fryerworks

Amy called this morning to apologize for last night. Apologize for what? For breaking up with me? Part of me thought maybe she’d forgotten, or that she’d just been so upset and angry that she’d Freudian-slipped and wanted to pretend like it never happened. But then the tone went serious. She remembered. But did she mean it? I didn’t know how to handle this conversation. Plus, I’d stayed up to smoke pot and watch Will Ferrell’s greatest SNL moments. Then I’d set my alarm for 11:00 AM and slept ’til 10:30, when she called. I was half-asleep when I spoke to her. Some of me thought I was still dreaming. We don’t get anywhere over the phone so I ask if she wants to stop by my place and talk before she goes to work. She does. I’m quick to gather my thoughts and prepare myself for what could be the last conversation I have with my girlfriend. And we might mean it this time.

I won’t explain Amy as a person. I won’t tell you about what happened on Thursday. There’s no need to get you that involved. All you need to know is that Amy and I are different people. Not because she has a vagina and I have a penis, but because–if I had to simplify all humankind into two groups, I’d put all the people who habitually use drugs in Group A and those who don’t in Group B. There is something unique about those who prefer drugs, some intrinsic desire to seek intoxication or lucid experiences. Healthy? Who gives a shit, not to give away the answer to: What group are you in, Chris? I enjoy drug use. I seek it out. Does Amy think I still smoke marijuana? Even after that powerpoint presentation of marijuana’s potential damaging effects? She doesn’t know that I do. Group A people hardly get along with Group B people without a varying amount of disdain between them. Amy and I haven’t been in the same group since she last tried pot with me sophomore year in the dorms. Too bad, I think. She could have used something to relax her this past semester.

I’m sitting by the pool. I just opened the umbrella above the patio table because the 11:00 AM sun has already baked the city in eighty degree heat. She parks just beyond the gate and enters the scene. I’m careful not to smile. I have my sunglasses on, thankfully, and she can’t see my eyes with the glare. My hat, lowered over my forehead, adds to my emotional elusiveness. We talk. Kind of. I honestly can’t read the situation very well, wanting most of the time for her to just get up and leave, wanting most of the time for her to just break up with me and move on. But I know she won’t say the words. I know I’m too chicken-shit to say it. So we talk. Kind of. I get to say a little bit more this morning, now that she’s not throwing shit at me and knocking my DVD’s all over the floor, and that doesn’t go anywhere. I talk myself in circles, talking like I’m Dr. Fucking Phil, like I’m psychoanalyzing myself. When I’m done explaining why I think we’ve arrived at this place in our relationship, just rehashing old arguments I can remember us having, we’ve left the pool and walked back to my apartment so that I could grab my bike and walk with her back to her car. These are awkward moments, you can imagine. At her car, she wants to know what we figured out by this conversation, if anything, and I don’t know what to say. In a hushed voice wavering on imitated sadness, I say some of the following phrases: “I don’t know what to do. I thought it would get better this summer. We’ve been so stressed out. We’ve grown apart. I don’t feel motivated to fix things.” All of this is true. Plus, I just really want to be single right now.

She’s gone off to work. The last thing we said to each other was, “I gotta go.” and “All right. Fine.” Sometime before that, however, she asked me, “So are we done?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Okay. Great.” That was not the most official way to put it–the conclusion felt like it lacked the final blow, like the fatalities of Mortal Kombat.

I ride my bike to work. I’m taking the road the exit spills onto and in my head I’m honestly wondering if Amy is going to speed up behind me and run me over. I wonder if she’d be so angry with me, so hurt, that she would kill me in a moment of insanity. Last night I was afraid she’d stab me. Honest to God. I thought she might have stabbed me. And today, riding my bike, I think she’ll gun the engine and chase me down. But she’d gone the other direction, thank God. I made it to work in one piece.

