Slice/Bread: Part II (Still Slicin' That Life)

~The Unbearable Hipness of Being~

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

The red neon of the Open sign buzzing dimly through in the dark-tinted second story window of Slice/Bread was the only indication of its very existence, let alone its location.  No sign graced the door to the stairwell up to the second floor, no light crept out around the door’s edges.  Not a single written word on any part of the building indicated what, exactly, was ‘Open’ and whether or not the spider was inviting flies into her parlor.

I honestly don’t recall how we transitioned from the parking lot to the front of the beige-brick building.  At some point, almost certainly gibbering and wild-eyed, we simply found ourselves staring at the unmarked and unremarkable door leading to Slice/Bread, drawn unthinkingly to the location by that animal memory of the best places to find food and drink.  This memory had harrumphed and settled in to sleep at the back of our brains, hibernating until the day came that we’d need it again. 

What I do know is that the four of us all moved decisively toward the proper door as we stepped from the street to the sidewalk.  With a decisive flourish, we went straight inside as if we owned the universe and were meant to go anywhere we pleased. 

More accurately, we went straight inside after an extended hesitation brought about by the door’s obstinate refusal to simply open.  I grunted in frustration as I gave up, and allowed *Cam to try.  His efforts were equal ineffectual and he stepped aside to allow *Tina – who was clutching insistently at his sleeve – to take a stab at it.

By resorting judiciously to some gentle applied physics and basic common sense, she managed to immediately pull open the door we’d been trying to push inwards for the last 20 seconds.

*Tina frequently demonstrated a capacity for the sort of perfect genius necessary to counter our frequent oafish inability to handle the world around us in the face of more than one option for opening doors. She turned the act of saving us from ourselves into a particularly deft art form and I loved her for it.  But as much as I loved her for that, I loved her even more for having the good – and impressively difficult – grace of not making fun of us afterwards.

True love, I think, comes from the magic of opening the right doors in the proper manner and never breathing a word of disapprobation toward those too inept to pull it off.  An eye roll or two is acceptable, of course.  But *Tina kept her mouth shut, the corners of it turned up ever so slightly into a pixie-ish smile. 

I won’t pretend I loved her deeply.  I can count on the fingers of one hand how many friends or lovers I can claim to have loved deeply, and I wouldn’t use up all the fingers.

But I loved her truly.  That is, for realsies.  And for realsies is good enough.  I’ve always found a sort of redemption in this.  As long as we can love someone truly without necessarily loving them deeply, we’re not broken, right?  As long as I’m still capable of such sentimentalities, of holding fast to someone I don’t necessarily believe I’ll hold for overly long, I think I’ll be okay.
Upstairs, the restaurant was packed so tightly that even standing room was essentially a pipe dream.  Sitting room only existed because waiters and waitresses nudged, shoved, and groped people out of the way of those lucky few who’d scored a table.  Spider-climbing room did exist, mainly because very few of the patrons had been bitten by a radioactive arachnid and even fewer were in a position to advantage of the space on the walls. 

Besides, the walls were covered in neon signs and unspeakably precious pop art informed primarily by Art Deco, with the occasional Toulouse-Latrec prints from his Moulin Rouge period holding places of honor at the center of the walls.

Grabbing menus from a completely unattended hostess station near the door, we managed to reach the bar by dint of *Tina’s firm motion, though not without essentially engaging in random sex acts along the way.  I’m reasonably sure Slice/Bread single-handedly kept the local paternity test industry in business by forcing patrons to slither through every imaginable crevice that humanity’s eternal and incessant insistence on crowding together in small, dimly-lit spaces could possibly devise.

I’m also absolutely certain this particular chic brand of overcrowding violated fire codes that hadn’t even been philosophically conceptualized, let alone actually passed into law.

