11:57 a.m. - 2001-10-12
summertime blues
I feel like there's blood all over my shirt.
And people see it and they're like, sympathetic 'cause you're bleeding an' shit; but still, it's uncomfortable for everyone involved. No girls want blood all over their sofa or on their clean sheets or answering machine. You shouldn't go cruisin' if you're gonna bleed all over your buddy's ride, and it's definitely bad etiquette to leave the pump-handle on the keg all slippery with your bleeding damn blood. Dude, c'mon. Suck in your blood dude.
But enough about me...ok maybe a little more about me. I had a three-week affair this summer with a dancer from Houston, and when I say dancer I don't mean stripper (which is what dancer means in LA), I mean classically trained and all that...although, since she makes her rent choreographing and performing in rap videos, one would be hard-pressed to observe any vestiges of classical pedigree in a survey of her recent work. So yeah, she shakes that ass for the camera...and let me tell you something about them rap videos- that's real ass they're shakin' there. That ain't no stunt ass. There's no camera trickery involved in making that ass look bigger or shake harder, no CGI ass-imation. I'm testifying here. Real.
Spanked it myself.
So...she was a sweet kid who for some reason took an interest in things Ernst, and we had unbelievable sex together right from the get-go. No learning curve involved or nothin'. Right to it. She brought her buxom, fit, body and a dancer's athleticism to the proceedings; I tried to bring clean underwear. It was something else boy howdy. Am I going somewhere with this?
I dunno. Anyway, this little fling went down back when my last girlfriend and I weren't talking. At a time when unresolved feelings kept manifesting themselves in the form of public screaming matches...and it had been unilaterally decided (and not by this sovereign) that we would cease contact. Now, since we hold about 90% of our friends in common, and since her crib is the setting for numerous weekend parties every summer, my social life was greatly impacted by this development. Saturday afternoons, when the phone used to start ringing with calls from friends seeking, relaying, and (on a good night) triangulating, party info, had become quiet. And the folks I could track down were evasive about their plans for the evening. This was the era of "secret bbqs".
So it was one of those Saturday nights this summer and I was sitting at home feeling sort of forsaken and choosing, as is my perverse inclination, to sort of wallow in (as a student of the human psyche, I prefer the term "explore") that state when this dancer called up. I told her I was feeling too uptight to go out and she was like, "Why don't I throw on a couple of steaks and some potatoes and you can just come over here and sip on a beer and unwind baby?"
Yep.
She was living out in the valley in this decrepit guesthouse behind an even more decrepit big house that was owned by this crazy "psychic" (psychic being Californian for "witch"), and like most witchy properties the grounds were thick with vines and spiderwebs. The driveway housed two broken down Cadillacs occupied by warring camps of feral cats...the ammonia stench of whose unclean presence hit you before you even set foot on the property and made passage into the front house nearly unbearable. (I had to back out of a potentially lucrative renovation gig there 'cause I honestly felt it was a health hazard...also the witch had divined some sort of astrological link between me and Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys and insisted on calling me Brian, which was unsettling). But the dancer had worked some girl-magic of her own in the little back house, and the candles and incense, the peeling paint, the vines creeping through rotten sashes, the undeniable summer heat of the valley, it all conspired to give the place a New Orleans sort of vibe. So it was a fun night. We smoked a bone and talked about Texas. She gave me a massage. We had Olympic sex for longer than I thought possible and then collapsed, both of us completely spent.
So I'm lying there with her head on my chest, letting the box fan cool down my naked sweaty self. Her crazy Dalmatian is down at the end of the bed licking my feet, and there's a big LA moon shining on through the vines and the spiderwebs and uh, I guess everything was great. I'd been fed, tenderized, stoned, and fucked beyond the call of duty...but god damnit, I was lonely. My heart was still on the other side of the Hollywood hills, where the woman I was thinking of lay with her head on someone else's sweaty chest. I was too tired to feel anxious, too sated to feel jealous, just lonely, man.
So...I dunno. I think maybe I just recalled that random and unremarkable piece of anecdotal evidence in an attempt to illustrate what the whole damn summer was like for me- I had fun every single day. I was never happy.
Ain't complaining, just a fact. It ain't anthrax or nothin'. Now I'm gonna go change shirts.
