Yours,

Knox Dupree

Dear ex-boyfriend,

Happy birthday.  I wish I could send this to you.  I miss you.  I have been dating… a lot actually and every one of them makes me miss you.  They all are missing something… and I think I know what it is.  They are not you.  They are either not as funny, not as smart, or don’t have a beard, or don’t know our inside jokes.  I know this is totally unfair to them.  How are they supposed to make up for the comparison to a 3 year relationship?  I don’t know, I think that I will never be able to let any of them in.  I don’t know that I want to.  I wish I could forget about you.. I wish that so many things did not remind me of you.  I went to the baseball game and I swear I turned around and thought that you would be next to me.  How sad is that?  How stupid am I?  Every time I think of you I hate myself a little more.  I am planning on leaving Michigan to get away from our memories.  I cannot take it.  I can’t stand only being 10 minutes away from you.  I cringe every time I come to your city.  I cringe when I see photos of you.  I cringe when I have to do things that I thought we would be doing together.  I hate being there and you are not.  I cannot wait to get out of here.  I hope it will ease the memories if I am not constantly around the things that we did together.  Sometimes I hate hearing songs that remind me of us.  I have to skip a lot of songs on my ipod.  The one that you gave me.  Even when I hear new bands or songs I think man I wish I could tell you about this band, I think you would like them.

You know someone asked me recently if I am a man-hater now or bitter when I told them that I had been in a three year relationship that ended as our did.  I was taken aback.  I don’t think I am.  But maybe I am, maybe I am flawed… I don’t know if I was before we broke up or because we did.  Maybe it is why we broke up.  I hope that one day I can be fixed, but I think not.  I think I will wonder the planet visiting different countries alone and still be the same screwed up person I am today.  Maybe, though I will eventually be okay with it.  Maybe one day I can look back and be happy for the time I had with you.  I don’t think so though.  My life feels odd now, it is not grounded.  I feel aimless.  Even though I have goals, I feel like I am floating around without being able to concentrate.  I make up things I want to do but I am lost.  It is odd to realize you have nothing to share with anyone.  No one to care just about you.  To share intimate details with.  You could be happy and I won’t know.  I wanted to be happy with you and now it will not be.  You will live a separate life and continue on without me.  That kills me.

Some days I succeed more than others.  But more often than not something triggers a memory of you and I am back to square one.  I wish I could send this to you.  I wish that our last conservation didn’t end like it did.  You saying you hoped it wouldn’t be our last one and me hoping as well, but knowing it would be.  Sigh.  I hate this.

She laughed at me. It wasn’t an isolated incident, mind you. She laughed many times that afternoon. But this was the first time. This time it was special it sounded perfect, the way she laughed as hard as you can when you’ve got a seatbelt on in a car driving over streets that haven’t been paved since Ford was President and you’re experiencing something completely new.

I’d known her for less than twenty minutes. She asked me my name -  the great romances don’t start like that, I though to myself. Well, actually I thought that later. When she asked me my name, I was in the process of thinking ‘how do I go about being careful in hiding the tin of Skoal and the spittoon from my passenger seat before she realizes I dip’. Jessica never commented on my more-disgusting tendencies, which, if they were something she noticed, was something I appreciated, and if she didn’t, then I deserved points for stealthiness.

She laughed at me when I told her I didn’t want to change the world; it’s going to hell in a hand basket, and really, what’s the fucking point anyways. She wants to change the world. This is, I guess, commendable.

Working for Hillary Clinton, a labor union, realizing she wants to do something more, aspirations of law school, election law, public-interest-type-stuff. I’m rooting her for like my favorite sports team.  ‘I’m too cool to have a plan’ I told her. I was only kind of kidding, and she laughed that special, amazing laugh for the first time, and with the last strands of laughter still ringing and causing me to be momentarily blissful, she told me that was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

We were driving through downtown New Orleans as the sky opened up and seeing past the hood of my car became a challenge. I said ‘welcome to New Orleans, where we’ve got thunderstorms and rain that you can’t find anywhere else.’ Five minutes later, as we were driving through the lower ninth ward, of Katrina fame, it was sunny. And she was still laughing at my ridiculousness.

As we were heading east on Claiborne, under the highway overpass that had destroyed a formerly great neighborhood, she remarked how I was good at these tours. ‘You see, here’s the thing. I practice these tours. Even the pauses, the asides that seem like I’m talking to myself, they’re all planned. I do it in front of the mirror each morning’ I said. I was addicted, constantly craving her to laugh, so I could marvel at how perfect it sounded, how wonderful it made me feel. She admitted that she had never heard of the indie rock band Wilco (kind of understandable) or the international music legend Fats Domino (not really understandable), whose home was destroyed during The Storm. But she had heard of Homer Plessy. As in Plessy versus Ferguson. Separate but equal. He was from the Lower 9^th. Right here. Where my car was. She knew that. And laughed at me for adding dramatic silence to the story of how the Plessy from Plessy vs. Ferguson was from the lower 9th ward, the same place that Brad Pitt was trying to save, Spike Lee had documented and our present geographic location.

She was in from Washington for one night, training our staff of computer-illiterates on the finer points of our reporting software. In between ordering records and reading Phillies-blogs, I’d made it a point to make eye contact with her, just so she knew I cared. When it was all said and done, my boss  designated me to giver he a ride back to her hotel. Maybe they thought I had been flirting with her before.

So we drove through Uptown, with its historic mansions and she was amazed at the ancient palaces that after The Storm were protected by private Israeli security companies. I made sure I told her this, and not just that one of the houses that stands out among the rest was nicknamed the Wedding Cake House, but how one of the top Democratic Fundraisers in the Gulf South lives there. She wanted to know what the guys name was. I hadn’t practiced this part of the tour before: I admitted to her I didn’t know his name. We drove through the Central Business District and I pointed out how O’Keefe Ave was named after one of Huey Long’s main political enemies and how Carondelet Street was named after the first governor of Louisiana, back when it was  a Spanish province; neither one of us, unfortunately could figure out how it should have been pronounced.

