(no subject)
Get settled in, get beer’ed, walk around and take things in before you get too drunk to appreciate the subtler points of depravity and lunacy. A cute, feathered blonde is interrogated about the validity of her breasts and buckles under questioning; puts the tanlined girls on display for a howling pack of onlookers, those university-bound mothers’ sons grinning and slobbering like Mastiffs in the dark. Jack Johnson from the car stereo adds a much-needed dose of melancholic future nostalgia to this moment. Someone shines a flashlight on her wide eyes and perfect skin, that face gleaming like Oscar night.
Boys with their trophy girls, clutching them like carnival prizes or coconut-scented trout that sway drunkenly on fishing wire. They smile and pout for camera shots. The ex-bikers and hippies who run this campground wander through every once in a while with their dogs, eliciting looks of distrust and uncertainty from Hollister-clad brosephs and their bottle-blonde mavens, that generational gap now wide enough to be galactic. The kids raise eyebrows to their old guard of ex-firebombers and acid-trippers, conspiracy-theorists and law-breakers. Years spent buying pre-packaged rebellion have led them to the conclusion that the only backlash possible lies in the form of irony-laden, wink-and-nudge conformity. They cannot fathom or relate to people who once subscribed to pie-eyed idealism with such passion and fervor that it burned through their veins and made their hands shake. These old skeletons pick up empties and keep their mouths shut, seeing and hearing and thinking things but still remembering, still not wanting to be a buzz kill.
The next day it pours. Too wet to make food anywhere, you crack a beer instead, trying to think of all the ingredients in a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon: hops, malt, etc. You try to view them on a plate together, to see them as a balanced meal. It is shuddering, rain-soaked moments like these when I thankfully realize I have no desire to be an alcoholic.
It clears up for evening and I am wandering alone with cheap wine; the stars tonight looking slippery and greased. I have no idea where I am going, just walking by camp sites, admiring fire at its strongest point, fires to beckon the words out of you, to somehow pull conversations together. I faintly overhear one.
Something about Israel. The Gaza strip. I stop and turn around, make my way towards these people. After an entire day and nights’ worth of dick and fart jokes, of hammered college girls stumbling through hackneyed, butchered rhetoric, I am starving.
An hour later and I’m playing cards with these new friends. The girl beside me is pretty and has an expensive-looking haircut. She saw my Black Flag tattoo and we started to talk about music. We trade drinks from my bottle and she tells me that Closer is a better Joy Division album than Unknown Pleasures. I’m not having it. Apparently, I lack the patience to discover greater rewards. I imagine what sex with this girl would be like and I think, tell me about it, sister. I can’t stop obsessing about these fires; how they transform moments. How her face gazes into it as she speaks, looks otherworldly. Like a time-traveler.
Then back to our own fire, my friend and I sitting and drinking our last beers of the night while he tells me how he beat a man into a year-long coma. He doesn’t like to talk about this, and his eyes remind me of black and white television. A tired, grey sadness.
“We were just driving by, you know…I think we were coming back from Wendy’s or something…just getting food…and then like, I see this guy…big guy….and he’s just wailing on this poor girl…like, really pretty girl, can’t be more than one-ten soaking wet. And I don’t know what happened, but I just stopped the car and got out and my friend got out too…and we walked right up to him and my friend decked him in the face hard, but it was like the guy didn’t even feel it…he just let go of the girl, jumped on my friend and started filling him in the face, just smashing him…and then…fuck, man….just this like….white kind of rage took over, you know? I punched him in the back of his head and just started kicking him, and he was out cold….I think I knocked him out with my first punch…but I just couldn’t stop…I just….I kept stomping on his head and feeling his head getting soft…like I knew I was crushing his skull…but I couldn’t stop…just this fucking white hot rage man….like an animal…”
I don’t say anything back, really. Just take sips and look at my ruined shoes.
“…and so apparently, yeah, the guy was in a coma for like a year. I felt so bad, man…honestly, I really did…I mean, I could have just hit him and that would have been it, you know? I still don’t know why I had to…”
He stops here. Closes his eyes briefly and I see his chest rising and falling. He stares bitterly into the center of something.
“You just…..you just don’t ever hit a girl.”