Kim and Jose are good people to work with if you’re in the middle of an awkward break-up. First, you have Jose who has recently been campaigning for you to break up with your girlfriend and date Michelle, the new girl. Jose won’t shut up about it. Kim tells him to cut it out, that he’s embarrassing me. But I like that he is so forward about the idea. I like that idea. It wasn’t Jose’s forceful attempts at match-making that put the idea in my head, though. The girl has been in my head for weeks. She’s a spunky little 20 year-old stoner, who more or less matches my ideal qualities of a prospective partner–though the idea of dating is far from my current interests–or at least someone to mess around with for fun. I’m not assuming anything about her character. I don’t know if she would feel the same way, considering she has a boyfriend right now, but I have been hoping that such an event might take place where we would become intimate. Take from that what you want. But maybe I’m just trying to say I have a crush on her. Look, now you’ve made me go off topic.

Kim is good to work with because she’s just an older version of us (and by “us” I mean the younger employees like Alyssa, Michelle, Sara, Olivia, and some others) in that she smokes pot, lives a very casual lifestyle, and relates pretty well to the daily struggles of the modern twenty-somethings. I like her. She can have the occasional moment, but otherwise I have no problem with her. I have no problem with anyone, really. She and Jose snap at each other sometimes, though, because they’re both power players. They enjoy holding the reins. Jose usually wins. You can’t beat the guy, he’s a loud gay Mexican with a short temper and snappy personality. But he likes me because I’m the closest thing to a gay guy next to Danny, who is gay. Take from that what you want. The point being I’m on everyone’s good side and everyone was there to support me and listen.

Michelle is break-coverage, meaning she comes in around 3:00 PM. I’ve been there two hours, telling the story of my relationship situation with Kim and Jose. Kim gives me good advice and motherly attention, speaking both from her own experiences with marriage and the lives of her grown kids. She tells me what I’ve known all along. She tells me that “honesty is the best policy.” I’ve been bending the truth for Amy for so long that I don’t know how to be honest with Amy. This means, of course, that if I’m asking Kim for advice about how to break up with Amy, then I still think we haven’t broken up, that by a thin strand we’re still considered dating. We didn’t exactly officially agree on anything. There was an interrupted feeling to the whole situation, like we hadn’t signed a form to seal the deal, that we had left the topic open for further discussion.

On the way to work, she sent me the text: U know what i dont want to break up i am gonna work on it! So i will c u on Sunday night!

After that tricky rhetorical move, I felt trapped in a corner. I thought I’d found a way out of the maze, and there I was facing another dead-end. Was I going to just give up? Again? And why did she use exclamation points? I couldn’t read it as sarcasm or legitimate excitement, like “Oh, Chris, I was just kidding. Let’s talk about this. I’ll make salmon for dinner on Sunday. See you there!” Most of me figured it was a bitter fuck-you in disguise. Like, “Hey. You can’t make up your mind because you’re too fucking retarded, and so let’s just fucking forget about it and pretend like nothing happened. Deal?”

Nothing particularly interesting happens at work. Jose tries to embarrass me when Michelle gets there. I enjoy the attention. I really do feel like Michelle and I would be great friends, or more, if she’d break up with her boyfriend. She’s told me that she’s unhappy with her relationship, annoyed with him for some of the same things I’d been annoyed with Amy about. She wants some space. She recently realized that you can’t change people, you can just find someone that already has those qualities that you want. She finally feels like an adult, like someone in charge of their existence, like someone who wants to really start living. Michelle is where I was a month ago.

