off and finished the job, dazed at my lack of shame in undressing in front of her, and trembling now with anticipation and wanting. She pulled me on top of her and started to kiss my neck and chest, and I lit up with the sudden realization that if I just followed her lead and did what she did, I wouldn't have to worry about how to perform. It seemed to work for a bit, but it wasn't long before she pulled back and gazed at me unsteadily. "You haven' done this very mush, have you?" she asked with a genuine smile of affection. I couldn't say or do anything, I just hung my head and wondered how to apologize. "'s okay," she laughed, laying a hand on my chest, "'s rilly easy, I'll teash you."
"I don't have any condoms," I said miserably. She smiled again, "Hey, 'at's okay Brenty, I doan think I c'n make enny babies, so just rilax and 'njoy th' ride. Doan worry, babe, we'll take it nice and slow." And we did.
* ~ * ~ * ~ *
I must have slept like a dead man. When I woke up, I realized I had neglected to take out my contact lenses before falling asleep. As I wandered through the apartment wrapped in the towel I had used on Lilly, trying to rub some moisture back into my eyes so I could focus, I realized I was alone. Half a pan of scrambled eggs sat cold on the stove; the egg crumbs and fork by the sink conjured an image of Lilly standing over the sink eating breakfast out of the pan. On the table was a note scribbled on the back of an old envelope, "U R a damn hard man to wake up. Thanks Bernie, IOU 4 saving me, call 4 payoff. Called GF to pick me up. Lil", along with a phone number. It must have been late in the afternoon before I could get my face to stop smiling. I could have sworn that when I looked at my feet, they were definitely not even touching the ground.
It took me several years to call her; or, that's what it felt like anyway, forcing myself to wait all day before calling, yet scared to death at the possible outcome. I wanted to tell her so many things, but I was sure I'd die before I had the chance to get any of it out. When I finally did call, the only response I got was the answering machine. "Hi, this is Lilly. I'm not here right now, at least as far as YOU know, so why don't you just leave a message and we'll say I listened to it when I 'get home'", and I was amused and enamoured of the way I could hear her putting quotation marks around the words 'get home'. "Um, hi, this is, uh, Brent, I, uh, uh, I, uh, spent the night with you last night," (God! Idiot! Can you be less smooth?) "and you left me your number, so, so uh, I just wanted to tell you how wonderful it was, and wondering, if you're not busy, if you'd like to get together and do something," (hah! yeah, right, like fucking each other's brains out), "because I can't stop thinking about you and just wanted to see if you were free." I was about to add my phone number and ask her to call me, when she picked up the phone.
"Hi, did you say your name is Brent?" she asked, and I made an affirmative noise. "Brent, what happened last night? I remember a couple of things, but most of it's a blank." 'OhmyGod. She doesn't know. She doesn't know she devirginized me,' I thought, feeling suddenly light-headed and sitting down forcefully on the couch.
"Well," I started, "you were pretty, uh, sick," (drunk) "when I found you, uh, passed out behind the Babylon. I remembered you from high school, I wanted to help you but I didn't know if you were with friends or what had happened to you, I just knew you needed help, so I brought you home and, uh, cleaned you up and, uh, put you to bed, and... uh, then we, uh... we had, uh... we made, uh..."
"Yeah, I remember that part now," she said with a suddenness that told me she had just realized what happened. "OhmyGod, that was your first time, wasn't it? Oh God, I'm so sorry! Please forgive me! Brent, are you in love with me?"
I was too astounded and dazed to know how to answer. I tried to say, 'No, Lilly, I'm not in love with you, I'm sorry,' but all that came out was, "Yes, I think so." Heavy sigh from Lilly. Couple more heavy sighs. Finally, "Okay, well, you'd better come on over. We'll just have to let it run its course, I guess. I do remember that I owe you my life, Brent, so we might as well get that into the deal right now." I puzzled over this when she said it; it wasn't until years later, when this conversation emerged from the depths of my memory, that I realized what she meant was that as long as she felt she still owed me ten or twelve more mercy fucks for saving her, and as long as I was in love with her (and she was certain I'd fall out of love with her sooner rather than later), we might as well play house. She was wise, but she was wrong about one thing: I never fell out of love with her; not really, anyway.
