rooks & knights (rb8+! nxb8)
��������� �����last night i found myself drunk and smoking many more cigarettes than i ever intended to. (just now i'm waking from a dream that included me stealing at least ten nestle crunch bars and smoking a cigarette on the way out to the parking lot, where my mother was waiting for me. she saw me smoking and seemed shocked, but i didn't seem to care.)it was at the house on south kelsey st. that jason & i found ourselves, lounging on the backporch area while mosquitoes and other bugs hurled themselves at the screens. a fat fruit fly buzzed lazily around the ceiling while we sprawled out on an old mattress and smoked. more than i ever have in my life, actually. the evening began to turn, from midnight even further into twilight, the skin of the sky sliding from black to blacker, and the beer came out, the coronas and the screwdrivers, and with it the toppling sensations of being related to certain towers in pisa, italy.
tara, jason, jeb, ryan, amanda and i talked, sat, walked, moved, split off, rejoined, and sat back down to smoke again alternately throughout. it was a continual game of some sort, through which every move had a fancy name. perhaps the "en passant" of ryan coming out to sit on the screened-in porch with me, talking about something vague, about how marymount (his college) is a good place, film school and endless hours plunged into a seething editing room, how USM sucks, and how he thinks jason & i are amazing actors. then, during a lull in the conversation, his bright blue eyes jump up like a spark from a fireplace, and he goes,
"want to have sex?" i pause, for a moment, and ask myself how odd the question was phrased, analysing every tone and timbre of the joke. then i laugh slightly, realising he's .. well, drunk. eventually the group rejoins in a mass colloquy about the theremin, and what role in a musical you would play, if you could any. it went from mrs. something, from tommy, to huck finn in big river, sally bowles in cabaret, and mine, sweeney todd in sweeney todd. later, i gush over how my dream role is tom wingfield in the glass menagerie.
like a bizarre diorama or movie, our party moves outside. amanda has written poetry on a tablet and passed it to me, tara has showed me a music video - two - one of bjork - and there has been another cigarette smoked. outside, the puddles are varied, like its springtime, and i confess a certain sort of love for tara, between puddles, and drop a cigarette in a large puddle, leaning close to hear its psss.
tonight the moon is full and pregnant with a sense of completion, while mars glitters balefully in the near horizon. it spit rain earlier, as i rented some movies and ran back out to the car, clothing polka-dotted with the ambivalence of clouds.
"you know that -- school, that one in north carolina, the black mountain college?"
"of course, of course, uh uh -- john cage!"
"yes, and robert rauschenberg - "
"philip glass - "
"and all these artists were there. that's what people will say about this house." he pounds the aluminum siding of the house, leaning into the muddled cascade of streetlight. "i just want to sit here and make art with you guys forever."
these ephemeral moments! even in only one day's retrospect i am confounded to even pull back a sense of clear chronology, a sense of motion, or a centre from which we all gravitated round .. a sense of purpose, or a divining of who will be the first to "break through," none of it seems important. i raged to jason in the car on the way home, still slightly fucked-up, and the headlights clawing eagerly through the layers of fog. "i'm going to trust you, i'm not going to question you as a friend anymore, i'm going to trust you .." while the postal service played.
a whirlwind of a lazy sort of hedonism, a passionada of slow violin playing, and no need to feel pretentious about it. "i love acting, i do," confessing to tara in the weird twilight, "but my medium is words .. i can't deny it. i'm a poet and i hate it."
"no, don't!" she said suddenly. "that's something so many people wish they could have, don't hate it."
we are standing mostly barefoot further down the driveway from jeb, ryan & jason, half-melting into the thrumming, chirruping darkness. i'm staring at her face and it seems to meld in with the trees and bushes behind her, until her skin is suddenly in a leaf-pattern, her bleary eyes and expansive smile powerless and invertebrate to the shifting of the wind - there is sludge of mud and twigs on the asphalt and the bugs are making a roadmap to mosquito heaven on my bare legs -
eventually we castle the rook & the queens (ha!) back inside to the porch, all of the chess pieces knocked over into a sort of sighing lethargy, the cigarette smoke as our banner unfolding overhead. one more move before we all checkmate sleep, and go uncertainly on our own ways - amanda to sleep in her bed, tucking tara into her expensive bedding and love, lights clicked off and the silence of a house beholden to sleep - the noisy silence that is, of course, deafening. ryan & jeb probably sat down to mugs of coffee in the morning hazes just as jason & i probably were driving through a blinking yellow stoplight somewhere in south portland.
the sun rises like clockwork, half-damasked over with grey veils of clouds and diaphanous ruses to divert attention horizon-ward, introspective etc., when it rains spottily all through the day. i woke up with a headache and a stunning sense of having played a game right, for once in my life. or maybe the second time.
who cares. i'm not keeping track.