To Love

To love is a funny thing – it seems to exist without definitions or instructions, nobody ever tells you what it is or what it’s supposed to do for you – its basically whatever you decide to make of it. If you can adjust your expectations to a realistic level, you might just actually enjoy the ride.

This is the story I want to tell: Back then, love meant everything and I expected the world of it. It was what I had been waiting for all my life; it would save me from being alone and useless in a world full of useful, clever people. It would teach me everything and lift me up above all the nonsense with its wisdom and light. Obviously, trouble was ahead. I met him as I met the others – those lucky insane few whose twisted fortunes made them the objects of my affections: basically, he just tapped me on the shoulder and said “Hi, I’m Bruno, what’s your name?”. I turned around to his dark brooding brow and sky-blue eyes that contained the world, and the ground dropped right out from under my feet. The rest, as they say, was history.

He quickly rose to the status of angel, then to god, and though I always maintained the veneer of a normal life with friends and even a cool boyfriend who always had lots of drugs on him, inside I burned to touch those long, black rock-star locks and athlete’s body. But since I noticed in the days after meeting him that he was constantly mobbed by women everywhere he went, I kept my distance. That and he was too friendly: people called him “Happy Bruno”, but then again there was also a guy at school called “Peaceful John” who I’d heard had broken a few guys jaws in bar fights – it wasn’t meant to be an ironic nickname either, people at our school were just extremely naïve. They thought that because “Peaceful John” wore tie dyes and was stoned all the time, he wasn’t a violent psycho, and so it was with some doubt that I heard the girls dish about Happy Bruno. Anyone with such a noticeably sunny disposition had to have a really scary dark side.

So I kept it all in, and it bubbled and boiled and occasionally splashed out a bit when I was drunk, but it was too powerful, I suppose, to be taken seriously. Still, I had these dreams of searching everywhere and finding him, our souls becoming one, etc. I did every drug in the world, but it never went away, and then one day in the extreme depths or a winter that could only be so gray and depressing in Poughkeepsie, I couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to give. It had been two years. That had been enough – salvation awaited.

I crept out quietly – my friends were all passed out around our drug-den living room, helter skelter. I walked to Bruno’s house. I rang the doorbell. He was home, let me in and I sat down coolly, calmly (after all this time, I knew it was the right thing to do) and I told him I loved him, I always loved him, and I wanted to get out of this hellish town and, I don’t know, maybe go out West. He listened patiently. He seemed slightly not necessarily disgusted (which was a miracle since I now realized I had not bothered to put on makeup or even brush my hair, and had not even showered in days).

When I’d finished my story, he spoke. He was not totally adverse to the idea of my loving him, or even cultivating the possibility of him loving me back. And going out West sounded nice. (“‘Course you’ll have to clean up a bit first” he cracked a grin). He was just fine with everything, but it was the complication of my rather unpredictable and prone-to-fits-of-rage boyfriend he was worried about. I told him I’d take care of that by spring, but of course I was aware that Bruno currently had the affections of, among others, a certain Brazilian beauty, who I was frankly concerned knew how to do things that life in Poughkeepsie had just not taught me how to do. He laughed when I brought her up: “No problem, no worries”. Right.

The next day, I woke up absolutely horrified with myself. What had I done? How had that even been allowed to happen? I was starting to doubt that it really had, starting to doubt my own existence, sitting in the campus pub downing beers. They never would believe me if I told them and if they did, they’d hate me for what I’d done the way that only jealous women can. I sat silently with them and drank, and then noticed a tinkling if change into the jukebox. Instinctively, I turned around, but there was no one there. Still, the box started playing Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon girl’. It was him – and that was ME! ‘I wanna live with you cinnamon girl, so I can be happy the rest of my life with my cinnamon girl’. It was ME! Somehow, I knew it was, and that everything was going to be alright…I wanna go out West with you cinnamon girl…at least in the short run.

Two weeks later, Bruno disappeared, and I began the frantic search I’d previewed so many times in my dreams. There’d been some strange message about him being off to follow the geese on their annual spring migration, but that made it even more puzzling, and made me afraid. A fog of desolation settled over our stinking town, and a lone crow followed me everywhere, always cawing three times and generally disheartening my drug-induced stupor (my friends were already sick of my strange behavior and this didn’t help). Another two weeks of drudging through the soup of late-winter existence in Upstate New York and he reappeared, equally bizarre, crouching low in the shadows outside my ‘Comparative Sculpture’ class. “Wanna go for coffee?”

“Sure, why not?”
He wasn’t in danger at least, just gone paranoid – insane. Clinical diagnosis and everything. Hospital. “I swear, this is the first day pass they gave me, otherwise I would have come sooner”.

Ah, but the Brazilian had been to see him already. No, they hadn’t had sex – it wasn’t allowed at the hospital – they watched you. Yes, he had sent the crow to protect me (and in general menace anyone else that might be interested). And yes, it occurred to me that this was all very strange, but hey, when you’re in love, you take anything you can get.

