She went into the porn industry on her own accord. Mutual friends blame me but I wouldn't. And this isn't a bad thing. She's a goddess and it's beautiful. She's tasteful and respected by photographers of high merit and she increases the net happiness in the world. Few people can say this.
She's moved from the Valley and has a penthouse in Santa Monica. I have a subscription and stare for hours at glossy images of her legs and feet and hair falling from her shoulder and that beautiful cleft that was always so gritty when I had it. It's been perfected and bound.
Life is... i can't finish that; 'reflective' is a cavernous word I have the meek power to voice. CNN exacerbates shallow feelings. I am not addicted to anything even though I try. I have two jobs and I dress up like it's Halloween and shake the hands of billionaires who've orbited space.
How did Houdini die? It was untoward and surreptitiously related to an act, wasn't it? There is a desire to feel like a root searching through soil.
I enter her suite and there are grapes and things are Roman and I always look for little boys hidden in closets behind the faux marble but fortunately there are none. She still hugs me tight and I'm glad she'll never date anyone in that underworld. It's the adjacent world, anyway.
She stands on coconut-strewn, Costa Rican beaches and wears necklaces of wooden ornaments and her hair is trimmed close and grown dark. Her skin is tan and it's an average of all skin. Her race is ambiguous and she'll always be mine. This is a laconic agreement.
In her apartment we're waiting and I'll play her Dylan on the piano. She loves the interplay between the left and right hand. I bounce the hands alternately and sing for her and she smiles and I finish and she sits and we'll embrace and the world is a mosaic with all the pieces there but not fitting now; the image too, is obscured and the goal is indefinite. I'll hug her tight and no matter what, it is never tight enough.
We can never reach a goal that is both hidden and meaningless. I can cry on her shoulder and this will feel good and she can pet my head and I can play her my own songs and I can stand with a guitar at the bowels of the train that will take passengers from Hollywood to Pasadena and I can sing for them. I can stand and sing and blow wildly into a harmonica and the change can pile up but it is never enough. I can go to the Ritz Carlton at the edge of the sea and shake hands with these billionaires but it does not inch me towards rent. I can tell them stories and I have played in the tunnels of London and Paris. I have been robbed in Tegucigalpa and for some reason I view this as essential.
I have kneeled between the legs of a goddess and it is still not enough. We will be together again. She travels to Costa Rica and the magazine is concerned with aesthetics. It publishes pedant articles and it is a cousin to The Economist –the average income among subscribers to both is the same.
She will drape a leg over a palm that extends from the dense jungle. Flocks of people will visualize that leg as an invitation to kiss their way up to the gem she hides with folded glossy thighs.
Her first shoot she was nervous and I accompanied her. We were not together then and it had been five months since we brought each other to that place. I do not check her registry to that place and I myself have boycotted it. This boycott dulls other things and I do not know why I do it.
"You know I still pull it out to you?" I sing from the bench and the piano is stout against the wall. It was bought for me for 50 dollars, it was a lure and the thing is delightful, keys just close enough to resemble accuracy and I sound vintage and my voice is feeble and it will never be a proper vehicle for anything but her.
And yet a mutual destination is evident. She will occupy her mind and I will tell her to budget her money and invest in index funds and think about the future and my mind still shapes her decisions.
"You know I still pull it out to you." I repeat and she smiles coyly.
"No you don't."
"I always end it to you. I may start with your co-workers. But I end it with you. You know?" I sing and bounce my floppy hands on the keys.
"I know."
I will play a few notes. The one song of any merit I etched from a painful adolescent love. It travels sparsely from C to a happy G then it plummets to a dreadful Em and I have young rhymes about missing 18-year-olds with dark hair and glacial eyes.
"When, babe?" She asks and I bounce on the flat keys.
"Well he never had enough money // and he never was quite satisfied // but he was a friend of mine…" I then play.
I sing and the only songs I try are Dylan. I've given up for the time being and maybe when I'm 40 I'll do something like H. Miller and say the equivalent of 'cunt' a lot. Hopefully before that I'll catch amnesia and nudge her legs apart and become some cave explorer and forget it all.
First, I suppose, I would have to figure out what it is that I need to forget. Then, I would have to re-etch the route. The destination is waiting and I wish it was as simple as me playing it like a fish on a line. It is convoluted. I made it that way. I am like a cat in a tree. She will become the tree.
