Prologue

Only anarchists are pretty. And for an entire year, we were absolutely beautiful. But feelings stagnate, like all other things, especially when your relationship consists solely of watching shitty Indie movies, brutal animalistic sex, and occasionally going to Perkins. Complacency had overtaken me completely, and I had gotten to the point where it was assumed my life would be the same without her. So I gave it a shot. Before my exodus to the promised Southernlands, I broke it off. When we were at our best, when we felt strongest about one another, we weren’t going out. No title was assigned to what we were. We were surreptitious, sneaking around, all midnight trysts and shady dealings. I believed breaking up would return us to that golden point, that fountain of white-hot infatuation with significantly less responsibility. She did not see it the same way.

I met a girl I’d known forever in Reading, and we spent a week in bliss. Clementine essentially staked out the situation, trying to have my homeboys spy on me, calling 27 times in the course of a week and sabotaging any chance I had of truly enjoying the second season of Lost. On day 6, she found love. I returned to the frigid Northlands white-knuckled and furious, not from jealousy, but due to harassment.

Let’s begin there.

Part I: Righteous Fury

“We need to talk. :X”

I squinted at my shitty Virgin Mobile flip phone, unsure of how one would go about decoding a text-message smiley with an X for a mouth. Admittedly, I was less sure of what the ex and I would have to talk about, considering the events of our separate weeks. I called a number of times, and all were met with no answer. I swung up to the Wal-Mart where she worked, knowing she was always either home or there, and found nothing. It was in the parking lot I finally got in touch with her.

“Hello?”

“Hey. So, what are we talking about?”

“Listen…”

“Is it the 27 missed calls on Chard’s phone, the texts trying to recruit him into espionage, or you fucking Joel?”

Joel was my drummer. I had caught wind of this from my best friend and surrogate sister of 6 years, a Hispanic chain-smoker named Consuela.

“… I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

I checked the watch I didn’t have to ensure I had, in fact, broken up with her a week before.

“… What?”

“I’ve found someone else.”

“Right, Joel, I know.”

“Wait, you know?”

Throngs of overweight white trash were now looking at me. I paced around my car, phone to my ear.

“Yeah, I know.”

“How?”

“Consuela. I don’t care in the least. I’m more concerned with you calling 27 times and spying on me.”

“Listen,” she said through a hiss of static, “I can’t hear you, the connection is breaking up.”

“Anything else you want to talk about?”

“What?”

“Anything else you need to say to me?”

“Uh… no, I don’t think so. Should I have?”

“Think hard. Nothing?”

“Nope.”

“Good. This is your last chance. Don’t talk to me anymore.”

I hung up, washed my hands of the situation, and went lifting.

#

A little back story on Joel. He is the drummer of a funk rock band that I had recently joined. They had existed three years prior to my induction, but had no singer. Joel didn’t believe a singer was necessary.

“I think vocals just ruin the music,” he said. “It’s just, it’s so much deeper than that.”

Most of the songs sounded remarkably like what would happen if the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Gorillaz had an irradiated, funky baby. Half of the songs they had pre-established lyrics for were about anal sex.

But Joel, for all his pretentious, artsy arrogance, had to gradually come to terms with the fact that nobody listens to jam bands, and after much badgering from the guitarist and bassist, had eventually recruited me. This may be ego, but we sounded magnificent. Joel did not care much for me. He was a control freak, a megalomaniac “tortured artist” insistent on calling the shots at all times. I was a swaggering, anti-authoritarian smart ass, but I understood that this was his band before it was mine, and walked on eggshells around him for a long time.

Joel also played women. I almost admired his ability; he had it down to a science. He’d catch girls exclusively on the rebound, when they were most vulnerable, and would apply what he’d gleaned from hundreds of romantic comedies in an effort to seduce them; the cutesy, complimentary boyfriend voice, the doting attention, the rambling quasi-philosophical discussions about nothing. It almost always worked like a charm, and had carved eleven notches in his bedpost by the age of eighteen. The exception to this rule was my little sister Rawhead, who’s game was even more highly developed. She had shrugged him off and humiliated him countless times. He had eventually given up, with no small damage dealt to his pride.

