Summer Love

Summer Love

               It was summertime and I was feeling alright.  The stormy, rainy nights of spring had finally come and gone and the miserable flood season had long since evaporated.  The rolling, green hills of Northern California’s wet season were nowhere in sight and the scenery had all faded to brown.  The sun beat down on my deadbeat neck during the day and the cloudless night sky sent moonbeams down all around me, lighting my broke ass’ nightly journey to the liquor store.

               I was standing at the counter, trying to see through my dark sunglasses to browse the liquors on the back shelf when I finally came to the realization I didn’t need to see.  I was in the mood for semi-rotgut booze, something to really punish my insides and remind me of how bad I looked on the outside.  Maybe if I got sick enough, or at least hung over enough, maybe my slowly disintegrating stomach lining would force me to quit drinking.  My receding hair line and my ever-increasing waistline would thank me.

               But it wouldn’t fix my fucking eye.

               This kid hit me in the face, busted the orbital floor of my eye socket ten years prior to that particular night at the liquor store.  The eye doctor had warned me that my eye would continue to fall further back, set itself further back in my skull one to two millimeters per year.  I was going to get progressively uglier as the years ticked on, although the doctor hadn’t expressly come out and said so at the time.  I hadn’t really known what he meant when he was telling me.  They were just words.

               But now you could see it.  Every time I tried to take a picture of myself to put a picture of me on an online dating profile, I couldn’t get an angle that would hide it.  And as I got older, as my disfigurement became more prominent, all the dates started to dry up.  Nobody had any interest in me anymore.  Which, when you think about it is a good thing.  Because really, had some woman, one of my previous girlfriends actually fallen in love and stayed in love with me, she would have at some point taken half of my shit in divorce court, finally noticing my asymmetry.  My children would have turned against me (after all, people hate that which is ugly), the judges would have labeled me a misfit of a father, and everybody would have cheered from the sidelines, “You go girl!  He’s too ugly for a beautiful woman like you!”

               So I started wearing sunglasses, even at night to try to hide my ugliness.  And in strolled a beauty behind me in the liquor store.  She was in her forties, maybe younger, but looked older than she truly was due to what apparently was years of alcohol abuse.  But she was reasonably thin, tall and statuesque.  You might even say she was pretty.

               I guess my sunglasses did the trick.  She began hitting on me immediately, and as I started to stroll out of the double doors with my small bottle of Seagram’s 7, she asked me how my night was going.  I shrugged, pointed at my plastic bottle of booze and gave her a smile.  She smiled back and proceeded to order a small bottle of Takka.

               What a beautiful coincidence - pure serendipity.  Finally, someone I had something in common with, even if it was superficial, even if I fucking despise vodka.

               I waited for her outside the store, stood on the curb and lit up a cigarette.  She followed me out after completing her purchase and fell in step with me, asking for a smoke.  We got to talking about all the different kinds of alcohol we liked, laughing about our shitty taste, our penchants for rotgut shit.  She made fun of me for the cigarettes I liked but still bummed one.  As was the common case these days, she was a snob and only smoked American Spirits.  But she didn’t have any on her because she, “just couldn’t afford it,” as she said.

               “Oh yeah, the taxes are really cutting into my paycheck,” I acknowledged her stated issue.  “Goddamn liberals have taken over.”

               She laughed and gave me a little shove in the shoulder.  She told me she was a liberal and she told me I was an asshole and kept smiling:  I was in.

               She asked me where I lived and what I was doing that night, asked me if I wanted some company.  I accepted the offer.

               We arrived at my place and sucked down a couple more cigarettes each, using them as chaser for our respective plastic bottles of booze.  I was starting to feel good.  I was starting to feel warm, hot even.

               “You’re blushing,” she said, smiling.  Her face was a little red, too.  She had consumed half her little bottle and I was trying to keep up.

               “Are you in a rush, there?” I asked, nodding at her Takka.

               “Shut up,” she laughed.  I laughed too.

               “Do you ever take your glasses off?” she finally asked.

               “Nah,” I said, and dragged my cigarette, trying to look cool.

               She took them off, and my only defense was to close my eyes.  All the sudden she was kissing me and I was kissing her back.  But when we finally released each other I couldn’t help but open my eyes to look at her.  She looked gorgeous and so I smiled.

               She didn’t smile back.

               Soon she was saying how she had to go; she was backing out of the garage.  She was through the garage door and into the foyer and I was telling her to have a good night, not even thinking to ask for her number.  I knew it was over and why.  I winced as she shut the door behind her and listened to her footsteps as she headed off into the night.  I waited a minute or two, just staring at the closed front door, staring at the rest of my life.  No motion, just bitter solitude.  I was too shell-shocked to be disappointed, let alone angry.

               After another minute or two of looking at the door and then staring at my shoes, I figured she was gone, out of sight.  So I opened the door and strolled out into driveway and watched the moon for awhile.  I lit up a cigarette and took in the beauty.  The moon was so big and bright.

               But soon, there were clouds.  It had been a cloudless day and a cloudless night and all of the sudden there were these dark, angry wisps of cotton making a beeline toward the moon.  The eclipse was so predictable.  They were going to cover it, destroy it.

               So I stood there smoking my cigarette, and I watched the clouds kill the moon.