Writing on Substance D

“I guess i stayed with her for song long because of a cock fight.” Steve rolled another joint as Calvin popped open two bottles of Anchor Steam. Calvin paused, listening to the cars stream by, the din dull by comparison to the morning traffic on South Van Ness (a corridor street in San Francisco that made up part of the 101 highway). Calvin sipped on his beer, dissolving each sip on his tongue, swirling around in his head every iota of flavor and content before his thoughts were flooded with that day. He hadn’t told anybody of the adventure he and Krystal took on their way to Seattle.

“So, remember when we went to Seattle?”. Steve lit the joint.

“Um uh. Jennifer and I went to ” he dragged heavily, his faced cockeyed, quickly exhaling, ” Baliz that summer. It’s too bad you had that wedding to go to. Well, too bad given now”.
“So, we had that brilliant idea of driving there, taking a whole week off for it, then flying back, right? Well, this was right after we had visited her sister in San Diego. I was driving, and tried to skirt around L.A.” Steve handed Calvin the joint.

“About half an hour into it, she was bitching that it was wrong way, but neither of us really knew the area or would admit we that weren’t 100% sure. We kept arguing, and then we both said mean shit you only say when really pissed off and stuck in a two-door toyota in middle of nowhere. She brought up shit about my past with my brother and comparing me to her ex boyfriend sort of thing. I went off about her mother and ragged on her being born into family money.” Calving took a quick hit, coughing violently as he handed the joint back.

“We ended up stewing in silence for about forty minutes until I copped to being lost and having to check the map. Of course, she took over, and she decided to take a state highway right through farmland instead of back-tracking to the freeway. I knew better than to say a single word about the Inland California heat. Like in Indio. Remember that year Radiohead played at Coachella? Heat like that.”

“Man that year was epic heat! I remember seeing two kids drop to heat-stroke while Beck played.”

“Oh yea! That’s when he started to kinda suck. He was doing some sort of bull-shit with a gameboy. ” Calvin pulled long on his beer. He had tagged along to Coachella with Steve and the girl he had been dating, carpooling from Scottsdale to Indio, marveling at the bleak empty spaces between towns and cities in the Sonoran desert, the sudden bursts of Sequoia forests, the dirty rest-stops.

“Dude…didn’t you have that thing with Krystal that year? You started dating a-lot after that.” A humming bird buzzed across their heads and perched on a tiny branch hidden near the top of the decoration orange tree (common in phoenix), planted in the rear corner of Steve’s backyard. They both fell silent, loosing the conversation as the bird began to sing. Steve grinned, imagining a tiny humming-bird DJ with bird-sized head-phones, scratching and skritching away from within the V.I.P branch at the top of his worthless bitter-orange tree.

Calvin that year had been chasing a friend of Steve’s girlfriend, a tiny sophomore with a Bettie-page haircut majoring in business, living on campus. His chest tightened as he conjured the image of her flirting with another girl whenever he started to make eye contact with her, sadistically teasing him with no mercy. In the end, he gave up and separated from the core group of Steve’s friend as they laid stake to space near the main stage and off to the side, flitting between the Techno Tent and the small whatever-band tent. He slept alone Friday night, giddy and tired from endless dancing, collapsing onto his aero-bed spent and content.

He could only remember the next morning as a haze of orange and white cut with crisp air scented with bermuda grass, lazy yoga stretches while brushing his teeth as the sun rised above the polo fields. A couple of ASU girls gossiping about sighting some micro-celebrity. They were unavoidably adorable the way they fitted in their ASU boy-shorts, flirting back at him, offering him an egg-burrito they cooked on a mini-gas stove. He originally was intrigued by Verna, the way her waist flowed into a heart-shape, the tip framed by her athletic legs, how her skin reminded him of a piece of silk, tied to a key, he once found as a child in a box in the garage. Waiting in line with Krystal, he noticed the nova explosion of green and hazel in her eyes as they bonded over the same bands they were both excited to see play that day.Verna was more into the main stage and the getting fucked up in the beer garden.