I dropped her off at her hotel and said I would call her later tonight, that we would hang out; she had one night in New Orleans and Bourbon St is sooo touristy. And then I missed her hotel and had to drive around the block again because I didn’t want to make her walk half a block; the CDB was swarming with mobs of 12 year olds. And yes, she laughed at this, too. I went home, listened to side one of Okkervil River’s ‘The Stage Names,’ watched Joe Blanton pitch for America’s team and wondered how soon was too soon to call her. What was the rule? 3 days??  I didn’t have three days, unfortunately. But I didn’t want her to think I liked her too much.

But I did like her. So Joe the Lumber struck out the first two batters he faced, Will Sheff reminded me that life may be just a bad movie and I stared at her business card with her number written on purple ink on the back, twirling it in between my index and middle finger, trying to find clues about her in the way she wrote the number two. And I called her. She was in the French Quarter-of course she was, it was an easy walk from her hotel- and I told her I would meet her down there, though not at the current spot she was standing at; she wasn’t going to wait at a corner for me. I got to the quarter, stopped at a dimly lit bar with classic rock on the jukebox, grabbed a beer, put it in a plastic cup and went to meet her.

‘Welcome to America’s worst frat party,’ I tolder her as our paths converged. I was trying to be smooth, but I’m sure I came off as an idiot. We walked through the quarter. Her daiquiri, to her admonishment, had 4 shots of alcohol in it. When she was so visibly shocked to learn this, the girl behind the counter asked her if she wanted another one. We’re not in Washington anymore. She was smart and funny, and I was into her. We ate beignets at Cafe Du Monde and talked about things we hadn’t talked about yet. At one point she mentioned an ex-boyfriend, and I wanted to ask her if she had a boyfriend that came without the preceding ‘ex’; instead I buried my face in my blackberry. I had some emails to send for work and a Phillies game to follow.

‘She had a short life’ she remarked to me, as we look at a statue of Joan of Arc, donated by the French, with the horse riders life years, 1412-1431, inscribed on the base. ‘I think it had something to do with being burned on the steak’ I told her.  I feared every word I said would fall short of the perfection I wanted it to have.

Eventually we left the Quarter–I wanted her to see that there is more to New Orleans than Bourbon Street, that we aren’t just a bunch of drunks down here. We played air hockey at Ms. Mae’s, the world’s best dive bar, where mixed drinks are $1. She beat me 7-6. I was ashamed, but not angry; after all, I had knocked two or three goals in on myself, and I was with her.

We went to Le Bon Temps, the one of the ultimate New Orleans bars and shot pool: I drank beer, she drank water. We weren’t good at pool, but both ok with it. Someone put Tom Waits on the jukebox and I was very happy about that. I didn’t ask her to dance, even though Jersey Girl is, in its own, Tom Waits way, a great song to dance to, and eventually we left and went to a club she could never pronounce on a street there’s no chance in hell she’ll ever be able to spell (Tipitinas on Tchopitoulas) and saw Soul Rebels, a New Orleans institution.

We stood up on the balcony, watching the Rebels play and DJ Soul Sister spin Michael Jackson tunes while the people down below danced; she liked people watching. I asked her if she wanted to go downstairs, to stand in the sweaty mass, to dance, to experience what a Soul Rebels show really is–a head-on collision of sweaty body’s, heavy beats and loud brass instruments. She said she wanted to stay upstairs, and so we did.

I dropped her off at her hotel downtown around 3. I told her I hoped she had a great time, and sent her a text later saying that I hoped that she realized that there’s more to New Orleans than Bourbon St; that we’re more than storm survivors who enjoy revelry as much as anyone. And I realized the heartbreak that she would lead to. She’s the ultimate DC girl–Georgetown law aspirant, American University graduate, a desire to change the world, leftist politics with a conviction to boot – the type of person who is born to live in DC. And me? It’s hard to tell. I guess I just wanted to hear her laugh one more time. And that’s where the heartbreak hit. I was never going to be able to leave the Crescent, and she was never going to want to live anywhere other than Washington.

The next morning at an event we were doing my boss asked me if I’d seen her last night. I was the ultimate New Orleans gentleman, I assured him. Took her to all the right bars, opened car doors for her, was resolved to send her a ‘Brad Pitt for Mayor’ t-shirt, a ‘DJ Soul Sister for President’ sticker and a mix-tape of the Tom Waits songs I should have asked her to dance to. I told him that, in my opinion, the staff really needed more computer training, a two-day seminar really, something to thoroughly get people the nuts-and-bolts knowledge that would help us succeed. He saw right through me, and we both laughed at the obvious: I just wanted to see her again.

My boss eventually told me a story, about how when he was working for a Presidential candidate he had tried to date a reporter who was covering the campaign he was working for. He’s now married and very happy, but not to this reporter.

After he finished his story, a sense of closure kind of hit me, and his story hit me, but not in the way he had intended. Sometimes, you need to draw the line and realize you’ve drawn it. And I did it, drew the line, and knew what it meant, right then and there. I would never hear her laugh again. My boss couldn’t date a reporter covering his job for obvious reasons and I could never have that perfect laugh wash over me for the rest of eternity for equally obvious reasons: she’s always going to be a DC girl who wants to change the world, and I guess that I’m a New Orleanian, for better or worse, who has accepted that there’s no changing the world, and you might as well watch it go to hell with a drink in your hand, living in a place you can’t bear the thought of leaving.