Off topic. I apologize. And then for a completely random turn of events, I agree to go see Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian with Kim. I haven’t hung out with Kim outside of A’romas before. The list of people I’ve socialized with outside of work is about five or six, including Angelina–my first A’romas crush. So it was interesting to see her outside of work. One of the first things she asked me was if I smoked pot. Are you kidding? Whenever I can. “Good shit,” she says, and then I pack a bowl. We pick up sandwiches and sodas and head to the theater parking lot, eat the sandwiches, smoke another bowl, and then gather our stuff. Because it’s so random, it seems like a commercial break in the drama. But lest you forget, Kim’s the motherly type with practice in the topic, so we chatter back and forth about my situation with Amy, her marriages and divorces of the past. I find out she’s from Santa Rosa, from a farm, and lived for ten years in Los Angeles, after which she moved back to Santa Rosa. Now she works in a coffee shop. I like her. I like talking to her because she is honest when she responds. It was just really bizarre to get high with her and go see the Chronicles of Narnia sequel. I don’t know why I underlined the name of the movie.

During my break at work I sent the text (revision #4): i cant give you want you need. I dont want to change. so how do we fix that?

She replied: I dont know, but i dont want to lose u. I want to work on it and i think we should get through finals and then talk.

Well this is when my mood changed. This was when I went from feeling trapped to feeling freed. It took me quite a few attempts to get the right text together while I sat in the back office during my break. Jose came in and stared at me, shocked, and said, “You better not be calling her.” He was excited that I was in the process of breaking up with Amy. You should have seen Olivia and Sara, too, when I saw them in the back office and Jose told them I had broken up with her. They started hugging me and rubbing against me, jokingly–they’re both like older sisters–trying to comfort me. I love them–they’re awesome girls. Jose started up about Michelle and then the girls started imitating scenes when Michelle would bend over in front of me or grind against me. You don’t expect to go to work and get a quick lap dance. Anyway, this response of hers hinted toward a plea, which is different from the command she’d sent the first time.

I am really losing the chronological narrative here. I apologize. Anyway, I went and saw a movie with Kim and then she dropped me off at A’romas around 9:30 PM. I go inside to say hello–mostly to Michelle–and feel confident enough to arrange plans to meet up later after they’ve closed the shop. First I make sure Alyssa will be down, since I don’t quite know if Michelle is comfortable being alone with me yet, though we are loosening the proximity limits of first impressions. Then I go to Michelle, who has this adorable story to excitedly tell me about tripping on the mats and injuring herself on the dishwasher. I make sure she’ll hang out with me and Alyssa. When I work with them Monday nights, I usually give them rides home, since neither owns a car. Though I’ve vouched to drive less and give my bank account time to recover from this drought, I figured four bucks of gas would be worth hanging out with Alyssa and Michelle and getting stoned.

Then Bryce, under the vague details that Amy and I had broken up, is asked by his girlfriend–Amy’s roommate, Nancy–to go out with me and do something, to console me, because she (and Amy, I presume) is worried about me. My phone had been turned off when I was in the movie. When Bryce got home, my bike was gone. Last time Amy and I broke up, I went on a long solitary bike ride across town in the middle of the night. Bryce assumed that I was on a similar quest. Through the grapevine, I bet that presumption went from Bryce to Nancy to Amy, and sounded like I was actually official about my decision. Was I actually serious? Through Bryce I got the impression that Amy was under the impression we had really broken up. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.

The funny thing is, I never assumed it was serious. I’m writing this right now, and I still don’t think I’ve officially broken up with her. I still feel like there’s a strand between us, a very weak and frail piece of string blowing in the wind, like a spider-web, and it’s been tugging at my mind all day. Maybe that’s why I felt the need to fill my mind with weed and beer. Bryce took me out to the town and we walked from the Last Day Saloon (which was depressing empty) after drinking a beer each all the way to the downtown plaza. We had a good talk. I didn’t want to repeat myself for the third time and so I gave him the cliff-notes version of Chris Fryer’s State of Mind. He was understanding. He made me choose between the metaphors: Getting a tattoo of an eagle and then, after finishing the wing, saying ‘Fuck, ouch. Stop. I’m done. That’s enough’ and looking at it with regret—or—Getting halfway through pulling off a band-aid and just waiting a second before ripping it the rest of the way off, something you should have just done in one move, but hesitated. I chose the second one.