~***~

Before I continue, I do have one parenthetical to add here with regards to the inevitable naughty touching required to navigate this iniquitously hip den of humanity.  I’ve wanted to get this off my chest for many years now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity:

Dear Brunette With The Blue Streak In Your Bangs, The Scent Of Vanilla About Your Head, And The Incredibly Soft Green Angora Sweater That Just Begged To Be Rewoven Into A Blanket For Us To Lie Languidly Upon Together As We Made The Sweetest Love Any Two People Ever Made Together Under The Bluest Sky And Fluffiest Clouds Ever Devised By A Wondrous God For Our Mutual Viewing Pleasure, And, Oh, All This (The Encounter, Not The Hypothetical Lovemaking) Took Place At Slice/Bread, Just To Narrow Thing’s Down:

I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t call you the following day.  I had neither your name nor your phone number nor any reliable source of psychically-divined information.  But I did enjoy our seven seconds in Heaven, or at least in one of the nicer Limbos, that we shared approximately half-way between the drinks station and the PBR sign on the wall as I struggled to reach the rear section of the restaurant’s main room.  While I’m aware that a significant amount of time has passed since that lovely moment, if you’re reading this, please contact me and we can decide whether or not to continue what circumstances and basic space-time physics led us to begin right before that large, somewhat sweaty man in a blue jean jacket – what was this, a momentary digression into 1979? – forced me to abruptly change directions right into your left hip.

                 That last sentence was far more complicated than necessary, but you were there.  You know what it was like in the midst of the madding crowd.

                I do hope that the hip I collided with has fully healed in the intervening years, incidentally.  Mine stopped being sore around my sixth beer, so that particularly element of Our Grand Romance, at least, had a (relatively, depending on how one interpolates the context) happy ending.

                If, for whatever reason – marriage, or screaming heebies that some stranger is writing you letters so many years later, or a premature exit from the mortal coil, or even simply forgetting about the incident almost immediately – you don’t want to pursue this, could you at least drop me a line letting me know your life has gone well since that one magical night?  If you have shuffled from this mortal coil, a quick line to (in order of increasing preference) a licensed medium, a semi-licensed masseuse, or an unlicensed but quite adorable cuddle-bunny with intimate knowledge of the workings of psychic possession will be acceptable means of reaching me.

(Please don’t use Whoopi.  A celebrity would draw far too much attention)

Yours,

Random

(Phone Number Redacted, Mainly Because I Never Remember It.  Social Security Number Memorized, But None of Your Business.  Golden Ratio Also Memorized, But Don’t Want To Rob You of the Pleasure of Discovering It Yourself)

P.S.  If you happen to be Asian, you’re not the same one I’m talking about here, but you are more than welcome to contact me as well.  You had a beautiful smile, and while I’m fairly certain I saw you at [name redacted]’s party back during the summer, he couldn’t identify you from my (admittedly inadequate) description the day following the events of this narrative.  Either that or you were a dear friend and he didn’t want to inflict me on you  Whichever happens to be the truth, I want to assure you that I’ve changed a lot since then and no longer allow myself to wear turtlenecks in any but the most appropriate weather.

P.P.S. If you’re the Green Agora Sweater girl, don’t worry about the preceding postscript.  I’m reasonably certain Pretty Asian Girl wore an engagement ring.  So the odds are not good that anything will come of this.

P.P.P.S.  If you’re Pretty Asian Girl, current divorce statistics are quite promising, so, regardless of what I said in the post-postscript, I haven’t given up on you.

P.P.P.P.S.  If I’ve left anyone out, please send your name, a good photograph to help me remember who you are (nudity optional, though appreciated), and a quick top 10 list of your favorite authors with pictures (again, nudity optional, and not likely to be appreciated.)

It feels good to finally attempt to rectify an olden, and possibly deplorable, wrong against another human being.  If redemption is ever truly possible in this tired old world of ours, I hope to one day meet this strange blue-streaked lady in the sweet bye-and-bye and explain that even though our one-true-love just wasn’t meant to be, the excessive full-body contact we’d engaged in wasn’t just some impersonal fling.  We too often take this life for granted, forgetting that chance meetings in human mosh pits can still mean something special.  Even to this day, whenever I go into a place flagrantly violating all manner of fire codes and leaving me feeling the wondrous high of near suffocation, I wonder, just for a second, whether I’ll meet a girl with an even softer sweater for me to enjoy in passing.