After that, he didn’t come back to the college anymore. He didn’t come back at all. He just went back out to Jamestown to get his head together. He said he didn’t remember much from before, which was a bad sign. Yes, the Brazilian had been out there to see him, but no he didn’t want to carry on the relationship – couldn’t keep up with her pace (in retrospect, I should also have seen this as a bad sign). But still I dreamed of him – I dreamed of him despite myself, about possessing his body and mind all to myself, and I searched the ugly campus buildings for him even though he was not there.

Finally, oh finally I was at least permitted to visit him, and was told he might even be able to take me up to Niagara Falls, if his mother and psychiatrist didn’t object. So the morning after my last exam, I left my little drug den, sneaking through the smoky-dusty shadows into the stark early light and boarded a train right across New York State, 300 miles of expectation (was any of this real?). And when I arrived at Williamsville station on that chilly spring evening, Bruno was waiting with the kind of smile that told me there was a plan. We got to the car and he headed north, explained that he’d fired his shrink and overruled his mom, and we were headed to the Falls.

I was beside myself with happiness and a touch of the kind of apprehension that you only get when you’ve waited so long and are finally about to get what you want. But as the sun set on his dad’s Buick in the northernmost regions of Our Great State to the strains of Bob Dylan ("She takes just like a woman, yes, she does, She makes love just like a woman, And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl”), it seemed that every second of my life had been leading up to right now.

We crossed to the Canadian side and hit the wild neon strip of Motels flashing their ROUND BEDS!, MIRRORED CEILINGS!, CHAMPAGNE-GLASS JACUZZI ROOMS! on cheap lighted signs. (This was what my father – if he had been present or had knownwhere I was at that moment – would have called ‘honky tonk’). We pulled into one and a manic Pakistani man erupted immediately from the lobby, eager to show his digs. The place was indeed as advertised, although the rugs looked a little worn. But in those tense few moments staring down at the satin-sheeted round bed, it was clear that neither Bruno or I could handle this scene, albeit for different reasons that were not entirely clear to us; he was already starting to tremble.

We glanced at each other just a half-second, sharing the lingering question of who was going to make a break for it first. I don’t remember who it was, but we were clearly of the same mind about this. Driving somberly back to the American side, we sought out a Holiday Inn. Conference Center. Family fun. All that. We could handle a Holiday Inn. We parked, checked in. The man at the desk looked bored and we liked that. He gave us our room key and we went up – knew what to expect – just two beds, a toilet ‘sanitized for our protection’ and a copy of Gideon’s Bible, just like every other Holiday Inn we’d ever been to in our lives. I exhaled – now it was time – the moment we’ve all been waiting for – to love. Yes, it's what I’d been imagining would come next -hadn’t given the course of events a second thought. Wasn’t it expected?

I’d been looking forward to it only for about two years and particularly so during the last six hours, so much so in fact that the thought of seeing us doing it on that round bed off a mirrored ceiling had been simply too much to bear. Bruno was perched precariously at the edge of the bed, looking at me funny in his orange jacket and khaki pants and shoes and everything: “Can’t do it”.
“What?

Why not?” Reality was fading fast. You might have thought that he would have dropped this important statement at me at a more opportune time, but I suppose there wasn’t one.

“It's all the meds they’ve got me on. You wouldn’t believe the cocktail of heavy shit I’m taking. Its not like real drugs – you can’t do anything on this shit.
“Like what?” I had taken Pharmacology – why hadn’t anyone mentioned this?

“Neurontin, Welbutrin, even Prozac. With all these downers in me, I can’t…nothing works…it uh…doesn’t function, you know." I had never been so stone-cold sober in my life. I wasn’t hearing this. I’d shared him with the Brazilian, betrayed my cool, abusive boyfriend to come and find him and ridden six hours on a shitty Amtrak train on the off chance that the stars would align and he’d take me on this little jaunt – gladly so. Not to mention the two years I’d seethed inside, searching him out in my dreams, praying in my veins for the chance to reach into that soul. But this I wasn’t hearing.

I heard myself taking on a surprisingly commanding voice: “Lie down. I’ll make it work”
“But I don’t think you under”—
“JUST LIE DOWN. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. I’ll take care of it!” I heard this commanding voice, but was it coming from me? Was this some other reality? Was this love? I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. And you know what? It was easy. I managed to take care of it again in the morning.

I’ll leave the story off here to spare you the inevitable crushing heartbreak that could only ensue, and that it took me years to work through – am I still working through it? – and that I have far from forgotten. Suffice it to say that we did go out West. And the West is a lonely place to be left behind without a penny to your name at age 19. Lots of spirits and ghosts out there in the desert – and not much else. It makes you question the very nature of love and what to expect from it.

I suppose I never really got what I wanted, which was to cease to exist as a solitary being, for true love to take away the pain and beat up all the bad guys and lead me to unadulterated bliss and unending ecstasy.  That night I found a voice but I never really learned to use it for anything productive - to stand up for myself.

But perhaps love is much simpler if you know how to look at it. Perhaps true love simply involves laughing together unseen on a vibrating, revolving bed with mirrors on the ceiling and a lot of heavy tranquilizers. Perhaps if this had occurred to me at the time, I’d be in a different place today. The less you think, the better.

The end.