Why I Committed Suicide

The summer heat was bearing down on the yellow hat I had perched on my head. The grease inside my skateboard trucks was approaching meltdown and the bearings were whirring with the not unpleasant sound of overuse. Push, push! Go, go! Smoke, bearings, smoke!

It was only in the blink of an eye that I saw her. Not that I hadn’t seen her around before, or seen her in the way I would pass a thousand other girls on the street. But this time it was different. I actually
saw
her, or very nearly ran her over while lost in my personal masochistic world, pushing the boundaries of maximum skate-power into my body’s overheat zone. Instant endorphin serenity, pause. The pause of seconds among the fleeting shade filtered through hot pulsating, green leaves.

“Turn the fuck around you dumbass!!” My brain screamed at me again from beneath the hat of fire. Turn around or you’ll regret this for the rest of your life. Wipe the sweat off your nasty face. Turn around and say “hi” to her or you’ll have one of those regrettable memories like the guy in “Citizen Kane.” Turn around and say… “Hi” . “Hi.”

“What are you doing?” Her smile was disarming. My feeling of false-bravado fading beneath it.

“Sitting on Fry Street and writing, you?” Cue the pounding heart and visions of children.
Say something before she thinks you ‘re retarded.

“Trying to skate, um, so, do you wanna go do some bong-hits?”
Ooh that was bad.

“Sure.”

So it all begins. She merely smiled and I got the intelligence of an orange. Today, one of the most incredible women I have ever had the pleasure to lay eyes on, graced me with her company. No matter that I already broke up with the supposed “love of my life” less than a month ago in a messy fucking scene that took place in a flowery wallpapered bathroom. Never mind that earlier in the week I had given a completely gorgeous girl the “I don’t want any sort of relationship to ruin our friendship” talk because it was impossible to carry on any sort of conversation with her for more than ten seconds. What was I supposed to say? “Okay bronze Barbie would you mind leaving now that I have released my manly frustration upon your loins in a multi-hour bit of passion and sweat induced drench.” Of course I couldn’t ever put it that way because I’ve always had to be anice person, even when the topic is the unappealing unpleasantness of breaking up with a very dumb member of the opposite sex.

I got so much grief about tossing away a perfectly good bimbo from my other brethren in the flophouse fraternity I’ve chosen to lodge in this sweltering summer that I had to put out the rumor she dumped me because I’m bad in the sack. I’d rather let them all think that I’m a lame fuck than know about my graduation from only appreciating hot dumb women on beer posters. My attraction for her waned immediately after easy attainment and how do I explain to my frat brothers that I’ve reached a turning point in my lusts and wants? Tits and pussy are great but eventually there needs to be more substance to a woman, even if my brothers can’t see it through their beer goggles yet. No, it’s far better for them to think me the victim of feminine rumor than doubt the seeds that define my primitive masculinity.

But this girl I met today is the spark of existential I
need.
A feeding frenzy of electric eels are already swimming and stimulating the pleasure zones of erotica in my mind.

Ask me how it feels when you know. You just know.

Her name is Jenifer Jane Lansing and despite being born and bred here in the college town of Denton, Texas she carries herself with a worldly air that suggests she knows this town isn’t her fate. Jenifer’s just come back from a bad stint down south at A&M University and it just so happens she’s spending the summer doing the same thing I am, bumming around.

After our brief street introduction Jenifer and I went into the room where I share space with my roommate Ernie and we smoked ourselves into a silly relaxing pause. The room is deep forest green and the ceiling’s that authentic color of tar. It even has uneven spots and crap poking through from decades of neglect to give an officially sumptuous “tar” color. The loft inside is made of wood the color of spilled bong water and it divides the room into a lopsided upper and lower half. This was quite a feat for a room that only has ten-foot ceilings. The heat became stifling. The ever-present odor of cats, wild inbred beasts that used to reign freely in this very room, came wafting back in a pinching sensation that offended the roots of everyone’s nose hair.

We talked the talk of people that ‘click’ when they meet. It was weird how we had a lot of the same stuff in common. She had just moved back to Denton after a long relationship with a future egotistical doctor went sour and she first went away to college to escape from home just like myself. She had even been on several road trips including an annual trip to Mardi gras. Just like me.