Brandon offered to fix my keychain on my very first day of college.  I walked into my friend Katie’s dorm room like a damsel in distress, complaining that I had already broken my identification keychain and it was only my first day. Had I known I would be meeting my future boyfriend at that moment I may have rethought the Hello Kitty pajamas, soaking wet hair and glasses. Luckily Brandon found my ensemble endearing and we immediately began spending every waking second together on campus. I always told him he had the warmest eyes I had ever seen.  Deep brown speckled with honey flecks around his iris, the eyes attached to the boy never ceased to bring a warm blush to my cheek.

One Saturday night on the way to a party we strolled hand in hand through the campus’ grassy arboretum.  The warm summer breeze swirled through the oak trees leaving a trail of goose bumps down the length of my arms.  Deep in the distance the university’s bells rang a melancholy tune.

“Look at that…what is that?” He said, straying a bit off of the trail and into the clouded wood.   A stone large enough for two crept into sight and Brandon took a seat.

“This is the perfect spot.  I wonder if anyone else has found it.  It’s so quiet and beautiful here.”

I slid next to him on the cool stone, lacing my fingers between his.   “It’s a talk rock, I think.  Our talk rock.”

“Talk rock…I like it. It fits.” We sat quietly for a moment, listening to the far off voices of drunken students walking through the trails.

“I want to tell you something.  I see you in my future.  I see us together.  I know we are young, but I have never felt like this before.  You are the one, Sarah.  You and me; this is it. ” Brandon whispered, his deep brown eyes shining.  I prayed he could not see my flushed face in the darkness.

We broke up a year later after deciding to experience college life on our own terms.  The split was amicable and we promised each other that we would remain friends. When graduation night rolled around, I called Brandon and asked him to meet me at our spot.  Through his drunken slurring said he would be there soon.  I sat patiently, nervously anticipating the familiar shuffle of his feet.  I ached to tell him that I regretted ending our relationship and now that we had grown up we could be together once again.  I waited on our talk rock all night until the sun peered through the trees, but he never came.

Bozeman was disappearing behind us. I’d found a cassette of Springsteen’s Nebraska at the last Texaco. The close-to-setting sun was painting the sky a sentimental color. I should have felt great. But then Stella had to come in and ruin the moment.

“How can I eat it?” I say. “One bite at at time, like anything else.”

“You don’t think about where it comes from at all?”

I take a melodramatic breath and look over at her. “I only eat jerky when I go on road trips. But, I ALWAYS eat jerky when I go on road trips. And no, I try not to think about where my food came from, really ever.”

“Well don’t think you’re going to be kissing me with your pepperoni breath.”

“I’ll pick up some gum next time we refill. Will you kiss me then?” I said.

“Depends on the flavor.” She says, in a way where I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. Jesus, I thought, only 1200 more miles to Chicago.

Stella worked at the café in Seattle where I had been writing my TV pilot. We had a charming repartee most mornings, and I always looked forward to seeing her. She’d ask me questions about how the series (based around a group of environmental terrorists in the mid-90s) was developing and I’d ask her questions about art school.

I’d never thought really thought any of her flirtations were serious until one day, when I brought a female friend, a former development person at Showtime, to the café to go over what I’d been working on. Stella’s demeanor was immediately cold, and she glared at my friend with the hateful eyes that only a jealous woman can summon. It was at that point, I thought to myself, ‘hmm, maybe that café girl is into me.” 

Our first dates were agreeable enough. We saw a friend of hers’ jazz combo and a friend of mine’s book reading. Reasonable, chic restaurants, where we went dutch on the bill (we were both starving artists, to some degree). And I still went to the café and flirted with her every morning, except now, I had a secret. As I set up at my regular table, with my laptop and triple americano, I’d look around at my fellow cafefolk and think to myself, smugly, “Yup. That’s right. I’m fucking her.”

Outside of Bismark, we get into an argument over Israel, of all things.

“I guess I just never took you for the self-loathing Jewish type of girl, who wears a ‘Free Palestine’ shirt to piss off her parents.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly it. I don’t support the terrorist actions of an illegitimate state to oppress 4 million refugees because daddy sent me to private school. Nail on the fucking head, Knox.”

“Listen, I’m sorry. Can we just agree to disagree about this? Some of my best friends in the world I NEVER talk about the middle east with, because it’s too sore a subject.

“Fine. We’ll agree to disagree. Do you mind if I plug in my Ipod?”

“Go for it. Just no more fucking rap. I already have a headache.” And with that, she put on a Tribe Called Quest playlist, and sang along to every word.

Our fight over my roadtrip to Caleb’s wedding should have been a warning flag, I guess. I’d assumed she would be able or want to come. It was only 10 days notice,  and there were no affordable flights. I was excited about going alone, frankly, and it’s not like we’d been dating all that long, but Stella blew up that I didn’t think to invite her. “Baby,” I told her, “I figured you wouldn’t be able to get 5 days off and I dunno, long-haul roadtrips just didn’t seem like your cup of tea.”

When she wound up quitting to come along, I was exhilarated. Maybe I’d underestimated her, and she had fiery impulsive streak. Maybe, I thought, this relationship was more than just a nice diversion, but something I could sink my teeth into.

She wakes up as we approach Minneapolis. “Hey, are we there?”

“What? Oh, no. We’re in Minneapolis. It’s another six hours.” I say.

“Fuck that. If you can’t get us there in four, I’m breaking up with you.” And giggles to herself, as she curls up to go back to sleep.

I grip the steering wheel tight and up sink deep into a fantasy meeting another woman at the wedding, and driving back to Seattle with them, instead. After the wedding, I wind up leaving without her, heading up to Montreal instead of Seattle. How she got home, I may never know.

