Find Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book Two) (10 page)

And then I
felt
. Oh, boy, did I
feel
.

That night when Gina and I fucked, I was
aware that I knew her from school, and that she wasn’t your local
bimbo to be fucked-and-dumped. I knew she expected more.

And I, cardboard box that I was, thought
that I was being the Big Shining Man by saying to her (after the
fuck), “Babe, we gotta go out, you know? I mean,
really
! Because
I feel this...
I don’t know
...SOMETHING for you!”

This was in the backseat of her car,
Gina’s generous leg dangling and hanging behind my waist while I
rode her gently. “Oh, Deck, be careful what you say. I know that
Ecstasy makes people think things they don’t
really—
Oh,
god!
” I pushed into
her.

She was right, of course.

I came. She came. We did it again. We
didn’t even go into the club that night. I think we screwed four
times in the back of that used Hyundai Accent. You’d be amazed how
good sex feels when you’re flying.

In the end, with me still rushing, she sat
back, fixed up her tight top, and asked, “Deck, are you just gonna
fuck me an’ leave me?”

Now, I might’ve been high as a kite, but I
wasn’t completely unaware of what I was doing. And, admittedly, I
wouldn’t have slept with her if I hadn’t thought about it already
beforehand. Because Gina was a good girl. She was attractive, well
developed. A little sultry, I guess. She dressed alluringly (she
had on torn tights this night and a tube top that had kept
distracting me earlier as I looked down at her considerable
knockers while she’d asked me about the A.)

So, I said, “Gina, I’m not an asshole. I
wouldn’t have made love to you if I hadn’t had the intention of
getting into a relationship with you.”

Yes, I used the words
“made love” and “relationship.” I was
high. And that’s not for context. That’s a fact.

I also said a lot of other things.
A
lot
of things. Loquacious
declarations of love for all of life and existence.

I’m pretty sure, at that stage, she
realized I was high, and that it was the drug talking.

Much later, when things had already gone
wrong for her, I even wondered if she
hadn’t
indeed known the effects of E. And I wondered if—while I
had stood there looking down at her bountiful cleavage during her
Q&A about the Acid on her fingertip—if she hadn’t been playing
me...

Clarissa’s Wise Words of the Waitress play
through my head:
You know everybody in school looked up to you.

Maybe they did.

Did I notice it?

No. My mind was on two things and two things
only in those last few months:

One: When is Ma gonna die?

Two: When can I get high again so I can stop
wondering when Ma’s gonna die?

Not for context.

Still in the past...

When I crashed the next day, I didn’t regret
anything about the night before. I was fully aware that Gina and I
had slept together. I was fully aware that I had done so knowingly.
She’d dropped me off at home the night before. And, the next day, I
called her.

Thinking back to it, she was not too
unconfident when she answered the phone. Know what I mean? If my
theory of her “not being emotionally developed” or “getting onto
drugs because of me” is correct, then I would expect her to be
something like, “Oh, Deck...(
giggle giggle
)...you called!”

But she wasn’t. She said, “Hello, baby,” in a
voice so husky I damn near came in my pants right away.

“
G—Gina, how—how are you?”

“
I’m
good
.”
Think Marilyn Monroe saying that, or, better, Lauren Bacall in her
sexy “Oh, fuck me, Humphrey” voice.

“
G—good.”

“You coming by?”

A few things were going through my mind at
that time, but the most prominent one shows the chauvinist that I
was (
am?
). It
was:
She
needs me. And if I don’t come over, she’ll have a broken
heart
.

I hope you realize I’m not trying to score
any points with you here. I’m telling it like it is. Because
burning-bottles-catapulted-through-windows
doesn’t happen because you were
Santa’s helper and forgot to give him his milk and cookies on
Christmas Eve.

But let’s not blame my chauvinism only. I
mentioned already that Gina Moretti was well ahead of her years
physically. And I mentioned that she was (I thought at the time)
perhaps a little unready emotionally.

Did I mention where she was at
intellectually
?
She was a straight A honors student, two years running.

I barely made Ds in most of my classes.

“
The way I see it, she took the A because
she wanted to take it,” Blaze says now.

“Ultimately, yes. I guess.”

Blaze
looks away, thoughts clearly raging away in her mind.
“Fine, I won’t pretend to understand until you finish. Carry
on.”

“We ‘dated’ for about three months. And by
that, I mean, well...had, uhm, sex...mostly.”

“
I’m not naïve. I figured that already. You
don’t need to be all worried about it when you tell me.” Blaze
grits her teeth.

I can’t even begin to imagine what
she must be going through
listening to me tell her this story.

In all honesty, we fucked like rabbits. It
was then that I noted I might’ve made a slight mis-adjudication as
to Gina’s plans with me that night we first slept together
at
The
L
. Because she knew damn
well what she was doing when we fucked.

Now, get this, I even asked her if she’d been
a virgin before. And you know what she said? “Oh, Deck, of course.
You were the first!”

Now, I’d
never taken a girl’s virginity. I’d slept with
experienced girls and inexperienced girls, but never a girl for the
first time.

The way the sex ran later in the
bedroom—blowjobs with tremendous amounts of bobbing the head and
slurping sounds—either Gina Moretti watched a lot of porn, or she
had one hell of a closet sex life.

We did it— (“OK, Deck, I think I get it
now. Next,” Blaze says.)

Gina
started wearing darker clothes—not the down-in-the-dumps
Gothic look. More like the Kate Beckinsale in
Underworld
look—confident, bad. Sexy.

She got popular at school. She was the
teacher’s pet because of her grades, and the High School queen
because of her attitude. And now also because of her
boyfriend.

