OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DEAD HISTORIES: How Memories Build Up Oceans Around Man's Worldless Islands

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- H.P. Lovecraft,
"The Call of Cthulhu"
[Full text avail. here]

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It fell out of a book, a paperback volume of the works of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet.

The photograph, of this bloated, unkempt, drug-distorted 19-year-old, had probably been used as an impromptu bookmark years ago. I can't remember the last time I sat down and read Donne's "Meditation XVII," can't remember the last time I read the words No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... or what inspired me to use such a foul image as a placeholder.

There is nothing quite like cleaning one's apartment and finding, buried within the bindings of a Cavalier religious writer, the graven image of oneself as a young addict. I sat on the corner of my bed and held the photograph in both hands, not as one cradles a child but as one would hold the putrid remnants of an aborted, rotten fetus.

1998* was such a rotten year, for both wine and life.

Memories, yes, memories can indeed flow like tears. It's why I've systematically destroyed most records of that infernal year, broken most of the ties that bind me to that time. Some things are best cast to the wind like dead leaves, left to fall where they may...

How I stared into the snide, fat face of the kid I used to be! That demonic child, framed in his own Victory-sign forming fists, did peyote with sorority girls on dares, bought intoxicating widgets off Aryan Brotherhood members and Mexican gangsters and sold, at profit, unspeakable products. That vile thing once got off on taking the virginity of Good Catholic illegal immigrant daughters without so much as a care about legality, or, well, whether or not Big Brothers Cholo would mark him for death.

That... person ... a marginal human being, with very little real conscience ... earned every bad thing that happened to him back then. The kid I was lived off of three things - pleasure, power, and the manipulation of everything in between.

And memories, yes, memories can swell in the brain like rivers when visual stimuli break the dams of time. Even good memories, funny stories, from 1998 somehow seem to be nothing more than tragic comedy...

* * * *

GREELEY, Colo. (ZP) -- Crackhead Jim wanted more tinfoil. He didn't knock. Just walked right in.

Basketcase junkies rarely knock, once you show them even the slightest courtesy, once they've been invited into a place. Like Hollywood vampires, crackheads generally wait for that first invitation into a dwelling, that first sign of human weakness, only to choose their comings and goings afterwards as if personal boundaries don't exist.

Crackhead Jim needed tinfoil to help him hide from his probation officer and the all-knowing, all-invasive Grov'ment Agents. They were always watching him, using their spy satellites to track him. Jim said that he'd stabbed a guy in a grocery store parking lot, some gangland Vato who'd called him a dirty nigger, a few days prior – he'd avoided them then, but, well, he'd used up all of his tinfoil wrapping his body in radar-jamming armor.

“Jada” was in the shower, the tiny studio's bathroom door wide open, her wet ebony nakedness barely a feminine contrast against the whitewashed walls. I was contently reading old Justice League comics on the toilet, shitting away three or four forty-once bottles of Olde English 800 and probably a good two or three grams of pristine Mexican blow.

I hollered back at Jim, told him that we were out of foil. He asked if he could take some wire coat hangers, our bags of garbage. He'd dig through them, sell back the recyclables, and have enough money for more tinfoil of his own – and enough money to score one or two tiny viles of rock to get him through the day.

Jim lived in 4B, two apartments down from the pre-op transsexual from Denver, across the hall from the skanky waitress from Omaha, Nebraska, the one who constantly inquired as to whether or not Jada and I were interested in a threesome. She'd already pulled a train with the two frat boys across from me...

And Jim, well, never robbed us. We were the only ones he never seemed to steal from. Jada and I, being junkies ourselves, were nice to him. Because of that common bond, and the steady supply of tinfoil and old aluminum cans and malt liquor bottles, we were probably the only tenants who actually got along in that run-down former sorority house.

From the toilet I carefully watched the junkie through the open door. Jada's tips from dancing were in her purse, right on the tiny table we used for meals. I watched and reached for the heaviest thing I could find – a shaving mug. I'd hate to think I'd have been forced to kill ol' Jim but, well, cold cash is worth more than a warm corpse to a junkie.

Jada'd picked up two private parties in a VIP room that weekend, Mormon businessmen who'd paid for all-nude lap dances, tipped well, and only tried to fingerbang her twice. Being good LDS boys, she'd racked up close to two grand – shamed at violating their faith by staring at a naked black woman, they'd dared not waste their sinning money on equally forbidden booze or soft drinks.

Jim, thankfully, ignored Jada's purse and her housegirl earnings. He was too immersed in gathering up all of the empty booze bottles we'd left lying around on the floor the previous night. He cleaned every scrap of trash up off that studio apartment's floor. He moved fast and furious and, without so much as a thank you, he waved and headed back to his apartment, back to feed his pet rat and to continue trying to remember way back, way back to when he was that young rhythm guitarist out of Washington, D.C.