She moved in after the first week. The two girls she'd been staying with let me know with hints and sideways comments that they fully expected her to move back with them before too long, but I didn't see it. The first two months danced by like ashes from a winter bonfire. We had sex every day, sometimes two or three times a day; even when she had her period, she still insisted on getting me off with her hand. I think that, for the first month, she thought she was helping me make up for lost time, and for the second month, she was trying to glut me, to get me so totally satiated with sex that I got tired of it; but in the end, all she was doing was feeding my multiple addictions to her; sexual, mental, spiritual, emotional. The more we were together, the more of her I wanted. The third month was "the month of new stuff", as Lilly introduced a variety of techniques to our encounters. We got very heavily into oral, then it was shot glasses and hot wax, with a chaser of one tantric position after another. She persuaded me to perform anal sex on her (and that was a lesson all to itself; it was also the first time we used a condom), and even moved me a little of the way along the path toward bondage and S/M. We never got too far in that direction, and toward the end of that third month, our sex life settled back to what it had been, then dropped below the horizon. First there was a pause of two days, then four, then it was a week; and by the end, when Lilly finally left me, it had been three months since we'd made love. Her goodbye is burned into my mind forever. Her folks had moved south a few years prior, and she was going to head south to live with them for a while, and she told me in no uncertain terms that this was the end of the road for us. I drove her to the bus depot, and as we sat side by side in the lobby, massaging each other's thighs and waiting for her bus to arrive, she found she couldn't deal with the feeling of imminent death radiating from me; so she took me by the hand and pulled me into the women's room. "One more for the good times," she said with a devil's grin as she backed into a stall and dropped her pants, and I mounted and "serviced" her, as she enjoyed calling it, for what I knew was the last time. It was the first time I'd ever had sex with tears in my eyes; I had no idea it wouldn't be the last.
3
...You can't make your heart feel something it won't... I Can't Make You Love Me (Bonnie Raitt)
I had never gotten around to telling Lilly that I didn't know whether she was my first time or not, because I was still unsure as to what counted, and for how much. When I was 15, I'd had a six-month relationship with a 17-year-old named Iris. She'd had several boyfriends, but for me she was my first love, and I thought about her more or less constantly in the years after. Iris and I never actually had intercourse, but we spent many nights in the basement of her house or mine with the lights off and the radio on, dry-humping through our underwear, feeling under each other's shirts; and Iris, on three separate occasions, took my member in her mouth and tried valiantly to get me off; but for some reason (nerves? tension? inexperience?) I was never able to orgasm from this. I didn't know if that counted as sex, especially since I never completed the act with Iris except when I was alone and picturing her in my mind; I suspected it did, but I wasn't sure how to reconcile the concepts "I have had sex" and "I am a virgin", so I never mentioned it to Lilly. Whatever. I loved Iris, I know I did. She was the first, she was burned into my soul the way no one else ever could be. I'm pretty sure I know now what love is, I might have then, too. All I know for real is that I loved being with her, and the day she broke up with me was the worst day of my life until Lilly left me. That day, the day Iris told me she couldn't be with me anymore, was a mosaic inside me; hard, permanent bits of faded color that jabbed into my soul like a faceful of broken glass. The only part of that memory that's smooth is the hours of crying that blended the daylight hours into the night.
The bigger picture, I guess, was that I was alone again, and knew I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. Both of the women whose interest I'd managed to capture had left me. I knew there was something wrong with me that prevented a woman from staying interested. With this as a foundation, I grew too depressed to hold any job for long, sloughing my way through one dead end after another.
4
...the sun is the same in a relative way but you're older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. -- Time (Pink Floyd)
The thought of just cashing it all in crossed my mind more than a few times over the years, even more so after I lost the last job. After some negotiation, the manager of my apartment complex agreed to let me work as a maintenance man for $200 a month and free rent. The catch was that I couldn't stay in my apartment; not as long as there were people willing to pay to rent it. I had to move into a little room at the back of the clubhouse, behind the indoor pool. It was really little bigger than a walk-in closet, but there was room for a cot and a dresser, and there was a bar to hang some of my clothes on. When I moved into that room, I stashed the rest of the stuff from my old apartment in one of the storage buildings that dotted the complex; not that I ever really had that much stuff to begin with. For bathroom and shower facilities I had to make do with what was available at the pool, and my kitchen was in the common area of the clubhouse. Not terribly private, but I was in no position to complain, especially since I was being allowed to stay there for free. I didn't know much about furnaces and washers and dryers, but I knew how to read a manual. I didn't do too badly.
I found out much later that the manager was actually given a $1000 monthly allowance by the owner for maintenance. I guess the idea was that he could hire someone part-time to do it for that $1000, but he had trouble keeping anybody for that salary, so a lot of the time he had to do the maintenance himself, which he hated. He just pocketed the $1000 and told the owner he paid it as salary, and he never had to produce any further proof of the fake employee. When I came along, he saw a chance to keep pocketing $800 a month and pay me $200 to do the job he despised. I can't really blame or hate him for it; after all, I would have been on the streets otherwise. I had already lost my car when I couldn't afford the insurance and had to sell it anyway for the money; after that ran out, I got three months behind on the rent. I was rapidly coming up on month number four with still no cash; so when I got the $200 salary and free rent, the hard place suddenly became the semi-comfortable place, and I told the rock to go hump itself.