My new-found appreciation of soft sweaters that night, I think, was just the universe’s way of telling me that everything has a purpose, even unbearably hip restaurants in stolidly unhip cities.

          It’s nice to know that His eye is on both the sparrow and the screeching magpies and every avian creature between the two.

          Hipness, incidentally (but not coincidentally, since I specifically chose to use that word here), practically oozed from the place in ways more obnoxious than most places can manage without a flugelhorn and a communal rifftrax.  When irony gets as tragic as it got in that place, it generally gives up the ghost and lets the power of positive thinking take over as the crowds move on to newer and more inane locales.

Unfortunately, irony was clinging on like it had a personal stake in the success of this place and a whole family of literary terms to feed.  Looking over the bartenders with hair and jewelry that defied both logic and most of Poor Richard’s Almanack’s better-intentioned advice for living a decent life, I suspected Ironic Detachment’s little brother Contrived Nausea had used Ironic Detachment’s connections to get a job here.

To give you a rough idea of the mindset of this place, less than four months later, it officially shortened its name to ‘/bread’ because (I was given to understand) the patrons had taken to this new cognomen with a ferocity that belied the terror they felt at the possibility of slipping into unhipness.

About eight months after that, it went out of business, having survived the endless vicissitudes of the au courant demimonde meaningless French phrase for just over a year and a half.  It was replaced with a gastropub specializing in Austrian and Bavarian beers and, for some reason, food from one of the more obscure former Soviet satellites.  While I can’t for the life of me recollect which one, I recall thinking that the CIA probably regarded it as a prime location to install a tin-pot dictator and a Mr. Coffee for those unavoidable stay-overs on their way to better-known places.

Whether by fortuitous placement or by an ancient curse by some malicious ifrit, some places are just damned to hipness and its inevitable treachery.

Because I disliked my actions being controlled by hexes, supernatural beings, or basic but seemingly capricious vagaries of geography, I never returned to dine in that particular location.  Unfortunately, I did suffer the occasional moral crisis of wanting to check out what sorts of food the gastropub offered.  I ultimately managed to resist the temptation with the help of dear friends and a complete change of residence that increased my drive time to approximately two hours even on perfectly clear days.

I don’t claim the two are related, just that fortuity takes many forms.

~***~

We finally found a place to sit after realizing the hostess had no intention of keeping track of new arrivals with any real diligence:  a frisbee table too small for one adult-sized person, let alone four, with an unnecessarily bright electric candle the approximate width (and perhaps same approximate symbolism) of my middle finger taking up the center of the table.  As luck would have it, the table was of a sufficient height (if not width) that one could easily rest one’s elbows on it without slouching, though doing so in groups larger than 1.25 human adults would likely, and did in this case, result some jostling disputes over shared personal space with one’s tablemates.

After examining the tiny table, I glance around to confirm that we had not, in fact, accidentally wandered into Mrs. Corney’s Preschool Workhouse for Piquant Orphans.  Unless laws concerning legal drinking age,, and regulations regarding the use of growth hormones on little children, had been relaxed since I last checked the law books, we had not.

Incidentally, my earlier use of the word ‘sit’ should not be interpreted literally.  Life is almost never that convenient.  I use it only in a strictly sarcastic sense since the ‘table’ – another word used in a strictly sarcastic, and somewhat sardonic, sense – was missing the stools that would have allowed us to actually sit in the accepted sense of one’s buttocks being supported by anything approximating a horizontal surface.