Pride was what Joel was about. He drained it. He robbed girls of their dignity, slowly warping them further and further into subservient little housewife domestics, sex-slave maids that fetched him drinks and cleaned up after him. For all my questionable misogyny, this had never sat right with me. I wouldn’t consider myself a player, exactly; just a man who really, really enjoys sex. I have always been up front with it. I don’t want to shatter your psyche, I don’t want to break your heart, I just understand we are two human beings with supplementary biological imperatives and interlocking genitals, and if we both enjoy each other’s company, well then shit, who loses? It’s not conquest to me. It’s just a way of passing time and keeping fit that beats the shit out of playing tennis.

I had borne witness to Joel’s system three times since joining the band, and had normally let it happen with detachment, if not mild bemusement. This was before he started inviting Clementine to practice. Awkward was a fitting word; I leapt around shirtless singing covers of songs like “Get on Top” and rambling tales I wrote about other girls months and months prior while Clem sat silently on the couch, doodling and trying not to look at me or Joel. She’d fetch him drinks. I felt something inside simmer, but bit it down, still indignant. I stopped holding my tongue around Joel. He hated me more.

“Listen,” he’d said in a MySpace message, as for some reason interacting through the internet and text messages made his balls swell to five times their previous size, “I need you to not be a douchebag during the show tomorrow and drop that frontman bullshit. You’re part of a band, you’re not THE band. I don’t want my first show ruined because of it.”

I asked him to meet me at my house to discuss this face to face. He brought Clementine.

Joel got out of the car wearing stupid sunglass-goggles.

“If you need to call me a douchebag,” I said calmly, “Please do so to my face.”

“I didn’t call you a douchebag.”

“Yes you did. See, here, I have drawn up a pie chart diagramming what you have to worry about in the band.”

I handed him the paper. Drums and Lyrics Joel Wrote were shaded. Guitar, Bass, Vocals, Lyrics Joel Did Not Write and Frontman Bullshit were all left unshaded. He stared at it silently, and for a long time.

From there, the conversation blossomed into how he was using this funk-rock band to demonstrate his own radical depth and to properly express the sorrow in his tortured philosopher’s soul. I was… unconvinced. I tried to explain to him that he was not revolutionizing rock and roll, and that the best song we had was about transvestite prison rape. He was likewise unconvinced. Clementine tried to interject that she backed him up, since in my previous band, the Backflip Journeymen, I had been the figurehead. I dismissed this. People liked the Backflip Journeymen. We all spoke onstage. We all dicked around. We were charming!

“Also,” he said, “You sound bad on Moonweed.”

“What?”

“On Moonweed, I don’t know, it sounds like your mumbling.”

“I have to sing lower. The amp don’t pick it up right when I try to keep pitch with you guys. If I go up an octave, I’LL BE SINGING LIKE THIS!”

I yelled this last part to demonstrate pitch and he jumped six feet straight in the air. I mentally noted that Joel was horrified of me, perhaps with good reason. I was a foot taller than him, a good sixty pounds heavier, and had been banging the girl who was now “his one true love” a week prior.

He got back in the car and the two drove away, both avoiding eye contact. Nothing was resolved, and we were rapidly heading toward culmination. I couldn’t wait for the fireworks.

Part II: Culmination

The day of the show, I picked up my aforementioned siblings, Consuela and Rawhead, as well as the true victim of this fiasco, Meg.

Meg was a beautiful but world-weary creature with stormy blue eyes and a beaten puppy demeanor. She had lost her virginity to Joel long ago, and sported a host of psychoses that inexplicably bound her to him from that point on. She was powerless to resist his whim, which played right into his macabre little God complex. Every time Joel set his sights on a freshly rebounded girl, he threw Meg away like a used condom and had a few weeks of fun. She’d still drift around them in silent agony, watching the man she loved whisper sweet nothings into the ear of a girl he barely new, taking the backseat on rides, sitting on the easy chair while they cuddled on the couch. Meg would sit and watch, her organs twisting, fighting back tears, until Joel finished his process and conquered his girl entirely. Then, he’d dump her and turn on the sweet talk, telling her the same thing every time: “I thought she understood me, but she doesn’t. No one does like you do, baby. Please, forgive me.” And five times, Meg had forgiven him. She’d do anything for him. Lie. Steal. Kill, if necessary. There was nothing left to the girl by now. Any emotion she’d had, any pride or dignity, any soul, had been eroded away through years of psychological abuse, leaving behind only her battered skeleton. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, she was little more than bleached bones.