Hey Knox,

I recently got a text from an out-of-town-fuck-buddy, who says shes going to be in my city  next weekend. Normally, I’d be really excited about seeing her, but I just got serious with someone else, and I don’t think it’d be appropriate to hang out with the out-of-towner, who is going to have some obvious expectations. I don’t know whether I should cop to the fact that I’m seeing somebody, or if I should just avoid her outright. Any thoughts?

Well, that all depends.  Are you trying to do the right thing or have your cake and eat it too?  Because it goes without saying that if you hang out with her, something will likely happen.  If you must see her, I recommend being upfront with the fact that you have a girlfriend because these sorts of lies have a way of coming back to haunt you.  Just when you think everything is fine and you’re past your past’s indiscretions, bam – you get blindsided by the truth on some idle Sunday morning.  Next thing you know, everyone is in tears and your Les Paul is getting thrown out of your fifth story apartment that you just signed a two-year lease for, with none other than the woman who now hates your guts.

Obviously (well, I maybe not to you) the conventional wisdom, or morality, is that you should be honest with your girlfriend and your out-of-towner, and if you’re just straight up, things will pan out as they should.  However, if you must be sneaky, at least tell your partner in crime what’s going on.  In other words, do damage control when it comes to your web of lies and deceit.  Otherwise you’ll all end up running into each other randomly and extreme awkwardness will ensue.

I doze for another six hours. When I awake, my head throbs. The summer heat in my basement apartment is already unbearable. I limp to the kitchen, pull a bottle of vodka out of the freezer and try to recall last nights bender.

It started at an old colleagues book release party. Well, to be honest, it started in this very kitchen, hours before the party, with the first half of this very bottle of vodka, listening to ‘Diz and Getz’ on repeat. I arrived at the party already drunk, but in a classy, jolly way, not belligerent. I don’t recall any outbursts, or disapproving looks. In fact, I believe I might have been in fine form.

There were a couple of women who caught my eye – a leggy brunette with a loud laugh and a small Asian girl, with a sarcastic streak. I vaguely recall speaking with both, and now that I’m thinking about it, I remember feeling like the Asian girl might have gotten in a cab with me.

After another swig from the bottle, I put it back in the freezer and lumber to the bathroom, where I wash my face with cold water. As I’m about to take a piss, I realize the seat on the toilet is down. That’s odd. I haven’t ate a thing in four days. Then, I notice a condom wrapper in the waste basket. Did that Asian girl come back here last night?

I retreat to my bedroom and look for clues. It’s a filthy mess, so it hard to say if I brought anyone back.  I notice two wine glasses on the bedside table. Wow, I think, you’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Dupree? I sit at the foot of the bed and try to piece together anything else. Did we maybe wind up at a jazz club. I have a vision of myself dancing.

I look at the floor, and amidst the clump of dirty shirts and half-read mystery paperbacks, there’s a small handbag. The contents are less than revealing – a compact, a tube of lipstick, maybe $45 and an expired, Florida drivers license. Her name is Andrea.

I dial information. They have neither a listing for Andrea here, or at the Miami address on her license. At the library, where I use the internet these days, I search for her for three hours, but nothing comes up.

A couple days go by and I constantly wonder who this woman is. I’ve been one-night-stranded before, but the mystery associated with this instance in paralyzing. I contact everyone I knew at the party that night, but no one knew who she was.

Her ID stays in my pocket for the next month, as I hope to run into her again, aware that, as time goes on, I’m less and less likely to recognize her. Every short, sophisticated Asian woman I pass gets a second glance from me. I remain faithful, though, that I’ll find her. Whatever connection we made, I want to rekindle it.

I certainly would like to know who she was, whether I’d actually be attracted to her if I wasn’t black out drunk. But I mostly want to know who I was when she met me. Why was I attractive enough to come home with, but repellant enough to never want to see again?  I’m desperate to know what kind of man she thought Knox Dupree was, because, if I couldn’t remember, there must be some truth to it.

Unfortunately, I never find out.

I can’t go too deeply into the details of my absence (yet), but let’s just say I had to go abroad, abruptly, and didn’t have the time to backlog the site with entries. Upon returning, I dove headfirst into a very time-consuming book proposal, and neglected my online readership. Rest assured, the Heartbroke Daily hasn’t ended, there will still be new posts by me and fine submissions will be posted as they come in (Please send submissions). However, the frequency of posts will be less regular than most are use to. My apologies -  I recently lost an intern to alcohol poisoning (rubbing alcohol poisoning, that is) and my copy editor remains irritated over a comment I made to his ex-girlfriend at a bar, so he hasn’t been returning my calls.

Needless to say, I have been buried under my workload. However, I will be revitalizing the site, posting more, and hopefully interacting with you all more. Please keep your subcriptions, keep checking back for new posts and keep looking for love, romance and intimacy wherever you’re least likely to find it.

Lovesick for life,

Knox Dupree

I’m not sure what a “normal” reaction to breakup is when you’re a 12-year-old girl, but I do know hers was pretty fucking weird.  She and a few friends got on the Internet and researched voodoo rituals, particularly voodoo dolls, and they created a little Knox doll that, I heard, was abused in untold ways.
I don’t think much of Santeria when practiced by adolescent white girls in a small, American city north of, say, Jackson, MI.  Still. . . there’s something unnerving about a gaggle of one’s peers trying to castrate him through supernatural means.  Just thinking about it made me uneasy.  I had a couple of terrible dreams, too – somewhat of an adolescent reverse-wet dream.

Walking past them in the hallways, they’d snicker among themselves and I’d feel creeped out.  Even hurt.  But most of all, I was annoyed.  I mean, c’mon—we only “went out” for a few weeks.  We kissed in the back of a YMCA van.  She was a terrible kisser, which made me mostly uninterested in whatever else she was bad at, and besides, her mom looked like Michael Jackson, from the cover of Thriller.   I don’t deserve this shit, damnit.