We made a couple GTA IV references and had the usual outwardly scattered yet subtly philosophical discussions. When I think about me and Bryce, I think of two guys who know the world they exist in and realize their position within it, and don’t really align themselves with any particular group. We are both fairly existential when it comes to existence and destiny and whatnot. We used to smoke together before the Iron Curtain fell. The two of us, just young consumers in a small city, going to college, paying rent for clogged shower drains and no dishwasher. The fact that he likes RPG games more than I do and he is consistently happy with his relationship are the two biggest differences between us. But he gets me. He has that voice of reason that differs from Kim’s because it adheres to my selfish view of the situation. I needed some guy time, anyway. Thanks for the beer, roomie.

When 12:30 AM came around, I turned of GTA and hopped into my car with my stash and bong. I thought the bong would be like icing on the cake, since everyone knows that bongs are better than pipes when it comes to getting fully baked. Plus, I want Michelle to know that I’m a dedicated smoker. I want her to realize how much we have in common. I haven’t felt this immediately bonded with someone since Angelina worked at A’romas. Someone that has the same idea about life as I do–desiring a formless and free-flowing schedule that lacks the responsibility to answer to someone. Time to figure out who you are as an individual. Both of us got into relationships around 18 years old. I don’t think I actually felt like an individual person until after a few months of living in an apartment and making good friends at work. That was well into the second attempt of my relationship with Amy. Becoming a real person who finally has total control of my choices and over the rest of my entire life, I knew that Amy was not going to be compatible with the future I was envisioning.

At 1:00 AM, Alyssa and Michelle are in my Jeep and we’re hotboxing to the point where Michelle vanishes in a haze in the backseat. When we open the back to put in Michelle’s bike, a cloud of smoke billows up toward the stars and Alyssa says, “I hope the cameras can’t see. We should have driven farther away.” But it was too late by then. We’d already been sitting in the parking lot for about a half-hour, smoking two bowls from the bong. They had a story about a meeting they were forced into by Rosa and Martha, the two recently-promoted Night Managers who are too particular about their job descriptions. Alyssa and Michelle were accused of talking to the customers too much, which I clearly learned from their explanation of the meeting was a false claim and a result of misunderstanding. That’s not really important to the story. But throughout, during appropriate moments, I made pinky-promises, handshakes, and gave high-fives to both girls, paid extra attention to things Michelle said and tried to always respond, and made sure to tell them that I was “95% broken up with my girlfriend.”

We talk about people at work. We talk about… I don’t remember. Mostly we talked about the after-work meeting that they continue to bitterly discuss throughout the night. Anyway, we were pretty stoned and after the second bowl we decided against packing another and got on the road. I’d already put in the four bucks of gas, which hardly pushed the needle out of the below-red mark. I just learned to ignore the low gas indicator light in the way people ignore CHECK ENGINE warnings. Anyway, I only drive once or twice a week. This summer, I’m going to be riding my bike to work most the time. Unless Amy asks for it back, considering we picked it up from her mom’s house, and could belong to Amy, for all I know. Hell, other than thinking she might stab me last night, I thought she’d also wind up asking for the bike, the pots and pans, and the Xbox 360. I’d give those things over if it meant we’d be broken up, though, honest.

I drop them off. Michelle first. On the way there, she has a disappointing phone call with her boyfriend that ends in her moaning and saying, “Sometimes…” without finishing the thought. I can totally relate. I could hear him talking to her because I’d turned down the radio and was eavesdropping with Alyssa. He sounded like a dick. I said goodnight to her as she walked her bike to her house and felt that it was a particularly improved goodbye from earlier smoke sessions. Maybe I was just high on the idea of being single again. Or just high. The chase was on again. I hadn’t felt this urge to pursue a girl since meeting Ashley after my first break-up.