Jada heard the door shut as Jim left. With one quick jerk, the kind of awkward motion that coke addicts make when they're still high, she pulled the shower curtain open, popping one corner of the plastic loose. Tiny black pearls rolled off her breasts, down onto her still soapy belly and crotch, down towards the fiberglass below her, down into a cold Colorado drainpipe. She yelled something incoherent, some fake hootchie squeal, feigned disgust at how one day Jim would OD and we'd be the first to smell his rotting corpse.

I put down my comic book, wiped my ass, flushed, and hopped into the shower with her. I reached for the tiny plastic bag on the back of the toilet. Jada squealed again, begged me not to drop the precious powdered elixir, to not let half of her Mormon tips wash down the drain.

In one night, we'd already moved into our stash of sacred, emergencies-only Angel Dust. I put a pinch on the tip of my tongue, pulled her into me, and let her tongue work loose the dust's sacred, hypnotic magic. I almost dropped the baggie, almost let that most precious earning wash away as that rush of invulnerability hit...

Crackhead Jim, at least, was smart enough to not fall in love with another junkie. He had his tinfoil and conspiracy theories and memories of those performances with Sam Cooke and Sammy Davis, with Sinatra and Aretha and Marvin...

That crackhead, at least, played music with legends. I only ended up getting played - and then stabbed - by my cokehead stripper fiancée.

And, as strange as it may sound, that's one of the most normal stories I can tell from that period in my life. For some reason, that one moment is burned into my mind like a brand, every detail as vivid as a Polaroid snapshot.

It only took looking at that old photograph of myself to resurrect that moment like Lazarus from the crypt. Needless to say, it wasn't all that pleasurable of a resurrection...

1998 was a rotten year, for both wine and life.

* * * *

BACK IN OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I crumpled up the photograph, tossed it like a baseball towards the trash bag by the bedroom door. The past is, well, the past; there's no sense in dwelling on that which one cannot change.

I was in the middle of cleaning my apartment, in the middle of throwing out all sorts of things and dusting and vacuuming and making the bed - life waits for no photograph, no dream or nightmare from the past, cares not for tragic comedy or pointless wallowing.

No man is an island - of course, Mr. Donne. If we were, we'd all sink like Atlantis under the weight of our own memories.

I clicked on the sweeper and watched as the past's dust disappeared from the carpet.

- # # # -

* - Heh. Even in flashbacks, I can get the year wrong. The first draft of this post listed 1997. My ten-year clean date, by the way, is Aug. 1.

COLLECTIONS OF THE DAMNED: The Historical Records of Dead Men Are Never Worth More Than the Lives of Those Yet to Come

"Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

- Cassius, from Julius Caesar (I.ii.140–142)

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHSIDE VIRGINIA (ZP) -- He almost wept as he showed me the largest piece from his personal collection, a lithograph print of the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest, ringed in tiny black-and-white photographs.

My knees buckled for a moment, as if his shame suddenly became mine as the artifact changed hands for the first time since the 1970s. That weight pulled me down onto his couch as the strong desire to vomit almost overtook me.

If I hadn't been sitting on that couch, the amount of smug, smiling hate in those mugshots would've eaten me alive.

Even years later, I can still feel that old widower's couch devouring me in its plushness, comforting my body so my senses could absorb it all.

* * * *

Some of the most prominent citizens from my own corner of Virginia stared up from behind the glass, their younger 1950s selves captured forever in white robes, my memories of them as simply nice old men shattered like a ceramic Jesus in hell.

One of the men used to cut my hair - I have many fond memories of my time in his barber's chair. Another face, that of a prominent retailer, a friend to not only my family but of many, glowed with his beautiful, Tobacco Country smile - a shopkeeper by day, and a Grand Dragon by night.

The most exclusive of fraternities, one of White Protestant Male paranoia, from the end of the Second World War through the end of Vietnam, residents of counties with such regal, Old World names: Prince Edward, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Cumberland. They hailed from towns like Farmville and Keysville and Burkeville, from Victoria and Kenbridge and Darlington Heights.

I knew all but four of them, at some point in my life, personally. The four I didn't know had all died before I was even born. But the record of their time in the Ku Klux Klan had been trapped in that old man's closet, in that frame.

Up until that point, several years ago, they had all been men I respected. The grandparents of classmates and friends, men who'd mentored my mother through her years as a business owner in the area, men who gave me candy and free bottles of soda in their shops, told wonderful stories and who entertained me before I could even walk.

And for all of the anxiety and terrifying expectation...

I wasn't even shocked.

* * * *

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

- James Baldwin

The elderly man finally broke down as we went through this one box, one full of photographs and, of all things, a ledger.

This one branch of Virginia's Klan, during the 1950s and 1960s, operated like other popular fraternal organizations, like the Kiwanis or the Moose or the Shriners. Members paid dues, paid for their robes and hoods. They even contributed money for timber and fuel oil to hold their rituals.