I cast several suspicious glances at nearby tables where seven or eight people, all with their own individual stools, had squeezed around their own varnished wooden frisbees in a manner that defied Euclidean geometry.  In fact, there was definitely something marginally Lovecraftian about the use of spaces and dimensions.  Since Lovecraftian geometry requires I believe in something too horrific to imagine, Euclid will continue to be my guide to what should and shouldn’t be possible.

And I will insist until the day I die that the sort of seating arrangement going on in that restaurant simply wasn’t topologically, or even logically, possible. 

When I’m on my deathbed and someone (if you read this, please make sure a ‘someone’ is around to do this with the proper reverence and aplomb) asks me about what wonders I’ve seen in my life, I will just cackle maniacally and harshly whisper Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! The restaurant…the restaurant… the seating…oh God….repeatedly until everyone flees the room.

We glanced over garish and overly beige menus hardly smaller than the table beneath them for a moment before realizing we’d never be able to have one menu apiece opened without resorting to some particularly torturous origami.  And this state of affairs still would have required finding someone nearby willing to accept the gift of our electric candle so we could utilize the entire table space.  So we closed three of them and gathered about *Tina’s menu, with *Cam being forced by his position to read the short history of the restaurant printed on the back of the menu.  Unlike some people, we were quite respectful of the conventions of Euclidian geometry.  Even when circumstances surrounding us seemed designed to rob us of our ability to do so, we managed to squeeze together in a manner that didn’t require M.C. Escher to illustrate. 

Not that it would have hurt to enlist his services.  There was a very thin line between what we pulled off and what would require a seven-and-a-half-dimensional artist to illustrate.

After a momentary perusal followed by a frantic examination of the other menus, it became clear that all we had available to us were beer and wine lists.  Since we were starving (in the familiar American stomach-can-still-hold-a-bit-more-food sense, not in a drought-stricken Third World sense) this turn of events put a damper on our excitement at finally grabbing a place to sit (even if sitting wasn’t actually an option at that juncture.)  Luckily, the table itself came up to our chests, so we could lean in comfortably and bitch about what our next option might be.

“Maybe we should go to that new N’mekl place down on Horizon.”

I had no idea how to actually pronounce it – a sure sign that it was almost as hip as Bread/Slice – so I just sort of mumbled nehmehkull. I might have thrown in an um sound for good measure.

“Go where?” *Tina asked

“Nmmmkl.”  I tried to keep my tone authoritative while slipping in the slightest hint of bafflement.

“What?”

“You know, nekmeekundl”

“Sweetie, it’s way too loud in here to be mumbling,” *Tina said, leaning in close so I could watch her lips as they spoke to my cocked left ear.  “It’s annoying.  Just talk.”

“I’m not mumbling.  At least I’m not trying to annoy you with my mumbling.  I’m talking about that new place over on Horizon Boulevard, just past the Asian market.  The one with the burnt orange façade and green-tiled roof?  Right across from Wells-Fargo?”

“Oh.  You mean N’mekl.  It’s pronounced nuh-muck-uh-el”

“Sorry, I don’t speak Swahili.”

“I don’t think it’s Swahili.  Bantu, maybe?”

Luckily, due to a confluence of idle curiosity and access to a good book on colonialism in Africa, I didn’t have to pretend I knew whether Bantu was more or less likely than Swahili.  Essentially the only thing I knew about the language came from some cursory research into “Heart of Darkness.”

“Any one of those major African languages.  Or maybe one of the more obscure languages from some particularly isolated region of the Caucasus?  Or Mongolian?  Have no idea whether Mongolian would be an Asiatic type language or more Slavic, like the Russians.  I’m just running my fool mouth for no good reason now, aren’t I?”

She shrugged at most of my questions.  All at once, because since more than one shrug would have lent my questions a dignity and value they didn’t deserve.  She nodded at the last one, however, because I was, indeed, just running my fool mouth for no good reason.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve never been.  Any good?”