Much to their—and I suspect many others’—chagrin, the voodoo rituals didn’t work on my man parts.  It sure would have made adolescence easier if they had.  And I often get to wondering what my life would have been like if I lacked the ability to please a woman.  Certainly, you wouldn’t be reading this now.
But I digress.  Years later I saw Bernadette at a bar in Los Baños, CA, wasted drunk and groping at an uninterested sailor.  After she realized it wasn’t going to happen, she turned to me.

“Hey, do I know you?” she slurred.

“Can’t say you do,” I said.  “The name’s McCoy.  Just passing through the area and thought I’d check out this fine little town.”

“Heh.  You’re a funny guy, Mr. McCoy.  I’ve been trying to leave this dump for years.”

I guess I can’t blame her for not recognizing me.  It had been 20 years or so and I had accumulated a few scars along the way.  I humored her for a few minutes, until she went to the bathroom.  I drew a picture of a voodoo doll on a bar napkin, wrote, “So long, Bernie,” and then I left that smear of a town.

Lilly didn’t seem much different from the rest of my students. At least, at first. She was small, introverted and seemed to harbor an inordinate amount of undirected rage. Midway through the year, though, she turned in an assignment on future goals entitled, “Why My Life Sucks.” When I started to read it, I thought, ‘here we go, again.’ The story however, wasn’t about adolescent melancholia, but was supposedly written in MY voice, about my own dissatisfaction with life.

The next day, after a surprisingly lively discussion of Fitzgerald, I asked Lilly to stay after class.

“Is this about my essay?” she asked, once the class emptied.

“What do you think?”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying make fun of you, or anything. I, like, just thought it’d be interesting to delve a little into you, as a character. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”

“You actually hit the nail on the head, Lilly,” I said. She looked up at me. “Which generally hurts more.”

I forgave Lilly for the paper, but told her she’d have to write a new assignment, as I couldn’t, in good conscience, give her a grade for a spot-on examination of my psyche.

“Go to a city,” I said. “A big college in the city. The more you can expose yourself to, the more you’ll learn. And you just won’t have that in some podunk college town.”

I fantasized about kissing Lilly more times than I’d like to admit, but had the decency to stop myself.  At least I think it was decency; it could have been just self preservation.

Lilly ended up getting into Columbia and she left in August.  She sent me updates of her life, which I happily read and responded to, my heart all a pitter patter.  When she came back to town the following summer, we met up for coffee again and discussed how lame college students are.  We took a walk through the park where she presented me with a bottle of ’82 Margot she’d stolen from her father.  We drank it from a brown paper back and threw bread into a duck pond.

“You ever feel like you were born at the wrong time, Knox?” Lilly asked, making a bit of a pass at me.

“Lilly, I don’t even know when I was born,” I said.

Lilly wrapped her arm around mine and laid her head on my shoulder.  We watched the ducks, sipped from a bottle worth a semester of my salary and thought of what things could have been like.  And that was enough for me.

I had a federal work-study job in college, one of three jobs that year. In the afternoons I was an administrative assistant. I navigated students through the culture of the administration.

This girl walks into the office one afternoon. She’s wearing her amber hair loosely in a bun, a spaghetti strap white linen dress flowing flawlessly with at her knees, flapping sandals, and thick, large black sunglasses, the type girls wear hide their ugliness behind them. She looks like a honeybee.

Her name is Emily. She’s from L.A. She’s new to the city. She slowly lifts her sunglasses up, resting them on top of her hair. She’s gorgeous, a crush against my will. She’s completely lost. Doesn’t know how or where to register for classes.

It was a beautiful day and she was a beautiful girl, so I tell her and her sister (I am guessing she was around as chaperon), I’ll walk them to the building where Emily can register.

We talk. Her father is an investment banker. He has put her up with an apartment in midtown with her chaperon. She’s here to go to school part-time. Why? Her mother has just had cosmetic surgery. She wants to understand the biology of beauty. That’s as far as we get.

A few years later, I wrote Emily from L.A., sitting on the steps of my trailer watching the sheep.  With what I knew I imagined that her family life was decadent, gaudy, and fake on the outside, ugly, depressing, and real on the inside.

I wrote Emily from L.A. to smear the makeup capitalism wears. I wrote it to mock the process of accumulating wealth. I wrote to disempower the rich by using their language against them. I wrote it to show the audience that rich folks are just as unpatriotic as everyone else. I wrote it to pock wholes in the American Dream so that listeners can hear the depression, disappointment, suffering, and exploitation echo inside of it. Ask Cornelius Vanderbilt. She and her family were rich bystanders in the drive by imagination of lower class boy who’d watched his family suffer under the oppression of racism and classism.

You say “well the emperor has been naked for a while.” Of course I know making fun of the rich is nothin’ new. So it goes. What’s might be coincidentally fresh about this song is that it is apt for these economic times. I wrote the song for you to listen to not consume.
As you listen, you might think I am jealous of her wealth. Part of me probably is…education don’t get you outa debt but does she know why her mom had cosmetic surgery?

Excellent question.  I can’t say for sure whether this guy would still be able to write what he writes if he were suddenly happy.  It’s impossible to say what really drives any individual’s creativity.  I’m reminded of when I briefly taught a high school English class – it seemed most of the American cannon are total fucking bummers, often written by depressed alcoholics and suicide cases.  Could they have done it had they been on antidepressants?  I’m reticent to say conclusively, though my gut tells me no, they couldn’t. It’s not that you have to be a sad person to be a legitimate writer.  What’s important, is that the writer has a large spectrum of feeling that he or she exercises frequently.  That, and, you know, imagination.