Two days before, her uncle, and a best friend to her since she was young, had died. He had killed himself. She had gone to identify the body. She was, understandably, a wee bit shaken. She had called Joel for solace. Clementine had picked up.

“Oh. Um… yeah, I’m sorry, but we’re together now,” she’d said.

You could have heard her shatter over the phone.

Since then, she had been proclaiming what you’d expect, of course:

“I can’t believe him. He always does this. I’m not going back this time. I’m sick of putting up with his bullshit. I’m going to beat the shit out of him at this show. You watch. I’m going to beat him to the fucking ground. Fuck that 90-pound bitch and fuck him.”

We all met at Wendy’s, and as soon as he entered, the fire in her eyes died. She lowered her head and said nothing.

I’d torn Clem apart for what she’d done to Meg, for the coldness and callousness of it, for the thoughtless selfishness. She pretended she didn’t see me. The bands gathered around the corner and I turned on the charm, talking to everyone, laughing and smoking and entertaining.

“Clem,” I called suddenly over everything else.

She looked up at me, then down again, then back up and caught my gaze. Her eyes were darker than I remembered.

“Do you hate me?”

“What?”

I leaned forward, yelling across the seats. “Do you hate me?”

“Um, sure.”

“Yes or no.”

She nodded slowly. I smiled.

“Good.”

Joel came in and I picked up the conversation where I’d left it. Clem sat silently, staring at her baked potato. Meg was laying her head on her arms, pretending to sleep on the table.

Joel finally looked at me, and I saw his face go a little pale. For our first show, the show he had been waiting three years to play, the first opportunity for him to share his “art” with the world, I had worn hiking boots, a Dinosaur Barbacue t-shirt, and flannel pajama bottoms with pine cones and axes on them.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t say anything to me.

We got our shit together and departed. Without looking at me, Meg got into Joel’s backseat, leaving the front for Clementine.

We drove off for Café Metropolis.

#

The Metro was throbbing with excitement. Joel tried to go over my head with both the guest passes, but I beat him to the punch and got little Rawhead, the girl who had shot him down so many times, in for free. The other guest was a gorgeous little gypsy girl I mentioned in a story a long time ago, Sierra. We talked and flirted for most of the night. A few minutes later, my personal oracle and muse, Ursula, showed up. She was high as a kite and dressed to kill. We were the only ones on the dance floor, making out sloppily as my brother’s band performed their hardcore rendition of Sisqo’s “The Thong Song.”

The night wore on and it drew closer to our time to perform. I didn’t know all the lyrics, but that is the unwritten rule of shows: There will always be at least one song you don’t know all the lyrics to. Bluffing is a very important part of stage presence.

Standing in the parking lot, bullshitting and smoking a Marlboro Menthol, I saw Joel walk by fiddling with his cell phone. Clementine walked behind him, carrying one of his drums.

I felt something in my chest begin to boil.

“Why is she carrying that?” Sierra asked.

“Because he’s a douchebag,” the younger and larger Nikolayevich said.

I was silent and glaring daggers.

  #

We got onstage and played. Karma intervened for a while, and Joel couldn’t set up his drums for a good ten minutes. We stood on the stage, looking around anxiously. I made faces and yelled to people I knew, trying to keep everyone from rioting and/or leaving. After the obligatory waiting period, we started our set, and blew the place apart.

I looked right into Clementine’s eyes when I sang Get on Top. It was the only point during the show where she actually looked at me.

I was shirtless and sweaty and bathed in spotlights, hopping around and accidentally knocking into the guitar neck, belting lyrics into the microphone and hearing them reverberated back at me full force. I was impressed by the power of my own voice. I always thought I sounded younger, and less like I knew what the fuck I was doing. Their eyes were all on us, and we sang and played and jumped around and sweated and for a moment there, I was divine. Only a moment, though.