I returned her shrug and added in a quick eyebrow raise.  “Never been there either.  I do know it’s supposed to be even ‘hipper’” – I managed not to add the air quotes because I’m basically a good person despite prevailing evidence to the contrary –  “than this place.  But I’m informed that their food is the best thing since…” 

I let my voice trail off as I deliberately examined the room around us.  I would have glanced at the cover on the menu, but this wasn’t the sort of place that would do anything so bourgeois as to write its name on the menus.  The place where one could usually locate a name contained an image that might have been a pastiche of Koons.  Or just a terrible, terrible mistake at the printers.

I considered whistling innocently as I waited for her to finish the sentence.   But, tragically, I’d never learned to whistle, innocently or not.

She caught onto my intention immediately.  “I’m not finishing that sentence.”

“No?”  I tried to inject as much hurt and sense of rejection as I could in that one syllable.  I couldn’t have been very successful because she just rolled her eyes.

“Absolutely not.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Pick a better sport and I won’t spoil it.”

“Fair enough,” I acknowledged.

The vibrancy of the place made me uncomfortable, almost itchy.  It was too self-consciously alive and kicking, like some desperate host’s increasingly frantic attempts to keep the party going despite the ironic detachment that had made the party so successful in the first place collapsing into a super-dense neutron star.  There was no subtlety remaining in the restaurant’s atmosphere, and it could be called subdued only in the sense that quiet dignity had been beaten down, subdued, and written off as an accidental death.  It reminded me of certain places I’ve been to in New York City, where the clichéd modern zeitgeist not only changed regularly, but often multiple times in the course of a single weekend.  Even the act of pointing out that this observation itself is a cliché borders on cliché.  This is why I typically prefer dive bars.  Or, rather, semi-dive bars, places just unsanitary enough that you feel like attempting a tour en l’air just trying to get across the floors, but not so unsanitary that the blood on the various surfaces from previous fights is left to dry and add character to the place.

Let me tell you from experience, the character is never one you’d want to be friends with except when attempting to do something incredibly stupid and not wanting any companionship from people who might try to talk you out of it.  We’ve all been there, of course, but it’s not something you really want to make a habit of.

Not that I was ever really a part of the modern zeitgeist in question.  Still, one does hear things from cooler people if one isn’t afraid of a little eavesdropping.  Back then, I could actually eavesdrop.  Time and fate, it seems, cure us of some afflictions by inflicting us with others.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had come to the conclusion that we’d entered the maw of a particularly overwrought dragon and should retire elsewhere.

“How do you propose we escape?” *Cam asked as he glanced over his shoulder toward the door and slid his arm protectively around *Carrie.

(Yes, I’m just as surprised as you are that *Cam and *Carrie were still there.  I mean, I knew they were around in the vague sense that our party of four had remained a party of four, but it just seemed improbable that they had managed to survive my slightly unconscionable focus on *Tina.  I’m sure they had some fascinating conversation that I paid absolutely no attention to.  I’m sure I’d be a better man for having done so, learning many wise and terrible truths, but no use crying over spilt milk.)

“Walk,” *Tina suggested.

“More a sort of…rub and slide, really,” I pointed out.

*Tina smiled and added, far more obliquely than I was comfortable with, “Good.  You can really use the practice.”

“Pardon?”

“Just saying, your rubbing and sliding technique could always benefit from a little extra work.”

I’m pretty sure I blushed.  I’m equally sure that she had no defensible way of knowing anything about my rub and slide technique at the time. 

(What little she would learn later in no way disproved her current assumptions, I grant, but she couldn’t speak authoritatively at the time unless she was prescient, and, in all the time I knew her, I saw no evidence she possessed that particular ability.)

Still, I blushed.

Sometimes – just sometimes – *Tina knew how to get to me.  I’m amazed that I still remember her quite fondly.  Normally, creatures of pure evil don’t hold places of honor in my memories.

