When Winter

When winter turns to spring turns to summer fall.

The summer falls like a feather, slowly through the later months.  With sweet emotion, the taste of which comes on the Indian winds, the off-shores.  The south swells fade west, but nothing really from the north just yet.  The water's still warm.  Spring-suit weather.  Two millimeters of neoprene and short sleeves.  Just to keep the warm breeze of a windchill off in the early morning or just before sunset.

What a lovely time to be in LA.  The summer crowds are pretty much gone after Labor Day, the kids are back in school.  The tourist are always around though, but less so after the turn, and it's more international now.  Americans only travel in the summer.  The morning fog flies off for the winter early.  And September and October are beautiful months, working at the shop, dinners at Mike's house, bars and house parties on the weekends.  Jessica, Megan, Emily the boxer, that trio of Italian girls, that German girl, and at the very end there Madelyn.

I met Jess when she came into the shop looking for a wetsuit.  By the look of her, she was a size 4, and I've always had a thing for size 4's.  It's a great size.  It's the right size for me, I'm not a big guy.   She looked good in the suit, she was a skinny girl.  Cute, delicate face.  Soft-spoken.  Frail's not the right word, but it wouldn't be far off.  I imagined I could probably break her if I fucked her hard enough, and when I ran after her to give her my number scribbled in pen on a piece of receipt paper, she very innocently handed me one of her business cards in return.  It said she was a writer, very innocently.  We had dinner the next week, Sushi House, I think, she lived just a block down from the place.  Then she took me home and we got high and watched Yellow Submarine on her little laptop because she didn't own a TV.  We watched it on a tiny couch in her living room that pulled out into a mattress sort of thing without the metal framed one would usually associated with a pull-out.  the cushions were all connected, more like a plush tongue rolling out to ready for an acid hit.  There was no acid to be had that night, we just took hits of some good weed from the the tiny pipe she had, and when the movie was over, she rolled onto me, and things got very, very physical, but no one's underwear came off.  "I'm not going to fuck you on the first date," she told me.

I said, "That's fine. I understand."  Two weeks later we were fucking for hours at a time.  We never once used rubbers.  When she was on top she rode quick with quick hips and short tight circles like she was trying too hard to get hers.  Trying too fast.  Moving too quick.  She liked it when I fucked her hard, and she could see me in the closet mirror.  She liked it when I fucked her in the kitchen when she was thirsty and trying to pour a glass of water.  She liked it when I fucked her while she held onto the door-frame to keep from falling over.  She would always go weak in the knees if I thrust into her particularly strong-like.  I did it all the time.  It felt good.

When I think of her, the word that comes to mind is mousey.  A brown-eyed girl.  She was smart, and she worked for a small advertising agency, and the slight signs of stress and work and life showed in the corners of her eyes and the red veins that would spider across them.  I will say this: she was adorable and her skin was olive smooth. And I was addicted to fucking her for some time.

At the same time, I was seeing Meghan as well.  I'd met her at the shop as well but she was different. I only sport-fucked Meghan, but she loved it.  We were each other's sex toys.  And she lived two blocks from the shop, which was highly ideal.  She wasn't skinny like Jess.  Her hips wouldn't dig into me while I was digging into her, so I fucked her even harder.  And all she would say was, "Fuck me harder, fuck me harder, fuck me harder."  So I would try to oblige, and it felt good and we both sweat through the nights and the early mornings that I spent there.

She wasn't shy like Jess.  She didn't look it either.  Blond hair, sharp blue eyes, loose red lips.  I'd caught her eye-fucking me, and she asked me to reach a dress that was too high for her.  The way she said it made me want to fuck her right then and there, middle of the store on a Sunday.  But instead I taped my number written on a piece of receipt paper to the clothes she had me pull down and put in a dressing room.  She texted me while trying stuff on.  She texted dirty things and told me to meet her after work, which I did, at the Irwin hotel.  There's a bar on the roof, and I ran into her on the elevator up, white lace dress, and we just started making out.  She tasted like vodka drinks, and when it got dark she took me to Gjelina's for dinner.  "Let's get a bottle of nice wine," she said.

I said, "I don't think I can afford a bottle of nice wine.  Not here."

"Stop it. Just stop it. Let momma take care of you."  She was a nurse.  She covered the whole tab, which came out to around $150.  I returned the favor with what I could back at her place, all leg squeezes and shudders and eyes rolling into the back of her head.  I even threw a back massage in for good measure.  She deserved it.  And she was dirty, and she liked it rough and athletic.

When it rains, it pours in Santa Monica.

The Good German

BsAs: Dangerous Winter (Invierno Peligroso)

"And what about me?"

"You... You my friend, es peligroso!  Haha!" Fre turns to the Columbian girls and talks in Spanish to them, gesturing towards me, making a flatline with his hand.

I look at Guada.  "Peligroso?"

"Dangerous," she smiles. 

Fre screams back in, "You're dangerous, my man. I was telling them. You're so cool.  Nothing effects you.  Very in control.  It's intimidating, man.  You're swagger.  No matter what happens."  Flatline.

"Oh, stop it.  I'm not dangerous."  But the Columbians are looking at me now.  So is Guauda, and so are the two Angolans.  "I just don't get very emotional that's all.  Control of one's emotions is a sign of maturity," I say very matter-of-factly.  Maybe it's because I listen to so much fucking sad music all the time.  Or the jazz.  What I like to call good music.