The clubhouse was centrally located in the complex and in addition to the pool, it also had a billiard table (upstairs), a reception area, and a little alcove with three ancient videogame consoles; Donkey Kong (good), Ms. Pac-Man, (bad), and some racing game (ugly) whose name I forget. When you have the key to the consoles, you can rack up as many free games as you want. I never did break three grand on DK, my high score remains at 297,800.
The complex also owned a beat-up white pickup that I used to get supplies and run errands. The manager grudgingly gave me five dollars a week for gas to run the errands, and let me know that I was free to use the truck any other time I wanted but that if I did, I had to buy my own gas. I didn't use it for personal stuff very much, pretty much every dollar I got went toward groceries and sundries like shampoo, contact lenses and solution, et cetera. As I was rooting around in one of the storage buildings, I found a stash of stuff that had been left by previous tenants. Most of it was junk, but there was a 10-speed bike that I claimed. It had been pretty badly beaten up, but I spent a lot of time cleaning it and straightening it out, and I used that if I wanted to go anywhere.
My responsibilities also included the swimming pool filters and pumps. There wasn't really anybody to do the other maintenance, like making sure the pool was kept clean and keeping the area in shape, stocking the supply of towels that the complex kept on hand for tenants to use, so all that kind of fell on me too. That wasn't too bad, either, because it kept me busy, and I had a legitimate excuse to hang around the pool all day while I watched the women who came to swim. Angela Anderson, with her flowing blonde mane and 36-24-36 perfection. Sandra Ochs, with her charming, crooked smile and frizzy hair. Sally Riddick, with her enormous lovely breasts that rippled and bounced so wonderfully whenever she jumped off the diving board. Annette Ross, with her oversized buttocks (easily twice as large as the next woman), under whose enormous cheeks I would have happily suffocated. Julie Ann (never did learn her last name), whose legs really did seem to go right up to her neck. Others whose names escape me, but whose various roundnesses live on in my memory. I'd go around slowly picking up wet towels and taking them back to the laundry room, where I'd load the machines while fantasizing about whoever I'd just seen. It had been too many years, and I had never had the ability or looks to hit on any of them, or the confidence to do anything about it even if I had. I didn't want to hit on anybody anyway, I just wanted a friend, a steady relationship, somebody to just be with, to go places with, to eat with, to talk to, to snuggle with and have sex with, like I'd had with Lilly, and I didn't know how to get a relationship like that going out of a clear blue sky. So mostly I just hunched down there by the driers, breathing in the moist atmosphere and stroking my lonely member. Pathetic.
As time went by, I resorted to pleasuring myself with the occasional stroke book. Nothing really raunchy, mostly just photos of couples doing the deed, soft core for the most part, but nothing left to the imagination. Sometimes I thought I was making it worse by torturing myself with what I could never have, but I couldn't help it. The need was too great, the longing too intense. I always held it in check, though; I never had more than one magazine at a time, and I never left it laying out, but always tucked it away in a dresser drawer in my room, to remind myself that there was something shameful about using porn, and that I should never lose that sense of shame.
Anybody that's known loneliness, real soul-crushing ravenous loneliness, knows what nighttime is like. They know what it is when the darkness closes in and chokes you and devours you with agonizing slowness. They know that loneliness shares a basic identity at the subatomic level with cancer. Sometimes it drives you out into the night looking for anything to escape the pain. The clubhouse was pretty slow most nights, and I was tired of being trapped there anyway. Bars are noisy and expensive, and the only mall nearby closed at 9:00 pm. There was a video game arcade about three miles from the complex, and more than a few nights I made the hike, or biked over, just to hang out and watch people be with each other, laugh with each other, hug each other, kiss each other, trying desperately to feed myself with whatever little crumbs and flakes I could pry from their happinesses. Walking or riding home, I watched people driving around, the cars crawling past all stuffed with eyes, and when I would finally make it back at 3:00 am, back to my lonely little clubhouse, I'd fix a Long Island Iced Tea from a bottle of mix and a root beer from the vending machine; and all too often this method was my only means of getting to sleep. When that didn't work, I'd occasionally wander around the complex, looking at the mix of dark and lighted windows, wondering what was going on behind those panes; sometimes hanging out in the stairwells of the buildings, just for the scraps of conversation I could hear seeping through the walls. What a repulsive sight I must have presented, standing there in the hall, ear pressed up to the cold, unyielding wallboard as I tried to tease the least little sense out of the words. It was a miserable existence, with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. I was so ready to end it all, yet too afraid of botching the job and winding up a vegetable or a cripple, unable to finish what I'd started; or even worse, succeeding and then finding out that I was wrong, that there really is an actual Hell; although how Hell could have been worse than my life, I couldn't imagine.