The first step seemed obvious.  We needed to somehow congregate and form a wedge.  Being stubborn, and, also, closest to the door, I refused to budge.  It made no sense for me to join them when that would just put me further away from the desired egress.  I looked lazily around, enjoying the fact that simple geography had given me an excuse to slack off while the others had to push through the crowd to join me.  Luckily for her, *Tina was close enough to just shimmy over to me.  *Carrie gave the scenario a bit of thought before ducking down and monkey-walking to the other side, ending up with her neck firmly between *Tina’s legs.  Though I watched with a certain interest and tried not to drool, that was as far as the new parameters of their relationship extended since *Tina moseyed backwards and allowed *Carrie to stand up.

That left *Cam.  Crawling under the table wasn't exactly an ideal option for someone of *Cam’s build.  Climbing over the table might have been theoretically feasible, but the number of ways it could end horribly proved too unsettling to contemplate.  So he attempted to go around the table.  A small gaggle of teenagers blocked him in on the counter-clockwise.  The wall blocked him on the clockwise.  Well a space as wide as a girl’s hand between the table and the wall technically allowed him to go that direction.  If we’d had three months to starve him down to the proportions of a girl’s hand, it would have perfect solution, assuming we had nothing else going on in our lives for those 90 days.

*Cam regarded his options and frowned.

“Go on without me,” he said, nobly.  “I’d just slow you down.”

Unfortunately, because he’s a jerk who didn’t actually want to sacrifice himself for our momentary convenience, he said no such thing.  Instead, he grabbed the table and started edging it away from the wall.  Eventually, the following Saturday, he’d made enough room for him to slide (with minimal rubbing) through the additional space.

Well, it felt like a week, anyway.  Stop interrupting me with petty complaints about the feasibility of my claims.

 ~***~

Eventually, we did make it back to the relative tranquility of the stairs, though not before *Tina kneed the groin of a dapper college-aged gent in chinos and a popped-collar Lacoste.  He tried to double over in pain, discovered he barely had enough room to actually experience pain, let alone double over in it, and glared balefully at *Tina.  Luckily, *Cam stood immediately to her left, his hard blue eyes glaring right back at the guy whose own baleful gaze suddenly had to shunt a bit to her right and around a cloud of cigarette smoke to reach *Tina’s face from a less dangerous angle, i.e. one that didn’t include *Cam. 

Always up for a challenge, I somehow moseyed in to her right and cocked my head just enough that it entered *Tina’s personal space in order to make clear that I was with her as well.

But not so far as to take any potentially-violent attention away from *Cam, because I figured *Cam needed to feel useful and I would never rob him of the chance to put himself in the line of fire to protect me.   And *Tina too, I guess, just so long as he didn’t neglect protecting me.

The Popped-Collar Kid shifted his gaze from *Tina to me and his brow unfurrowed only slightly, just enough to indicate he was re-examining whatever his original plan had been for possible flaws, but not so much as to indicate he was ready to let the matter drop.

After a moment, he looked back over at *Cam.  The furrow disappeared almost immediately, replaced by a mumbling frown as he turned wisely away.

                Being a 6’4” man in possession of a hockey player’s half-Frankenstein’s monster, half-dumpy dinner roll physique, an aggressively-shaped crew cut surmounted by a small blood-tinted fauxhawk, and the tattoo of a particularly angry and possibly drunk manimal of some sort peeking over his shirt collar at the base of his neck, *Cam’s charms were open to any number of appalling interpretations by any number strangers who happened to get on his bad side.  Or his good side.  Pretty much any side that could be opened to shallow interpretation.  His friends bore witness to his fluffy puppy-dog demeanor on a daily basis; strangers frequently just assumed he was a bulked-up were-beaver of some kind.  That fact that he was endowed with slight but noticeable buck teeth provided circumstantial evidence of the credibility of that particular assumption.

                Or maybe it was just me.  It’s entirely possible that the general population made no such assumption because they were far nicer people than me.