He fell in love with Krystal twice; Once as they talked about nothing and poetry and aspirations, lying on their backs in the sod-grass cooling themselves in front of a huge squared fan in the Heineken Tent, giggling hysterics over banal things and silly faces and a comfortability with another woman he never felt before. She inspired him to do cartwheels in front of the giant Tesla Coil after swimming in each other’s eyes during an inconsequential indie band. His face fell as he recalled the wonder and beauty of their naivety, the way her jaw went slack as they reclined on the grass during RadioHead, the rhythms of her chest as she let herself go and sway her head to Thom Yorke’s voice, humming to herself off key. She seemed to melt into the grass, or rather, she was an extension of the grassy field, her scent elusive like the dusty breeze billowing around them, wafting in the smell of coca-cola stained BBQ bits stuck to Styrofoam plates baked in the sun littered around the metal garbage barrels. He reached out to touch her hand, losing his own as his fingers intertwined perfectly into hers, his head spinning from the sudden realization that his heart was beating faster, his hands disappearing into one more happy couple dancing and swaying and laughing, led by the singer shaking on the stage flanked by professional big screens. They didn’t make love that night; they cemented their affinity for each other a few weeks later after a few hearty dinner dates. They laughed after an intense make-out session at the back of a parking lot of their favorite bar was interrupted by an impressive display of projectile vomit from across the lot. He had never before that night made love and forget which leg belonged to whom and whose fingertip he was experiencing.

Calvin quickly downed half of his beer and eagerly smoked the joint proffered.

“Farmland California sucks. A sequence of farms followed by cow manure and grazing pastures, and we couldn’t get out from behind a tractor doing 35 for like thirty minutes. Awful. We finally get to a freeway and near San Francisco, but it was like 11 at night. She couldn’t get a hold of her friend on her cell phone, and we ended spending the night in a Hotel 6 somewhere near the airport. We sleep in, and she gets a txt from her friend while were in a Denny’s, with shaky directions to some dirty neighborhood in east San Jose, one of those huge California suburbs.”

“They were friends from high school, and her friend got pregnant right after they graduated and was living as cheap as possible. I think she was discouraged from not having a college degree. I guess she had been working a long time as a clerk at some Albertsons.” The DJ humming bird had gone silent, then chirped once as it chased down another that had tried to sneak a drink from the feeder Steve left out across the yard.

“So it’s a cousin of her friend’s quinceanera, and we wandered in right when everybody had started dancing and the drinking started to step up. After a few shots, we started dancing”. Calvin sighed, remembering how she danced that night, how it reminded him of the first time they mastered swing dance, ditching their rehearsed dance routine and just playing around with each other’s steps and improvisations. “I never told anybody about this, but this is why it took me so long to get into tequila.” Calvin caught himself, self-aware that he may be revealing too much to Steve at 5 am in the morning, cracked out yet pleasantly awaiting the inevitable feeling of exhaustion. The reality of it being morning nudged Calvin into divulging more than he normally would have, if only given a fractum of will to stop blathering on.

“Well, we were both white and everybody treated us all cool, we were friendly and got along and laughed with them all, but we stuck to her cousin like glue. We ended up smoking some wickedly heavy weed and we get sort of dragged along with her friend to a liquor store and then to her in-laws’ house.

“and her father-in-law was great! He proudly showed me around his small home, smiling and telling me in broken english how he watched baseball, loved the A’s! on the t.v. he had set up in the living room. He was proud of his air conditioner, but kept pointing out how he installed the fans, ‘much more cool, these.’ he kept saying. And Krystal looked so beautiful holding that baby, her friend’s second. Everybody was so positive despite the heat, and oh my god that carna asade they cooked was the best meat I’ve ever fucking had, tender and citrus I could’ve just gorged myself on the meat alone, but the beans they cooked! I’ve never tasted beans with so much flavor!” Calvin grinned as their conversation was interrupted by Steve’s neighbors, kitty-corner to the front door, trampled through the courtyard, fumbling with their keys while the token loud drunk girlfriend chatted on and on about the night’s events. It apparently had concluded with awkward groping and kissing. Steve and Calvin were both just as glad as she was that they “thank god got that door open I have to peeee!”. Calvin continued, just above a whisper, “so then some more cousins of her friend show up, and they all are our age, speak fluent English and and we’re joking around. This one dude, Eddie, was cracking us up!” Calvin laughed to himself, “dude, i can’t remember his jokes, something about a schoolteacher and a cow that had Krystal and I laughing so hard. That guy was hilarious.

“Well, it wasn’t until then that she told me she had bought a pack of cigarettes while we were getting beer earlier. Oddly enough, it was perfect, it sounded perfect at the time. We sneak out to the side of the house to have a smoke, and being all messed up, we decided to check out some weird noise and people cheering in the backyard.