The smell of cat piss is one of the more permanent odors in this vast world of particularly rambunctious odors, but it allowed for a properly realistic excuse to walk the new love of my life home. My stomach was doing flip flops because I knew when we got to her apartment I was going to kiss her and after that I was going to make love to her. I was mentally saying a brief prayer already to protect me from the deadly virus us college folk are apparently particularly privy to. Another psychotic psychological legacy of my ex.
“God”,
I said,
“I know I have been with a lot of women and that she has been with a lot of men, but all I want out of life is for someone to love me as much as I love them with all of my heart. So if this isn’t meant to be then please give me some kind of sign”
Like I said, it was a brief prayer but I figured God understood the way I was feeling at the moment.

Her kiss was electric. It had more of a rush than the time I accidentally used wet hands to plug in the motor of the fountain by my parents pool. We went into her apartment with its sweet, God sent, air conditioning where we consummated the relationship and secured the mantle of partnership. It’s a hot weird summer, the pot is good and the wheels of my mind are simply in love after a single afternoon.

I thought I was sure that I loved her later, as I buried my face into the hot mound of goodness between her legs and entered her with a sigh on the forest green sheets of her bed. We were making it next to the cage of her giant pet rat Rico who has a fluorescent green tail from the cage liner Jenifer uses to keep him sanitary. We fucked under her giant Jane’s Addiction poster with Perry in his effeminate pose and orgasm heightened my senses to the out of body feeling that gave the illusion of floating and I knew it was real. Then a symphony of cigarettes followed and preceded our third and fourth bouts of animalistic copulation on the bathroom floor and against the wall respectively.

The morning sunlight shone like a spotlight through the thick felt-like green blanket hanging over the window. I awoke to the pleasant and unfamiliar sensation of not sweating or the need for immediate hydration. I awoke with an angel in my arms and absorbed the scent of her hair and the meditative rhythms of her breathing.
Nice.
Her skin was soft and smelled like girl.
The girl.
I managed to squirm out from underneath her arms and kiss my way down her soft flat stomach until I could feel the harsher hairs poke into my mouth. I just turned my head and let my cheek rest on her tight belly, moving slightly up and down with her breaths. I planted a brief kiss that tickled the lips then I sat up in the bed, put my back against the wall and just watched her sleep.

I acquired that habit a long time ago. Watching a woman deeply asleep in the morning is one of the most beautiful paintings God’s ever created. Jenifer didn’t know yet, but I did. We are meant to be together.

This IS going to be real. Real enough to stand the test of time. The problem is that like so many other times in my life when I
knew,
the opposite sex of the coin has reservations. So I let the evening of torment and agonies ensue. I drowned out the mere prospect of thinking about it with alcohol and whatever else was around to postpone any imaginary pain and insecurity until another date with her. Alas poor Horatio, I am the king of all.

♦ ♦ ♦

The smell of her and this intense summer. The prospect of the wide open road inspired by a winter of Jack K. and the pink paperback edition of everyone’s classic motorcycle Zen companion manual, the latter of which I have been toting around in the back pocket of my pants to strike intrigue into the female persuasion that have cause to need the benefits of a phone call. Usually some sort of lame excuse provides that backdrop. Honestly, it really isn’t too hard to inspire the mind of young college co-eds who have been taught all their lives that after prom it would be man-snagging time and there would be no better place to look for that intellectual best friend for life than their college campus.

In college there’s a heavy moral pendulum that suddenly releases and swings back along its lifelong arc. College is a place designed for exploration. Eager minds, raging hormones and cheap beer by the keg all in one mixed up sexual stewpot. Just heat, simmer and serve.

I’m infatuated with Jenifer. She is cool and laid back about everything and it works for her. Normally I would be slightly embarrassed to show a girl that I really like where I am living. Of course she’s already seen the Lodge, and being that she is from Denton, she’s probably been around the Deltas more than I have.

The Delta Lodge is an “alternative fraternity” that I pledged way back when I was a 17-year-old freshman in the fall of 1991. It was hard for me to balance getting good grades, the dependence of a new girlfriend and the “I don’t give a fuck” party attitude of the Lodge but I managed to squeeze into the brotherhood while I was young, unnoticed and nai’ve to the ways of the world. The place held some of the magic that the Animal House/Revenge of the Nerd movies offered. I knew that I wanted the full piss-in-your-face college experience and I knew that to do this I would have to associate with the people my “higher” education was designed to keep me from. I wanted to be able to look the hardcore drinkers in the face and have the stamina to kick each other in the nuts. Well maybe nothing that crazy, but I knew the flophouse frat called the Delta Lodge was going to play a far greater role in my life than anything I had done up to that point and would finally test my mettle. This was the one spot in Denton where the one percent of the population that truly knew they were cool, dark and different deep down in their soul could hang out. A place they could gravitate to and not feel persecuted. Either that or just party their asses off and stir up trouble in a fairly safe haven.

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