                Mind you, I’m not disavowing the were-beaver assumption regardless of how widespread it might or might not have been.  It served me in good stead more than once, and I won’t pretend I didn’t feel the slightest bit edgy around the time of the full moon, especially when forced by circumstances to be inside wooden buildings.  I’m just suggesting you decide for yourself how likely that explanation actually is in light of the information presented.

                So our little Mr. Popped-Collar Kid decided more important things in the exact opposite direction from us demanded his attention.  He shook his head, did a 180 to face the bar, and proceeded to stand there aggressively not caring about us anymore and doing so with a determination most people could only dream of emulating.  It takes an iron will to completely ignore anything that might compromise your sense of dignity, and a will of titanium to ignore the fact that your dignity was fairly damned well compromised already.

By the time we descended the steps and emerged from the stairwell (which, being approximately 3 inches wide, required further acrobatics to squeeze past an ascending couple just arriving), the rain had stopped completely.  Thin clouds were drifting across the sporadic blue patina of the moon.  It felt like the end of night, the moment when the words stop coming and the shoes feel tight around sore feet.  We still had energy, gregarious and twitchy, chattering at a pace too rapid to allow for much in the way of thought.  We were going somewhere.  None of us knew quite what track we would be taking, nor where it led; we just knew that the night hadn’t ended.

Or perhaps it ended long ago and we had kept going so long that we couldn’t bear to stop now, before finding out where this all was leading.

Sometimes I shouldn’t be allowed to ponder these things.  The result is almost always facile.

This is the place where I’m expected to draw some deeper meaning from it all.   As I said to start with, I simply will not.  Neither truth nor wisdom are necessary components of a life lived between all the infinitely divisible moments that make up our time here on Earth. 

And, no, there’s no lesson or moral to be learned in that either.

But I will discuss this one last point:  none of the names I use are the real names, as I’ve made clear before, but they’re absolutely true to the spirit of the people and places.  ‘*Carrie’, for instance, was a redhead in possession of vast psychic powers and a willingness to burn down the school.

Okay, no, that’s not precisely true.  She wasn’t a natural redhead. Just one on occasion.

(At least I don’t think she was.  Confirmation was a tricky bugger in this situation.  While *Carrie had many charms, she never expressed much interest in sharing pubic hair-related ones with me in the sort of intimate fashion necessary to ascertain the truth.  If she kept dye or hair-coloring in her bathroom, she made certain it was hidden from casual perusal.  Besides, she was the type to use a professional stylist for such things, the upper-middle class daughter of upper-middle class parents who fancied herself one of  the outsiders, the artists and actors and pipe smokers and every manner of recherché social activist who used trappings of wealth unthinkingly and without deliberate irony.  I’m not criticizing.  She was a good person who meant well.  I’m just saying all of us, even me, are prisoners of our upbringing.)

I suppose I could have asked *Cam, but I also suppose I could have repeatedly bashed my head against a wall until I believed whatever I wanted to believe.  That is, only two possible outcomes could result from asking *Cam:  1) *Cam would have regarded the question as entirely too forward, even from me, and shook his head disappointedly at the fact that I did something entirely in character for me; or 2) *Cam would have told me, with as much passion and depth as his benightedly infatuated soul could manage, with a wistful look on his face and a bit of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth.

In any event, the art of choosing pseudonyms, nom de plumes, nom de guerres, et cetera, is far more complicated than many people realize.  You’re picking a name that can’t be traced back to its owner, but somehow represents them in your mind.  Granted, not everyone is as punctilious or fastidious or ridiculous about this as I am, but I think the basic principle is sound.  *Carrie seemed like a ‘Carrie’ because she reminded me of a girl I knew long ago.  *Cam looked exactly like a ‘Cam’, and I couldn’t for the life of me explain what a ‘Cam’ looks like except to point at *Cam.  And *Tina?  I honestly have no idea.  Nevertheless she’s *Tina henceforth, sometimes even in my head.