Bottom line, though, it comes from a loving place that wishes to share experience with others and gain some kind of grasp on the perplexing human condition.  Obviously this requires that we ask some  difficult questions of ourselves and our surroundings, and sometimes that means wallowing in the depths of painful emotions just to understand them.  And sometimes one gets stuck down there because it feels more real to relate these truths to others, despite looking self destructive and miserable from the outside.  And I believe there’s something noble about that, even if it is masochistic.

Finally, do I think that I’m cursed and all relationships end up going south because of some latent desire to sabotage myself?  Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, but my gut tells me yes.

This is a transcript of an audio recording that my ex-girlfriend sent me to the night that she left to move to Texas for a new job.  We dated for a year, and at the time of her sending this to me, had been broken up for a month and a half.  Our breakup was quiet, she instigated, saying that with her leaving it was better to just let it go now, since I had never really wanted anything that was too serious.  We parted with small, wet, smiles.  I felt wounded, slightly the victim.

We didn’t speak much after that, although I thought about her all the time.  It was so odd to listen to this recording that she made.  I could tell she was speaking off the cuff, as her thoughts came to her.  Her words had a slow, sad quality, and her voice sounds beautiful to me, deepened by the obviously late hour and her fitful sleep.    When she says “maybe they’ll last.” her voice raises with the sweetest, hopeful note, which made me smile.  She always was so optimistic, so joyful about life and it was me that often tried to tamp that down.  I was wrong to let her go but it’s sort of obvious to me now how I pushed her away.

He and I never really fought…in such a manner.  Our arguments…or our disagreements…about behavior, never escalated beyond a cool, logical conversation, and yet….and yet I think that it might have done us some good to have started screaming at each other, because then I wouldn’t feel this squirming in my gut now.  That we’re at the other side of the end of the relationship and I feel still so full…so full sometimes that I think I might…throw up from it all. All of these emotions that I have writhing around.

The argument continues for a while longer and I listen to the muffled sounds of the yells, occasional cursing, accusations, until it quietly dims down to the soft, full sobs of the woman and the quiet cooing of the man, now comforting her….and you think….maybe they’ll last.  The heartbreak of an argument that…sometimes is healed.

And me lying in my quiet bed, alone…knowing…that if I’m going to heal my own heartbreak…I had better start now.

I was able to unload the rugs to a buyer from Canada, which helped with my losses, but I was still about 10 grand in the red. The only thing to do was go back to Spain, drink for a few weeks and come up with a new plan. Crossing the straits, I got to thinking about poor old Darryl. I talked with my sister about it from the train station, who cheered me up.

“It’s not your fault,” she said.  “If you hadn’t come along to traumatize the girl, someone else would have.”

“I just don’t get why she couldn’t have waited for the guy to die. He clearly didn’t have much time left.”

“Yeah, but when you think about it, if you haven’t loved someone for years and you’re just playing the role, you may not want to wait around to watch them die.”

“I guess not.”

I felt bad for Darryl, doomed as he was, but I was starting to understand Tracey a little bit better. She’d probably felt stuck in their high school sweethearts role and maybe the trauma of meeting me had provided her the psychological opening to shake up her life. I pulled their engagement ring out of my satchel and wondered what I should do with it. “Maybe I should go look for her,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.

It didn’t take as long as it should have to track down where Tracey was volunteering. I had my lawyer, stateside, get the name of the organization she was volunteering with. From there, it was a little bit of smooth-talking to girl who ran their field office and I had the name of a village in North-Central Morocco.

When I got to the dusty village however, with maybe 400 people living there, Tracey was nowhere to be found. There were a couple other volunteer types who said Tracey had come and gone within a couple of days.

Well shit, I thought, how am I supposed to give her back her ring now?

I thought about going back to Madrid, but when I realized it would only mean more trouble, I decided to return home. Chasing a girl I didn’t really know just didn’t seem like it was going to help me get my life back on track.

In the end, I don’t know what I would have told her. She was an intriguing woman, who the universe had dropped into my life, but I couldn’t say what she wanted or who she was. I certainly had no interest in becoming involved with her. I just felt like maybe she had something to tell me, and I wanted to know what it was. I guess her disappearance was a message in itself.

As for their engagement ring, I held onto it, thinking maybe Tracey’d come back for it some day. Eventually, I tried giving it to a girlfriend, but when I told her the story behind it, she imploded. Some might say the ring is just bad luck, but I know better. It’s more a tribute to bad decisions.

“This message is for Sophie, if this is still her phone number. This is Nolan giving you a call to see how you are doing. I am drunk and alone in a parking lot and more likely than not about to be arrested. I hope your life is turning out alright and that you have not worked yourself to death yet. Please give me a call sometime and maybe we can talk about who our favorite Bronte sister is and why. Mine is Charlotte.”

I left that message on Sophie’s cell phone about four months after Johnny left me for the singer of a now moderately famous hardcore band. When I dialed Sophie’s number all I was greeted with was what the sound of seal’s barking. I thought she had changed her number.

Sophie called me back the next day and we talked. Kept it casual. It was nice to hear her voice. I always felt like the two of us always had a knack for wandering into each other’s lives at the right time, and this was no exception: I was reeling from a string of failed courtships immediately following the Johnny debacle, and Sophie was wallowing away with some joyless Ph.D lit candidate asshole and seemed startlingly miserable and happy to hear from me. We connected again, and slowly eased back into talking every day. We eventually realized we never stopped caring about one another, and I became determined to break her away from this undeserving prick and win her back. It worked for a while.

