It was essentially like this: keep on drinking with the amateurs in that smoke-filled apartment, or take a chance on me in my eight-by-ten bedroom. She was dumb enough to fall for the latter. We made our strategic break from the crowd and headed for my room. I'd had the foresight to close the door before the party, we could almost breathe and see each other clearly once we locked ourselves in there. The booze was running its course in both of our circulatory systems. Fate would do the rest. Fate, and whatever the predecessor to karma is.
The lights went off and she showed me what she had in mind. It was good to be in favor with such a generous young woman. Good, and tragically familiar. I was twenty then, not even old enough to buy my own beer. Still, the alcohol kept flowing at my weekly wild parties and the line of new endeavors was growing faster than I could handle. It was almost like I'd died and gone to Muslim Heaven, or better yet-- found a way to reap its rewards without dying. This one would be another notch in the headboard. She knew it, I knew it, the people in the living room smoking expensive cigarettes while drinking cheap beer knew it. What she didn't know was that she wasn't the first of the evening.
But she found out the hard way once that boat left harbor. Hey, it was her idea in the first place. No one asked her to do that deed. She must've figured it out a few strokes in, but she wasn't about to confess that she'd been duped. Admitting that a previous girl had beat her to the punch was almost more shameful than the walk back out into the drunken haze of that apartment was going to be later on. Revenge would be silent. The teeth dug in to let me know that I wasn't getting over on her. My hand grabbed tighter at the ponytail she'd conjured to make her life easier. I was letting her know that I knew that she knew, but didn't care. We were both playing the game, I just happened to win that round.
If only our mothers could see us then. If only our fathers had been around. If only I could go back in time and unhurt all those poor, defenseless girls too naive to notice a wolf in wolf's clothing still on the hunt for vengeance after foolishly blaming the opposite sex for his sorrows. But I can't, so I write about it four years later. Sue me. I was young and stupid, and now I'm only one of the two.
Anyway, she finished. Well, I finished. We finished, and without a word between us ever since the cat stumbled out of the bag. She wiped her face, I zipped up, she yanked the door open and was replaced with the cloud of cigarette smoke that rushed into my room. Jumping to my feet would've been safer had I not been drinking so heavily; my socks slipped on the wood floor and I fell flat on my tailbone, cursing the wench for not being polite enough to close the door behind her. I reached over and gently pushed it shut. The latch caught and clicked, it was a comforting sound that I wasn't worthy of hearing at the time. I sat up against the wall of that small room, rummaged through my pocket for my lighter, lit a crushed Marlboro Menthol. Somehow my own smoke was OK. It wasn't the smell that bothered me, but the source. My own didn't stink back then. Things, of course, have changed. I've learned a lot from those days. Have you?
A friend told me today that the Earth's poles reversed millions of years ago. The globe flipped in a matter of seconds. Life as it knew itself ceased to exist in a cloud of dust and a tidal wave and the gods started over. I believe it.
I believe it, but that's only because I wish it were that simple.
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