“You know, I love the Metro, man,” I said between songs, “Because the Metro fuckin’ remembers punk rock. Remember before cars? When motherfuckers had to WALK everywhere-”

“JUST PLAY SOMETHING!” a kid I went to school with yelled from the crowd. We all cracked up. Joel stood, suddenly very vehement, and yelled “THANK YOU!” into the drum mic that they had given him for reasons beyond my comprehension. I rolled my eyes, grabbed my junk and informed my former schoolmate that this was, in fact, “all for you, buddy. Right here,” and we launched into our next song. We cleaned up the set, and before the last song, I threw thirty-six condoms into the crowd.

Joel was livid. Everyone was inflating them and knocking them around; I was batting them right back as I sang. We wrapped up our set to thunderous applause.

“Alright, thanks everyone, that’s all we got,” I said. “Tony, will you do the honors?” I held the mic in front of the bassist’s face. He smiled and leaned forward.

“We are Certifiable Trainwreck, and we just rocked your ass.”

The applause exploded again.

“Alright!” Joel said, leaping to his feet behind his needlessly elaborate drum set, “Who wants to hear the instrumentals!?” He rattled off a few names. I looked back at him, then at the puzzled audience, and shrugged.

“Ain’t no vocals in those,” I said, putting the mic back on the stand. I hopped offstage, and as soon as I hit the floor, the house lights kicked on.

I walked around, shaking hands and thanking people. As I headed for the outer bar and rehydration, I saw Meg walk by, carrying one of Joel’s drumsticks. Our eyes met and I winced. You could feel the shame come off her in waves.

Before we departed, I tore off the sweaty hemp necklace Clem had made me all those months ago and threw it in her lap. She didn’t say a word until I was out of earshot.

On the way home, Joel texted me, saying, “I hope you enjoyed your first and last show with us.”

I called him back, but he didn’t answer. I scared the shit out of the boy. Just as well. I left him a voicemail.

“Don’t be scurred, slugger! You can’t fire me, I quit! I hope you enjoyed the first and last show you’ll EVER fuckin’ play! Enjoy your whore.”

Clem tried to fight me a little, but I was on a roll and she shut up quick.

I wish I could end the story here.

Part III: Irrationality

Two days passed, and I called her at 6 in the morning.

“Hello?” her tiny voice was thick with sleep.

“Are you at home or at Joel’s?”

“Joel’s.”

“Give me one hour. I need to talk to you, face to face, like real people.”

“What?”

“One hour. That’s all. After that, you say blow, and I’m gone.”

“… Why should I? After all the shit you’ve said to me this week, why should I give you another chance?”

“You shouldn’t. But don’t you want to know why I said what I did?”

She paused. I heard Joel’s voice. I’d woken him up, too. I was fine with that.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea. Joel’s mom will be waking up soon.”

“I don’t care. I’ll pick you up and drop you back off. I just need an hour.”

I heard him in the background telling her no.

“Put him on.”

She did.

“So, what, you own her now?” I asked, my voice involuntarily getting louder. “You call the shots? She’s not allowed out to play?”

“Listen,” he said, “You guys don’t understand, that she’s a female, all right?”

I approached this statement in my head from every possible angle and still could not decipher what it meant.

“True. Put her back on.”

“No. Fuck off.” He hung up.

Growling, snarling, I called her back.

“Hello?”

“One hour. That’s it. And I’m gone.”

“It’s not a good idea. Now’s not a good time.”

“Now is the ONLY time.”

“What do you need to talk to me about so bad?”

“I can’t explain over the phone.”

“Anything you need to say to me, you can say here.”

“Not if I want you to listen.”

“What, is it about Joel?”

“Some of it.” Most of it. Fuck, all of it.

“Well, here, let me put him on. You can tell him, how about that?”

She did. I don’t know what this was supposed to accomplish.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I don’t really want to talk to you.”

“Clem said you had something to tell her about me? Is there something you want to say?”

I laughed. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Wherever, man. The beginning.”

“All right. You play women. You’re not nearly as deep as you think you are. You’re an arrogant prick. Nobody can fucking stand you. You dump Meg every two weeks, keep her dangling around you to mentally torture her into submission, then pick her back up a month later. You’re a control freak, which is why your band never wants to jam with you, and I would absolutely love to rip out and eat your heart.”

There was a long silence, followed by the click of a receiver and a dial tone.

