Love Stories

More than one way to skin a cat, make a move, pull a trigger… The time for words is all but over and then we’ll all be stuck here humming our favorite songs, making believe we still have the time for making things right. The days run away like Bukowski’s horses and on a cloudy afternoon in September, it’s easy to pretend you know what you’re doing. But when the sun goes down at 4 pm in January, all bets are off unless you’re holding aces…

A friend of mine came to town to visit over the holidays. His girlfriend fucked his best friend and just like that his world exploded. They couldn’t have done any less damage if they’d used a grenade. Never seems to be any end to the ways people come up with to hurt each other. As if it wouldn’t have been just as painful to fuck a stranger, she had to compound the fracture, twist the knife a little deeper so he wouldn’t think it was an accident. Not to mention the guy she boned was engaged to her best friend. Fucking insurgent bitch blew up everybody on the bus. Pathological. The kind of move you get to make only once in this life because once you know you’re capable of that kind of destruction, you run the risk of never being able to trust yourself enough to love again. I wonder what went through her head when she wiggled out of her bluejeans, let her bra and panties fall to the floor, looked into that dumb fuck’s eyes as he lowered himself into her. I wonder if it was a rush, if it felt like she had her finger hooked through the pin or pressing down on the Big Red Button. It’s seductive, that power. The undeniable pull of destruction, passive aggression turned outright aggression, all that anger turned up high until it singes everything it touches. She should have hit him in the head with a bat, stomped his balls to jelly, set his house on fire. But I guess those things aren’t the same as putting one right through his heart, leaving a giant hole where all that good shit used to live.

I’ve done my share of putting hurt on people, left a few amputees in my own wake, so I don’t have the vantage point of the moral high ground. No, I’ve been right down there in the muck with the rest of them, wading in a pool of shit and blood, blinded by rage and overcome by desire. It never hurts as bad as it does that first morning after, when you wake up and know that nothing will ever be the same again and there’s no take backs, no second chance to put things right, nothing to do but drink, cut yourself, bang your head on the wall until you black out. It’s a disease, pain. It calls out to you on those long winter nights, your only friend. And what a friend to have. It’ll never leave you alone until you cut it out like a cancer. But even the dumbest surgeon knows you can’t operate on yourself and every stab you take with the scalpel only leaves you with more holes, and the cancer just grows, the beast inside you.

I’m one of the lucky few. I found a woman with a taste for scar tissue and an eye for the long game. I got my second chance, and my third, and more since then. I’ve tried to put the pain in a place where it can’t get to me, or her, and it’s only when I forget it’s there do I fuck up and allow it to escape. It’s better to take a long look at it every now and then, pay homage to its power, leave a small sacrifice of self to sate its hunger. Can’t turn your back on the bitch or she’ll take a chunk of your ass. Better believe that.

Everybody’s built differently and who am I to say my friend won’t go back to that same girl and re-build it all from scratch. Better than me have been denied a shot at redemption so I do sincerely wish them the best of luck. I know it’s a tough pill to swallow, though, and no matter what kind of Phoenix rises from the ashes, there will come a night when he’ll roll over and watch her sleep and wonder when the hell she’ll do the same shit, or worse, again. Maybe his pain will decide it can’t wait to see what happens and he’ll hurt her back just to feed the maw inside him, put her out no matter how loud she screams or how many tears she cries. I hope it doesn’t go down like that. I really do.

I moved away after my wife fucked my best friend. It was over a decade ago and to tell the truth, I was sick of her ass anyway, looking for a way out from the jump. It was a fucked-up way to do me a favor, though, and I’ll never forget the hurt those two idiots gave me. It wasn’t so much that I loved her or even that I loved him (though I did, as much as I’ve ever loved anyone), it was that I let my guard down, never saw it coming, was too blinded by my own cool to see the tracer rounds streaking toward my position. I liked to think I was some bad, dope-smoking cat, all my angles were covered, no bitch was going to get to me. I’d never had a broken heart, couldn’t imagine it. I’d done all the suffering I was going to do in this life. Truth was I didn’t even know what real pain was until that year. And the shitty thing was I couldn’t even hurt her back. There was nothing left to take from her, no way to make her feel the way I felt. I just had to eat it, my plate of shit, every last bite. Ate it until I made myself sick and then I turned that sickness into a weapon, pointed it at every friendly in my sector and cut loose. I couldn’t hurt the ones I hated so I just kept hurting the ones I loved. Spent the better of a decade wondering why I even bothered with getting up in the morning, the only thing each day promised was more of my misdirected animosity. I was too chicken shit to kill myself, too weak to do the right thing by anyone, feeling sorry for myself for being so totally fucked up. It’s a wonder I have any friends left at all. But in the end there were a couple who survived those angry black days, and maybe they’re better for it. It’s hard to tell now because I’ll never know how good they could’ve been if they hadn’t had to spend so much of their time protecting themselves from me.

Maybe it all comes back to how much power we give our pricks and cunts. Maybe if we didn’t care who fucked who or why or when and just concentrated on the love of it all -- taking care of each other, treating each other with genuine respect, protecting each other from harm. But who among us, save for the swingers and the new-agers (who I’m convinced don’t believe half of their own shit), can separate sex from love? When you feel yourself inside another person, a person whose heart you want to eat, a person you really truly love, it’s hard to say that it’s just sex, that it doesn’t matter. Because it damn well matters and we all know it. It’s human nature. I don’t want some scumbag’s dirty paws all over my woman, his sweat mingling with hers, his breath on her skin. That’s the physical of it. What I want even less than that is someone fucking with what’s mine. That’s territorial pissing and it’s the biggest part. We all want to think we’re special. And when you find out you’re not, it can really set you off.

I guess the only thing I’ve really learned is that you can’t change the game, you can only change yourself. And if your choice is to go hard, you’ll live hard. But if you do have the sack to trust, the amount of pure joy your heart’s capable of can only be equaled by the absolute pain of having that trust broken. That’s what it's all about. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.