I just edited out a little of the last paragraph because I thought it made me sound like a jackass. I don’t want to come across as a jackass, though I am completely aware of the fact that I am a jackass. I feel that way, at least. I feel like I don’t have a good excuse to break up with Amy and that I’m just doing this for no reason at all. But I don’t normally do this stuff. This stuff is fucking hard. I know she’s upset. I know she doesn’t want to break up. I know she feels that strand between us, too. But I can’t back up now. I can’t. When I’m in the best mood, usually at work–surprisingly, I look around and realize that I don’t want to be with Amy because Amy would not appreciate the fact that I want to live a homely little life in various cities working at social hub jobs like coffeeshops and bookstores, just making a living socializing and experiencing, so that I can write books in the meantime. I want to sleep, work, write, and have fun. I’m banking on the hope that I will be published and meet valuable life-long friends. But I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. I want that life and I know it will work for me. I don’t know how often I’ll jump from city to city, but I know it’ll be when I absolutely out-lived the excitement of the place. Maybe I’ll meet people who move around the country with me, like Carissa did with her friends who moved with her from Arizona. A handful of them are trying out the California climate in Santa Rosa. I suspect they might migrate again, someday, or at least some of them. Maybe this drive to hop from city to city is my quest for the city with the best connection to my personality. I can’t do San Francisco because I don’t feel eccentric enough. New York sounds too formal. Los Angeles is just Northern California with more skyscrapers and smog. I liked Seattle when I visited friends there for a week, but it lost its appeal after that. Now I’m thinking of trying Chicago, St. Louis, or Denver. Denver is an interesting choice because I have an uncle that lives out there and I’ve seen it before, but I enjoyed the wide-spread urban feeling that seemed to exist on every street corner, unlike the confined urban spots of most cities. I don’t know. I’m just rambling now. Basically, I’m sorry if I sound like a jackass.

After I drop off Alyssa, I park and head toward my apartment. Bryce is asleep and I creep upstairs to take off my backpack and hide my stash. I take a piss and then, halfway through the piss, I decide that I want to write down a journal-like record of this day. It was such a strange day. It started with me going to bed last night thinking about how insane it was that I had just broken up with Amy, that this was the night before my first day as a single guy in over a year. I’m having deja vu of the time I broke up with Leorah (who I tried to be explicitly clear to about not actually being boyfriend / girlfriend) by not talking to her and sending her a cruel letter about how her friend accused me of playing with Leorah’s feelings as though we were dating, and I reminded her that we were definitely not dating. And then I never talked to her again and deleted her and her friends from my Facebook friend list.

I’m interested to see what happens tomorrow. I think she’s actually going to be too busy to call me. I don’t want to call her. Her last text message said, “i think we should get through finals and then talk” and that’s not until next weekend. So I’m going to use that as my excuse if she decides to fight about that anytime soon. Anyway, I want her to realize that I wasn’t the right guy for her. I know I can’t give her what she wants because I’ve been trying to do that–by changing who I am in the process–for months. Not only will I eventually snap because I’m hiding so much of myself from her, but she wants to move in together and get married and have babies, and I don’t know about all that.

This night will end with me stripping down to boxers, getting into bed, and sleeping until some late hour of the morning. I’ve silenced my phone so no early morning phone call from Amy wakes me up in a bad mood. I’m going to be as ignorant of the situation as I can and just ignore those guilty feelings, that goddamn strand tugging all the time, and wait until I’m absolutely ready to talk to her. Okay–I am a jackass.

I don’t know if I’ll write any more after tonight. If I go back on my word (DON’T FUCKING DO THAT, I have to remind myself) but if I do–if–then I’ll be too embarrassed to confess that here. Or if nothing happens and this gets uninteresting fast, then I’ll post a little conclusion and end it immediately. But if this draws out like I think it might, then I’ll be here every night reporting it. I don’t know why. It feels a little masochistic. But I’m a writer. I fucking love this shit.

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