About a year later, Sophie came out to California to visit some friends. I always look for any excuse to visit the bay area, and took her up on an invite to come and stay with her for a weekend. We suffered some initial awkwardness—like my insisting we kiss as soon as possible, so as to alleviate any pressure—but after that, everything went well. And the sex was great. I realized in an instant that there are so many aspects of who a person is that are impossible to know without ever really being with that person. No matter how many times I had seen pictures of Sophie, I never before had noticed a long, thin scar down her left cheek which resembled pillow lines and made it look like she had always just woken up. Or that whenever Sophie was ordering from a drive-thru window, her voice became instantly and inexplicably several octaves higher. Or that she is absolutely incapable of sneezing only once. In all of our years together, I have only witnessed Sophie let out a single sneeze on one occasion, and was absolutely flabbergasted.

We visited each other more and more as time went on. We went to Europe together. After she graduated from UF, she moved out to Oakland to live with friends, which I felt signaled a turning point in our relationship. Now we were separated only by several hundred miles, rather than several thousand.

But, looking back, ever since we reconciled after my incident with Johnny, things were a little different. No matter how intimate we became, we never actually committed to each other. This mostly came from her side, I noticed. It seemed as is Sophie had recognized what had happened between Johnny and I and altered our relationship accordingly. In a sense, Sophie and I have always been each other’s back-ups. We were each others understudies. We existed for one another as a person to enjoy and have sex with and act like a couple with, but only until the point when something easier and better and more real came along. We had gained the physical dimension of a relationship, but had lost part of the emotional dimension.

That and, well, I never exactly treated her like a princess. Sometimes I fought with her just to fight with her. I told her we shouldn’t communicate anymore just months after I told her I loved her. I made her cry, almost hysterically, outside of a cemetery in Prague where we had just spent three unsuccessful hours searching for Franz Kafka’s grave. I left her practically defenseless against the formidable charms of a Frenchman, armed with a guitar and Elliot Smith songs, at a hostel in Paris, while I sat, in ear-shot, talking Blue Jays baseball with a couple of Canadian dudes.

Worst of all: I never told her that I thought she was beautiful and I never told her how much she meant to me.

The last few months of our relationship, I started to recognize her dissatisfaction with the way things were, and I tried to change. Honest to god, I tried. I acknowledged my faults and my shortcomings and my own self-worth issues—all the shit that fed into me being the miserable sack of shit that I was—and I tried to change. But by then it was too late.

One day, riding a wave of energy and passion, I needed to talk to Sophie about where we were headed.

“We need to talk seriously for a minute,” I said. “I need to ask you something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I need to know where we stand,” I said. “I need to know that if I felt ready, I could leave everything behind and move in with you so we could be together.”

After a long silence, she told me she had been sleeping with someone else for a few months, and that they were becoming serious. She told me she didn’t see a problem with it, because it’s not like we were in a relationship.

“But I absolutely cannot lose you as a friend,” she said.

“I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t possibly be your friend. You didn’t give me a chance to fix things. You were fucking with me and I hate you for it. I honestly and truly never want to hear from you again.”

I meant it at the time, but now I just want her back. It’s emasculating, but it’s the truth. We’re not nineteen anymore. The idea of having to get to know another girl so deeply scares the hell out of me. I’m not going to be in my twenties forever.

I broke Sophie’s heart on some level, long ago, so maybe I deserved everything I got. But she wasn’t an angel, either. She ignored my feelings for her and kept on as if we were perfectly casual and non-committal. But now, I don’t care who was wrong.

We still talk every now and then. Casual text-messages and hellos. I have gone forward with my self-improvement mission, trying to show her that she was wrong about me. It’s petty, I know, but sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me going. I have not had a serious girlfriend since she gave up on me. I dated a girl from a writer’s group I was in—an incredibly sexy Greek woman who wrote with an old soul, but I never felt right. I felt alone, no matter what.

Sophie means more to me than any woman I have ever met, and continues, to this day, to go forward and conquer whatever it is she sets her mind to. She is unstoppable, brash, smart as all hell and beautiful. Sophie was my conquistador once, and maybe she could be again.

I have had many relationships, both good and bad. I feel my romantic life is relatively healthy for a person my age and even though I’ve had my share of heartbreak, my regrets are few and good memories plenty. Last night – I fear I did something regrettable. For the first time ever, I completely lost my composure and became so enraged by a lie that I slapped my ex, in public, in front of his new girlfriend. Then I walked away. This was a reaction to a blatant lie and not the fact that he has a new girlfriend. I knew he had moved on, I just didn’t know it was before he had broken up with me. He blamed the breakup on the way I was acting regarding his sudden change in behavior – mystery solved. I can assure you he did something very wrong but I am still very disappointed in myself for being so out of control. Have you ever been slapped by a woman? Did you deserve it? How did you feel, other than slapped? I thought I would feel more closure than I do. Thoughts?

It sounds as if you were angry when you slapped your ex, which is completely allowed. You should forgive yourself for losing your composure and you shouldn’t worry too much about making a scene. I’ve been slapped in public by woman, oh, let’s say three or four times and the crucial element , I’ve found, isn’t the slapped part but the public part. Because while no one around you knows why you’ve been slapped, the general assumption is that it’s because you haven’t been a gentleman, to the point where a woman has felt the need to  forcefully announce it to a crowd. I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, or whether you want me to vindicate you or anything. It seems like it may have been a rather cathartic slap, perhaps the final chapter in your old relationship. I encourage not to dwell on it and to absolutely not slap anyone ever again, unless you just can’t help it. Because frankly, that’s the only way to do it.

Getting out of dodge and getting drunk has always proven the best method for dealing with heartbreak, especially in foreign countries where few things remind you of your former self. Maybe I’ll never even come back, I thought.  I’ll just wander the mountains, hocking rugs with nomadic Berbers.  Crack, go native.  Marry into a tribe, change my name, make babies in tents as sand storms rage outside.  It’s funny, the things that go through your mind when you’re running away from your problems.