#

I showed up at her house at 3 AM the following night. Her eyes were huge and brown and wet.

“All right,” she said quietly, her thunder and rage gone, “What?”

“Will you come with me?”

She stood, biting her lower lip.

“… I’ll see if I can.”

We drove back to my house.

“All right. When I first joined CTW, there was this girl. She had just gotten out of a long relationship via a rough breakup, and she was incredibly vulnerable. The timing was perfect. She bumped into Joel, who was the perfect boyfriend. He doted attention on her, complimented her, fed her all the same fake romantic comedy bullshit that our society has become so used to associating with true love. In doing so, he dropped Meg, of course, but kept her around. They’re ‘best friends’, after all. A few weeks went by, and Joel got bored with his true love, so he kicked her ass to the curb and told Meg that he didn’t mean it, he thought she understood him, but no one can, not like Meg does. Meg bought it. You want to know this girl’s name?”

Clem looked down, then back up at me and nodded slowly.

“Chelsea. Amber. Consuela. And Clementine.”

She looked back down again.

“… Nobody told me,” she said slowly.

“You saw it happen to Consuela.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Rawhead warned you.”

“I thought I was different.”

“Girls always do.”

She started crying. I pulled her into my chest and held her close.

“Meg’s over his house right now,” she whimpered.

“What?”

“Yeah. She’s staying over. We need to call them. I need to get back my iPod and my 40 dollars.”

“Why does he have your 40 dollars?”

“To buy weed.”

I frowned. “You gave him forty fucking dollars to buy weed for himself and his ex-girlfriend of two days for when she stays the night? Jesus, Clem.”

“I know,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I know.”

She called Joel and reprimanded him. He fought it to the end, never giving up the ploy. “What are you talking about?” he kept asking. “Why are you doing this?”

He brought her iPod and the bag to my house. Neither he nor Meg would look at me. They didn’t say a word.

“Why don’t you get out of the car?” Clem taunted him.

I knew why.

They handed off the goods and drove around the block so they wouldn’t have to pass us again. Clem and I went inside, smoked, had sex, and fell asleep as we had for a year.

It’d be the last time.

Part IV: Endgame

Clem spent the next two days at my house, and we spent them arguing. She kept saying he hadn’t done anything yet. She was just taking my (and everyone else’s) word for it. She didn’t know for a fact Joel was… the way he was. But she also said she felt so used. So fucked with. Like she was nothing. Like she didn’t matter.

I poured my heart out to the girl, of course. I told her everything. Threw around the L-word, which I typically avoid like the plague. I even said I couldn’t imagine my life without her. Jesus, that’s disgusting.

“What you did in Reading really hurt me, Ivan,” she kept saying. “I don’t know if I can ever feel the same. I don’t know if I can be in love with you again. I just… I can’t decide.”

“Decide?”

“I know what’s right, and I know what I want.”

I was right. Joel was what she wanted.

“Well then, do what you want.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I’ll miss you too much.”

After forty-eight hours of this, I had reached my breaking point. I called her from work.

“I’m not an option anymore,” I told her.

“What?”

“I’m not an option now. It’s not either me or Joel. It’s Joel or nobody.”

“What? No!”

“I’m not going to sit around and be a possibility. And if a one-week rebound fuck meant more to you than the year we had, fuck that, I’m not wasting any more time.”

“You just need to give me time to get over him!”

“You shouldn’t need to get over him! You met him seven fucking days ago! You should still be getting over me!”

“When you went to Reading, I did everything I could to forget about you.”

“You did a hell of a job!”

“Ivan, please-”

“Talk to me when you decide what’s important.”

“I just need time!”

“No you don’t! I went on vacation and you fucked my drummer for a week! You don’t need TIME to get over that! You don’t even know him!”

“Why do you have to say it like that?”

“Because that’s what it was to me. I’m sure in your head you fell in love, or found your soul’s counterpart in another or some sappy bullshit like that, but straight up, we broke up, I went to Reading, you stalked me for six days, then you fucked my drummer.”

“I may’ve fucked him but at least I DIDN’T PLAN IT!” she howled.

“Oh, yeah, knowing him for two days before you let him fuck you definitely gives you the moral high ground.”