There is one thing you
must
believe in all this, because it’s key. In all this
time, I had a few thoughts in my mind constantly: Mom. Drugs. A
close third was football.

I really didn’t notice the changes in
Gina. I noticed very little about her actually. When we went out,
we dropped. Simple as that. I didn’t notice that she started
dropping more often. I didn’t notice that two Es became four,
six,
ten
!

I didn’t notice the speed. The lines of Big
C.

But I did notice the A. Who couldn’t?

She dropped it without telling me. She’d told
me many times she’d wanted to try it, mostly during soaring moments
of sextasy. I knew little about A. All I knew is it wasn’t
something I was ever gonna do. It’s not a drug to escape with.

I needed my escapes.

I told her this. I told her we could have
a good time with E, with speed. With good ol’ Columbian Herb. I
told her that hallucinogenics weren’t my thing. I never done
shrooms and I ain’t never gonna do A. I told her that sex on A
would be weird.

“
I don’t want it for the sex!” she said. “I
want it for the experience!”

By now, she was sourcing her own goods. She
didn’t need me for that anymore.

She took a dot. A fucking dot for her
first trip! They only took dots on their first trips in the
seventies! And they were fucking lunatics back then!

S
he never came down from it.

She dropped it at ten
P.M., was peaking by three. Paranoid by
four (saying things like “You’re a devil, aren’t you, Deck? In his
body and here to take me to into the sewers with you, right?”) I
called Trev at six A.M. to try and help me calm her
down.

By seven, she was screaming. We called
nine-one-one. They tranquilized her, strapped her down.

None of it worked.

In essence, she lost her mind. And she’s
never found it since...

“She’s in an institution?”

I nod. “Pretty much. Not your typical one.
It’s holistic or something. But, yeah, institutionalized.” If only
I’d taken it a bit more seriously. If only I’d taken
her
more seriously! What
did
she feel? Was she in love with
me? Playing me? Ma was gonna die anyway. Should I not have focused
on the living?

Should we have spoken more than screwed?
Because that’s all we did:
Screwed
. Not make love. All we did was have hot sex for chemical
satisfaction.

True-blue addicts. If it wasn’t the Molly, it
was the endorphins of a good lay.

“
So,” Blaze says, thinking out loud, “this
Dino guy, her brother, went after you then.”

“A few days later. Once it had sunk in that
there was nothing else that could be done for her.”

“And now he’s coming for you again.”

“So it seems.”

“Why now?”

“
Clarissa—remember her? The waitress
at
Tom’s
?”

“
Yeah, the Kat Dennings double.”

“
Yeah. Well, she and Gina were friends. And
she hangs out with a lot of the old crowd from school. She told me
Gina was ‘getting worse’ or whatever that means. So, I dunno, maybe
her brother figured it was time for a renewal of suffering on my
part.”

“
If it
even
was
him.”

“
Yeah. ’Cause maybe it wasn’t.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you?”

I hold my coffee tighter. “Sadly, no. Not
after what happened to pops. It’s almost like you’re too good for
me to have.”

“
Me? Bullshit. You know my
shit—”

“
Yeah, and now you know mine. And then we
find each other and it almost feels like it’s a sick joke on us,
carried out by the universe itself. Just to tease us. Just to let
us know what we can’t have because we’ve done too many wrong things
in our lives or something. Because, being with you, it’s perfect. I
don’t need to lie to you. I don’t need to pretend I’m someone else.
You sure as fuck don’t need to lie to me, Blaze. I love you for who
you are. Your past, your present, all of it. You can—
Blaze?”

“Uh huh?”

“
Your mouth is gaping
and getting wider by the
second.”

She closes it. “You just”—she
swallows—“told me you
love
me.”

Holy damn
, that I did. I raise my eyebrows, think
about it a second. “They say the first thing out of your mouth is
what you’re really thinking.”

Society.

It bears commenting upon: That the things
we see and the emotions we feel are determined by the rules and
regulations imposed upon us by television, politicians, and, worst
of all, Broken Hearts.

Imposed on us by Has-Been Dreamers.

And Once-Upon Hopefuls.

Grabbing onto that hope is like lifting an
aircraft carrier off your back while simultaneously being crushed
by a thousand feet of water above you. And then, when your hand
comes out and sees the light of day after being buried in shit for
a hundred years, under the soil of loss and pain and hopelessness,
someone stands on it. With cleats.

And who, you ask, is it that would stand on
such a thing?

And I say to you,
Who the fuck
wouldn’t
?

The Hope-Stomper Phrases:

“
There are other fish in the
sea.”

“It’s better to have loved and lost.”

And, my favorite, “Oh, it’s merely the
naivety of youth. Because such things only happen in the
movies.”

Fuck. That. Shit!

Now, let us say, hypothetically, that we
take a politely deferential finger, and stick it to these here
people—to these
Things With No Name
—that tell us, “No, it’s bullshit.
DON’T dream! DON’T
believe in the spark! That nervousness you
feel in your chest when you’re with her is just a neurotic
tendency. We can solve it. We can medicate it. We can make it go
away, son. Because, my boy—now listen to me, because I’m older, I
know better. I’ve loved and lost and been there and done that. And
I’ve failed, so, it follows reason, you must also fail. Because
it’s logic. If one man fails, so must another. We’re all the same
after all. So,
listen
to me,
little boy, little girl, little children of this meaningless world.
Listen when I tell you that
there is no such thing as mad, over-the-rafters,
in-your-face
,
fuck-the-world-and-everyone-in-it, passionate
love
! Two follows one
just as three follows two. Mathematics. Science. If A and B are
fact, then so is C. And if
I
failed, why shouldn’t you?”