In Madrid, I spent my days wandering the city, stopping in for garlic fries smothered in mayonaise, and lots of Amstel.  I smoked packs of cigarettes and tried to keep a diary.  I haunted museums and nightclubs, dive bars and public parks.  I tried making friends with strangers.  I had a one-night stand with an Armenian tourist.  I kept putting off Morocco.

It all helped to keep memories of the Tracey situation at bay, until I got her letter:

Knox,

I don’t know why I’m sending you this or why I even continue to think of you at all.  My shrink says I have some odd kind of Stockholm Syndrome, falling for my “captor.”  It doesn’t seem to matter to her that you weren’t actually attacking me – my shrink is a fucking quack.  My (now ex) boyfriend agreed with her and it led to one or two arguments.  It’s probably good that you left town when you did. He was trying to get a lynch mob together to string you up.

In any case, I’ve gone and done something rather rash.  I dropped out of grad school and signed up to volunteer in Africa.  I love writing, of course – I just can’t stand most other people in my creative writing program.  They’re sending me to Morocco to live in a small, tribal village that’s over 50 miles from a toilet.  I’m supposed to help educate the women on birth control methods or something.  I leave next week and I look forward to it.

Anyway, I thought I remember you saying you were trying to get a carpet business together somewhere in Morocco.  Was that bullshit?
I hope this finds you well, Mr. Dupree.

Sincerely,

Tracey

P.S. my favorite season is the summer, you arrogant bastard.

Holy shit, I thought.  The hand of fate has intervened.  This is meant to be.  But where in Morocco would she be camped out?  Somewhere obscure, no doubt.  I wanted to write back but I knew it wouldn’t get there in time.  Besides, she didn’t leave a return address.  Well. . . shit.  Only one thing left to do.  I’m going to Morrocco, I’m going to wander the hills with Berbers until I find Tracey.  I booked a flight for Rabat at the travel agency, then went back to my hostel to pack.
As I packed, I felt something strange – a presence in my room.  My heart began to race.  I pulled the curtain to the side to see a man I didn’t recognize.

“This is for Tracey, you sick fuck,” he said.

“Wha—?”

Next I knew, I was being dragged by my feet down the hallway, a strange ringing sound in my ears.

“We might be able to reach out to the girl and explain to her that you drive the exact same make, model, year and color of car, parked half a block down and that you weren’t trying to rape her. That just might work. But you’re still gonna have to pay about $1500 in back tickets if you want them to take the boot off your hybrid.”

Just when it seemed like my luck had changed, I go and pass out in the wrong car. I had a cracked rib, bruises just about everywhere and 25 stitches in my forehead. Not only that, but even if I could make bail, I was supposed to go to Africa the next week, but most likely wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country.

“I’m getting my Master’s in Creative Writing,” she said defiantly, which I thought was pretty neat for someone engaged in such a futile pursuit.

Looking me in the eyes, I could hear her thoughts in my head. She was thinking that she should say yes. That maybe I was someone special. Maybe I could be her muse, and we’d dine for years off the story of how we met, me thinking she was a car thief and her thinking I was a rapist. It was dynamite material, sure.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.

And then she walked away.

“Who the fuck are you? And what the fuck are you doing in my Prius?” I slurred, half-drunk and slightly amused by the terrified and utterly attractive stranger driving my hybrid.  I looked down at my chest and noticed that there was a rainbow flower lei around my neck.  Out the passenger side window it appeared that we were speeding uncontrollably along a residential stretch of block near campus.  In my stupor I was both confused and giddy, and began laughing uncontrollably.  

I was still laughing and she was still screaming when she lost control of the steering wheel. The Prius suddenly veered left, hopping a curb and tearing through a well-kept lawn. We unearthed a flowerbed before eventually crashing into an oak tree.

I must have hit my face against the roof of the car because I was now covered in blood, the site of which only made me laugh harder.  She was thrashing about wildly in the front seat looking for a way out. Her berserk movements reminded me of a badger that I had once trapped in a tiny cage, the thought of which was also quite hilarious to me.

“Badger! Woodland creature!” I croaked.  “I demand you quell your kerfuffle at once and state to me your coarse intentions.”

Pulling violently at the handle multiple times she was eventually able to open the driver’s side door and escape from the vehicle.  However, the crash had evidentially disoriented her severely and she slowly stumbled around the lawn. While she did so I struggled with trying to disable the child safety locks on the back doors.  After failing to figure them out I managed to roll down my window and crawl out of the Prius that way.  When she saw that I had managed to escape from the vehicle she began screaming again and made for the street. I, of course, dragged my heels to follow her.

“Hey, can we talk?” I implored, limping down the road behind her.  We were both inching along at a snail’s pace.  Lights were starting to appear from the houses around us.  She did not answer.

“Can I at least buy you a cup of coffee, maybe some chicken fried steak, and find out your name?”

Still no answer, so I picked up the pace a little in order to catch up with her.

“Just a goddamn minute,” I said, grabbing her with both hands by the shoulders. As I spoke I lost my balance, tackling us both onto the ground.

“Help! Rape! Rape!” she yelled.

“Shut up, lady. I don’t want to rape you. Are you bonkers? You’re the one who tried to steal my car.”

“Please someone. This man is trying to rape me.”

I tried to cover her mouth to quiet her, but she bit my hand and drew blood. Then the two of us wrestled sloppily on the ground for several minutes. Eventually I was able to put her in a full nelson, which finally stopped her from hooping and hollering so much.
But by then it was already too late.  I looked up just in time to see a large, athletic sneaker sink into my face.   It belonged to one of about a half-dozen juiceheads who had come to both rescue the girl and to kick my ass. For the next few minutes they proceeded to light me up like the Fourth of July.  As they beat me to a pulp I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Where was she born? What was her favorite season? Had she ever been in love? For a brief moment our eyes met and I knew she was wondering the same things about me.