But even using a pseudonym for them, I choose to obscure identifying traits about them because they now have families, possibly with beautiful and innocent children to raise, and I can’t risk destroying everything they’ve worked for by publicizing the sort of completely innocent things they inflicted all willy-nilly on an innocent world back when their families were nothing more than theoretical constructs.

I’m quite certain the preceding narrative would do no such thing.  But it’s about principle.  Though few, if any, people will ever read this, basic consideration never hurts, holistically-speaking.

And yet, if I’m being honest, there’s an entirely selfish principle at work here.  Pieces of our lives belong to so many different people.  Every word, every act, every epic search for dinner, belongs to whichever people are in your company when these sounds and motions and frantic meanderings occur.  As long as you’re not alone, you don’t own your own past completely.  Others bear witness, and can interpret and remember and misremember and flat-out lie about what they observe.  Your life is never completely your own until no-one you’ve ever known is left alive but you.

So, while I primarily change their names to preserve their anonymity, I also change them almost as an act of reclamation.  If their identities aren’t known, if I choose not to share this last detail, nobody can root around in my past, confront me with a twist on my narrative.  My life may not be mine entire, but my choices are.  And this is one of them.

~***~

But the “no-one…left alive but you” part is the most important one to me right now.  I wrote the phrase with all the aforethought of a shudder in the cold breeze.  I frequently type almost as fast as I think, covering several ideas before I even bother to pause and look at what I wrote and decide if it makes sense.  In this case, I’m pretty sure I’d been talking about that idea all along, from the beginning.  I just didn’t realize it until now.  *Terri suggested that I write to move on, though I doubt she knew what sorts of things I would write, the oblique and the incidental, the irrelevant become relevant.  With *E.A. passed away, and *M.W. too, it’s only natural to wonder what the difference is.  When time has swallowed up our separate lives and the world has faded, does it matter if we died or just went away forever?  Stories never change, after all, even when the characters do.

When all the world grows old and drab and even the sun barely stirs from fattened sleep, when ten billion years of evolution are laid bare and cold on that marble slab, what matters most?

The things we lose or the things we keep?

                This is my narrative:  the people I’ve lost, the moments we shared, just the two of us, can never really change.  That sounds comforting at first blush.  These are truths, eternal and unwavering.  They cannot be broken or lost.

                But then I start to think about the fact that they can never be added on to, or actually shared anymore.  When I told *E.A. I loved her, or comforted *M.W. after a rough day, I created a memory that didn’t belong to just me.  Is it the same memory when it was fashioned as a paired experience and the pair no longer exists?  She’s gone now, as are others, and the difference is pretty simple, the disconnect between a play and a painting, between sheet music and performance.

                As far as I know, every person named (or pseudo-named) in this narrative is alive and well, and, I sincerely hope, happy with their life.  That is the only thing I really feel I’ve done wrong; just because I don’t feel a need to rehash history and keep up with *Tina or *Carrie or *Cam, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t feel like my world is just the tiniest bit better by learning that they’re all happy.

                *Cam and *Carrie would go on to break up a few months later.  *Cam took it surprisingly well, all things considered.  One weekend-long bender with a few of us keeping him from doing anything crazy, and life went on  *Carrie would move about a month after that.  Several of her friends held a goodbye party for her.  I even brought the beer.  I have no idea what has happened since.  *Tina got engaged, last I heard.  I never met the guy.  I just know that it involved an unexpected pregnancy. 

This is life in all its silly little swerves and complications.  There’s no reason for me to believe that they couldn’t be satisfied with how theirs turned out.  Though I’ll likely never learn for certain, it doesn’t matter.  I know enough to

And me?  Well, in spite of many things lately, if any of them were to contact me to ask, I’d tell them honestly that I’m happy with my life.  Some things that have happened lately are brutal, no question, but happiness is about who you are, not where you’ve been, at least in the end.  I am what I was back then.   They are who they were.  Some things don’t change.  I can’t really ask for much better than that, and that, children, is why I refuse to learn any lessons from these experiences.

~~Fin~~