We wander back right into a chicken fight, right as this one mean looking red and brown rooster with this massive!! crest on his head” Calvin mocked a rooster’s cockscomb above his head “just tearing into this fucked up bird, dude, it was missing an eye! Blood was everywhere and this poor guy wasn’t giving up, but the big one was just dancing around the dying one’s kicks. The looser wouldn’t give up, it was crazy and desperate how it tried to peck the other one. The big one just kept throwing it back and killing this poor bird. Everybody around it was cheering it on, and I know it was only like 10 seconds or so, but it felt like forever, just watching this bird die, people jeering at it, until the big one knocked it down for good and walked away, the dead bird flapping around in its own blood, twitching and kicking up clods of dirt.

“Then I looked over and saw Krystal’s face. I don’t know. Maybe it was because she has so high earlier, she totally out smoked me, but you know how she has a problem with seeing blood. You know how she gets squeamish when some one dies in a movie” Steve almost demanded the last part, desperate for affirmation.

“Ya ya”

“So she froze. I had never seen her like that, I was waiting for her to flip out and make a scene and get us into some serious trouble with these people. I’m sure they knew it wasn’t all that _legal_, and the last thing i wanted was to be that white guy whose girlfriend was talking shit and threatening to call the cops on them.” Steve paused, still bothered by her response, not yet working out what about that moment signaled the end.

Krystal never forgave him for the way he stood there, watching her shrink, choking on her fear. For the first time since they had left San Diego, she was finally happy and, deeply in love with him, picturing a baby in her life as she watched her high school friend whisper to her second daughter, the way her oldest, “I’m umm ..”, holding up three fingers, “This many”, melting her heart with crayon scribbles of her mother and daddy and bunny. For an afternoon that had seemed so rare for them during that trip, she felt like he really got her, how he was there when she just when she needed to be reminded that she was alive and loved like no other, and so handsome as he laughed and joked with the everybody else, confident in how easy he made it for them to fit in at a neighborhood she customarily would have avoided with derision. She felt nothing but trust and requited love when she looked at his eyes as they innocently kissed before sharing a cigarette.

Then the dying bird. The bird was alone, left to the mercy to the men gathered around it, to the tightly closed cluster of people cheering at the easy money coming their way, and the men screaming at it to get up, shouting spanish obscenities, spraying flecks of spittle as they got worked up, conjuring every phrase and word combination possible to curse out a dying bird. It wouldn’t give up, it struggled despite the reality that it had already lost, had long lost even before it was thrown in the ring, fighting with everything it had. Perhaps the bird was born smaller, born slower, or perhaps improperly penned and trained by the red-faced man. These last moments of its confused life were distilled into this one, dripping blood and loosing more with each futile attempt to fight back. Krystal saw the the myriad of possible histories that connected the rooster’s destiny toward this savage event, then ending in a shallow grave, too far beaten to even serve as nourishment.

Calvin would never forget how her irises disappeared into the whites, the way her perfectly plumped eyelashes exaggerated the terror she felt. He incorrectly assumed she was panic-stricken by the blood-bath. However, she was afraid for her life, vertiginous and suddenly struck with tinnitus, her chest collapsing, as he just stood there, not moving or lifting a finger to help her. As she had seen the series of events that led to the roosters death, she saw the future she was going to have with him, how it would lead to a baby and how he will always disappoint her, always right when she needed him most and right when the life of their child would depend on it.

Krystal snapped herself awake, vowing to never again depend on another, to start right now damn it!!! the pattern of survival that would become necessary for her future family, to not become Calvin, to not become the red-faced trainer or the bored, apathetic teenager, barely a man, uninterested in  the blood-bath before him. She vowed to not freeze and do nothing when a life was at stake, no matter how trivial it’s perceived worth.

Steve watched a wave of confusion ebb into a look of sadness on Calvin’s face. Steve was unsure as to what Calvin was desperately searching for, unable to offer him anything, trading a sympathetic ear into an uncomfortable silence broken only by Calvin’s clumsy attempt to roll a new joint.

The Phoenix sun had finally came up in full fury, the dim magic of the pink and orange clouds of the sunrise blending into white streaks replaced with a wash of heat and an unusually blue sky. It was finally hot like Calvin remembered when living in phoenix, before the break up and before he left it all to try for a life in a suburb outside of San Fransisco, before Krystal and Calvin finally owned up to the fact that it was over, unrepairable no matter how much love they wrung from their hearts. No matter how desperately Calvin would chase after those precious moments of honesty and brutality, they no longer were there to find, and no amount of sleepwalking could extend the dream of a love they only remembered in fragmented moments of tenderness and anger.