10:12 a.m. - 2001-04-21
sundress
I was living with my crazy stoner-aunt in this unbelievable floor-through loft in Tribeca when we met. The three of us were co-workers. Well, ok, they were co-workers; and my aunt had shaken me off some slacker position on the same show so that I'd have a little spending money while we were roommates. We all used to take the subway back to the loft after work, where they would smoke pot and eat highbrow cheeses and talk about the TV business and I would go jogging up the westside highway (not that I'm a fitness buff, or even 'fit' for that matter, I was just new to that numb feeling that creeps all over your body when you work in an office and had to shake it off daily). She was a New York City girl and had 'style'. I'd moved to the city from rural Texas, where women wear bad orange make-up and harsh perms and like, denim blouses w/rhinestones and shit and was totally intrigued by this cosmopolitan stuff. So...yeah, I thought she was sexy. But she lived with her boyfriend in Brooklyn, and the few conversations we'd started hadn't really gone anywhere... Then one night she stayed a little later than usual and I offered to walk her out to find a cab. As we were walking we started talking and um, it was nice...so we ducked into a bar and continued. I kinda sensed that she didn't want to go home, and inferred from her reticence to discuss 'why' that all was not well back in Brooklyn. A few days later, over more cocktails, this was confirmed. She said her boyfriend was an emotionally unavailable indie-rockstar, involved in his art to the extent that he had no time left over to spend with her. Because Karma would one day squeeze my own foot into this gentleman's elegant shoes (pointy little Beatle boots, bought in London no doubt), I realize that this was probably not entirely true. But hey, I was an egotistic young bastard, horny as a buck and too busy enjoying the "Goes around" part of the ride to worry about the fellow strapped to the other side of fate's spinning tire. So it turned into a pretty intense New York summer...followed by a couple years of oft-hellish, always complicated, co-habitation.
But the reason I'm writing an excerpt from a chapter of my life that I don't especially like to remember, much less dwell on ('cause it reads like a theory that's been refuted...y'know?) is because I woke up at five this morning and this dress, this accidental souvenir of that summer and that woman, had worked its way to the to the top of my pile. Piling being for me the preferred way of keeping 'stuff', and 'stuff' being the designated term for any material possession that is not a tool or a guitar. So anyway I woke up and there was this little sundress. The first time I'd seen it was in New York. My aunt was back in LA visiting her family for the weekend, and this woman's rockstar boyfriend was holed up in a recording studio upstate. That Saturday I woke up nervous and exited and called her. An hour later I was sipping my coffee, smoking a bowl and watching in amazement as this work associate of my aunt's rollerbladed around the loft (it was giant floor-through w/wood floors) in this dress, which is like, sheer, and these little shorts and oh sweet jesus. Every little detail. Every little detail. At some point she straddled me on the couch and we kissed and fucked and she pulled off and finished like I thought only happened on porn sets and so yeah- I was officially in love at that point. My college girlfriend back in Texas had been this skinny little white girl who was, like most girls, sort of a stealth freak. But this woman was overt. Her freakiness was straight up, a fully integrated facet of her sophisticated being.
Her boyfriend came home that evening and she went back to Brooklyn and I sat up alone in the loft thinking about her somewhere over the east river, lying with him. I woke up at five the next morning, lovesick. It was threatening rain out and I sat on the fire escape and stared out over the Hudson at New Jersey, over which the storm-front hung like something out of that Mark Helprin novel...green as a bruise, stained at the edges by the red threat of the sunrise. The city was completely silent. Just like Los Angeles was this morning when I woke up...lovesick over a different woman. And there was this dress.
Anyway, there's another definitive incident in the history of this dress that occurred somewhere between those two lonely mornings, right after we moved from Brooklyn to LA. We were leaving the house to run some errand, and she was wearing it...and like I said, it's really revealing. And it made me uncomfortable. I realized that this was hypocritical, and didn't say anything, but my discomfort manifested itself in some stupid way and she had to stop and and ask what the fuck was wrong with me and I told her and then there was a really, really, ugly fight. In retrospect I understand the source of my discomfort...I think I still considered that her "cheatin' on my boyfriend" dress. And even though we'd been going out for over a year at this point, fidelity had never been a priority with her.
So when she did finally deliver the coup de gras, it was with an indiscretion of epic proportions. I had ridden the wheel full circle. And the sad thing is that, when you use sex to hurt someone (even though I'm sure that wasn't her intention), you burn the memory-bridges that return to your shared erotic history. So now this little dress, which should be a sexually supercharged tribute to the deep-seeded carnal attraction we once had for each other, carries instead a negative association. My few attempts to masturbate with it have ended in flaccid depression (in fact, it's probably the only object around which my twisted imagination can't construct an 'accommodating ' scenario).
So...I dunno. I got this weird notion to put it on e-bay as "sundress with tragic history" and link to this page. Or maybe start a whole site where people do the same sort of thing...infuse the seemingly banal with the kind of meaning we usually associate with celebrity ephemera. I mean, that's what this site does to a certain extent...but incorporating the money-auction thing I might expand the concept.
Of course, if I do intend to auction it off, I should probably delete the part about trying to jerk off with it...