Fre nods, "No doubt."  Already he's more muted.  Just slightly.  He's a smart man, Fre, maybe the most articulate one I've ever met, being fluent in six languages.  English, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, Italian, and of course Bantu, a tongue native to Angola.  He likes to read books and cook good food and enjoys good music and quite obviously loves fucking futbol to death.  A fanatic, he calls himself, but he's an intelligent fanatic.  He likes poetry and sometimes he talks to Guada about Jorges Luis Borges, the Argentine writer.  According to him, poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. Poetry remembers that it was first song.  It was music.

*****

Winter's a good time for music.  It's a hard season, and something like music can carry you through if it needs to.  In Santa Cruz, we still had the festival bug from Europe, from the show in Nice and the Berlin forests.  We wanted it still.  We wanted the music.  In the middle of October there was a festival on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.  It was very appropriately named Treasure Island, this festival.  Matty had gone the year before and convinced us to go.  It didn't take much.  Just the promise of grand music and haywire molly.  The whole house was on board, and Max and Chase were driving up from Orange County for it, and Taylor and Dylan and Matt Swartz and Nikse were all going to because they lived in the city now.  Tay and Dylan lived together in a nice quiet building out in the Richmond.  Close to Ocean Beach so we stayed with them.

The usual mischief.  Miss Molly as always.  For Max Mike and I, the last outdoor concert we'd been to was in the summer in Southern France, and before that Berlin in the summer too, and LA and in the spring Indio.  They were hot affairs, the lot of them, so we dressed according to that.  But the seasons were turning, had turned already even to fall.  To fall in San Francisco.  It's not freezing, by any means.  It's still California.  But let's just say it wasn't fucking tank top weather in 2010.  But that had been my wise decision.  Max's too.  Mike went with a t-shirt, just didn't bring a jacket, and he was chilly.  It wasn't bad though.  What we lacked in layers we more than made up for in drug use and dance sweat.

Through the day wasn't bad, but into the night we'd snake our ways to the center in the front.  For the warmth.  And we danced close on girls with the same ideas.  Through Miike Snow, through Kruder, through Deadmau5 and LCD.  And in the in between times, walking between stages, put a chill in the bone.

And then it started raining.  Right through the middle of LCD Soundsystem, it started drizzling.  Lighter than that, maybe misting.  Whatever it was would melt, burn off before it touched the ground, or even our skin sometimes, if the drops were light enough.

Charles Bukoski: The Crunch

Winter is Dark and Stormy

Winter is dark and stormy and wrought with drinking.  It's a boozy season.  But then again, so could be said about every season really.  Summer's for drinking, fall's for drinking, spring's for drinking.  But winter's for drinking in a different way than the others.  In California, winter means rain, so we drink indoors, and we say it's to keep warm.  It's spiced wine and cider with brandy.  The wine's red.  The liquor's dark.  It's stormy outside and in the mind.  Moods fly particularly so in the winter.  It's a dangerous time.  Short-sighted.  Immediate.  Gluttonous.  Prowling.  Lying in wait.  Traps baited.  Fingers cold to the bone is what winter feels like.  It smells like wet rain.  Damp ground.  Red wine.  Ports.  And pastries from the bakery.  It's love lost and right in front of you.  Of me.  Hearts are crushed slowly underfoot, just after the holidays.  Dreams of new beginnings are dashed by grim reality.  A freeze of the soul.  Difficulty breathing before the rains come.

Barometric pressure.  Feverish forgetting, whispering, "Stop, stop, stop, stop."

Like the old cliché, what doesn't kill you, if it doesn't drive you off the road, it just makes you stronger.  Strengthens the grip, sharpens the mind.  Winter hollows out the core of me.

Each year.

Although to be true, there hasn't been much in there for some time anyways.  I am a hollow core.  An empty vessel. 

*****

When I was driving back with Lennon it was winter.  No, maybe Spring.  What color were the hills.  (Is that the white or the red?) Oh, jeez.  I can never remember that.  White?

No, they were green, bright green.  And the rolling hills of the Salinas valley are always the greenest in spring.  So it must've been spring.

No, it was winter.  That's right.  They were brown.  Wet brown and dead.  Not raining, just wet.  Lennon and I were both sufficiently high by the time we hit Salinas, and the sun was still out, not so high, but fighting the clouds to the west over the hills.  We were talkin'.

"We are all parts of a whole," he said.  "And we are each one whole.  Does that make sense?"

"Sure. Like a pie."

"Yes, like a pie."

"Mmm. Pie."

"But we are not always whole pies, Brian.  Like you.  You say you are happy and self-fullfilled all on your own."

"Yes.  Perfectly content."

"But you are not everyone."

"I know.  I can see it in others.  That need to be with someone.  In a relationship.  With a boyfriend or a girlfriend."

"Some people need that.  Some people are not whole pies like you.  They need someone else's slices to fill them."

"Not me.  I need the right one."  But at the time I felt like the right one wasn't ever going to find me.  Consigned to a single life.  But I did know what he was talking about.  "I don't need that intimacy, but I can't be alone.  Not completely alone.  I'd fuckin' die."

[stop]

Charles Bradley

The Deserved