We both hung up. I called her two days later, asking if she’d been the one who wrote “I <3 you” on my blank CD. Her phone was crackly and all static. I had to hit Wal-Mart earlier, and didn’t see her there. If she’d been home, she would have answered her phone. All her friends had abandoned her since she started with Joel, so that left one possibility.

She called me back seven hours later.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” she asked me.

“Home.”

“… Oh. We thought you’d be on your way to work by now. I have to pick up my cell phone charger.”

“… Go ahead.”

“No, we’re too far from your house now.”

This was illogical bullshit.

“I’ll bet you are,” I said. I lost it, starting to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?!” she demanded.

I heard Joel intone a half-whined “Oh my GOD” from the background.

“Nothing!” I said, trying to fight it down and failing. “Look, I have to go. I’ll drop your charger off at your house. I have some other shit I want to give to you anyway. I’m guessing you won’t be home by 3 AM?”

“… I’ll come pick up my shit.”

“No, you won’t. I don’t want to fucking look at you.”

“You’re being ridiculous. What’s your fucking problem?”

“Gee, I don’t know! Whatcha think?”

“I’m not fucking DATING him!”

“Yeah, neither were we.”

“What’re you trying to say?”

“That I’m going to make it even easier to forget me this time around. If that’s even possible. Peace.”

I hung up, and after work, I got my shit together.

She’d made me four paintings in the time I’d known her, putting a lot of work into each. A taxi cab in a field, a yeti shooting heroin, a plant-monster eating an emokid, and my favorite, a picture of Saturn. She’d also made me a peace-sign charm for the hemp necklace and a shrinky-dink goat.

I destroyed them all. I broke the goat into pieces. I used needle-nosed pliers to twist the charm into something unrecognizable. I tore the paintings into shreds, ripping and stacking and re-ripping, until there was nothing left.

Except for Saturn. I tacked Saturn to my ceiling, pulled my Pakistani throwing knife out of the wall, and set to work.

My mind twisted and sang with each thrust. I thought back to the year I’d wasted. I thought about all of her friends who had hit me with the Fuck Me eyes at parties, and all the opportunities I’d passed up. I thought about all the other girls I’d turned down, girls from work, girls I used to go to school with. I thought about planning her that surprise birthday party at the Vista, and how I’d gradually worked her through the geeking out she’d do whenever she got high.

What kept coming back to me was maybe six months ago, when she stayed over my house. We had already partaken in Ja’s sacrament and it had done its job well. Our minds were turned off, our spirits soaring, our bodies hanging behind like moorings, still unconsciously thrashing and sweating and writhing in absolute ecstasy. We were millions of miles away, floating through perfection, but somehow I could still feel those nails in my back, those thighs locking around me. Those eternal brown eyes looking into and through me. I remember her words clearest of all, the half-gasped, half-screamed professions I’ll take with me to the grave:

“I love you,” she’d stammered, “Oh my God. I never want to have sex with anybody else. Fuck me forever.”

My triceps swelled as I jammed the knife through the middle of Saturn and tore down, through my ceiling, through the side of the page, throwing paper scraps and plaster all over my dark blue carpeting.

I crammed the pieces of our wasted year into an envelope, topping it with a note written on paper I’d torn out of the moleskin notebook she’d gotten my writing.

“Dearest Clementine,” I wrote,

“It’s been a hell of a ride. Try forgetting this one.”

I dropped the envelope off in her mailbox and called her.

“Hello?”

“I dropped off your closure,” I said.

“What?”

“I dropped off your closure. You might want to have your boytoy zip over and pick it up.”

“Uh, no. What’d you drop off?”

“You’ll find out. Peace.”

I hung up.

Two hours later, I got a text from her. This was the last thing she was ever going to say to me. The last words I’d ever see.

“I’m sorry.”

I still don’t believe her.

I hope I’m wrong, and I hope she’s right. I hope she’s the one who’ll change him, and she won’t have to go through what I’ve seen him put all the others through. But most of all, I hope Meg finds her place, wherever that may be. She is little more than an emotional slave. The girl’s soul is broken, battered, beaten and bruised. There is nothing left to her. She’s been scraped clean by trauma after trauma, and as much as I’d love to save her, I know I can’t. I don’t know if she can be saved, by this point.

Nothing remains but her bleached bones.