And someone, probably the local chapter's Klabee, kept very detailed records.

More than 50 pages of writing in that one ledger, filled with addresses and old switchboard phone extensions - and, of course, names.

Names.

How many of these men knew that almost a half-century later, society would change so drastically? Did they know how wrong they were? Did they realize, like my old collector, that society would not remember them for working to save the South but as an instrument of terror, a symbol of intolerance and fear?

* * * *

It was the snapshots in that box, however, that offered real insight into the true dynamic that drove racism and prejudice in the South.

The origins of segregation and slavery lie not in the color of skin but in the gluttonous insanity of unchecked capitalism, a pursuit of wealth and power devoid of compassion, reason, and responsibility. The quest for money, guns, and land gave rise to the social construct of race in the New World, just as surely as the monarchist traditions of Europe gave rise to Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism in the Old.

It was easy for slave owners to justify oppression as just another cost of doing business, for example. And after slavery, it was equally easy for white landowners to justify the system of sharecropping - a system propped up by Jim Crow policies designed to keep not only former slaves unable to escape agrarian servitude, but the descendants of the white non-landowning classes as well.

While the ledger detailed the business transactions of an organization, the basic bookkeeping that goes into any exchange of capital for privilege and property, the black-and-white images testified to the corrupting nature of the quest for profit.

One series of prints, banded together with an event program and several anti-integration pamphlets, spoke volumes about the true greedy, childish face of institutionalized racism:

The event, sponsored by a supposedly less-offensive white citizen's group dedicated to what in Virginia was known as the Massive Resistance Movement , touted the evening's keynote speech, about the dangers of integration to certain businesses and communities.

The speaker that night back in the 1950s was not George Wallace, or Gov. Byrd, or some other blowhard Southern Segregationist politician - the keynote was delivered, instead, by a prominent Negro leader speaking, supposedly, on behalf of concerned colored business owners.

And in the photographs, I beheld an interesting rider upon a very different pale horse - a black community leader and racial separatist, preaching to a Caucasian choir, with the Confederate colors flying above him. In some of the prints, he posed with old Daughters of the Confederacy ladies and with local football heroes from the all-white public high school.

And he posed with some of those same Klansmen, too, shook their hands and smiled beneath the ol' Stars and Bars. Sure, the Klan hadn't shown up in robes and hoods. There wasn't a flaming cross anywhere to be found. After all, who would want to offend a business partner?

And, I remember the old man explaining, many white folks had no problem with a Negro leader who blamed the social disturbances and protests of the era on what they saw as the real threat to America - the Northern pinkos and godless Muslims, the flashy Hollywood communists, and, of course, the Jews.

And again, nothing shocking. Does anyone really think there were no black men who supported, who prospered under the laws of the Old South? And that those same men never did business with white supremacists?

Makes perfect sense, actually, in a time when the whole of society was based on a flawed separate-but-equal system, including the economics. The elimination of segregated facilities and services signaled the death-knell for race-based businesses, both black and white.

Who, at the dawn of the dreaded Big Box Stores, would want to keep paying for the right to shop free of other races, for a Whites Only section, would continue to pay extra for it, as competition grew? And did anyone think that black folk really wanted to pay more for a dozen oranges at the Colored grocery than at one of those new-fangled, integrated supermarkets?

* * * *

It took five years' worth of correspondence to get the old man to even discuss the his activities, much less admit that he'd been a member of an organization that once corrupted the minds of many decent folks, a blasted society that fed on its members' fear of change as much as it fed upon the fear of the outside world.

At one point, it was an obsession - to expose something called the truth, the righteous concept of social justice driven by a personal need, a self-righteousness more akin to that of a lynch mob than to anything else. I'd planned a book, done the library research, studied my prey like a scholarly assassin.

I needed dirt to throw upon the graves of my enemies, the ghosts of the Old South. I didn't, at the time, care who I hurt. Hurt was, at the time, just what I intended to cause, through my quest to expose the truth. I'd made the mistake of so many, those who mistake arrogance for social justice - I'd passed sentence well before I'd judged the crime.

Though the mid-20th century Ku Klux Klan in Southside Virginia was abhorrent, it never was the violent terror that plagued the American Deep South. Sure, there were cross-burnings, and hateful speeches, and even acts of intimidation. But for the most part, history seems to record that its leaders failed to convince the majority of white folks in the area that their black neighbors were somehow deserving of violence. It wasn't the dreaded midnight monster of the 1800s or early 1900s. And, by most accounts, it was nowhere near as insane as the current White Pride movements.

Even a clergyman, a leader at a historically black church and veteran of the Civil Rights Movement I'd interviewed early on in my pursuit of truth, back when I was still in high school, wondered why a white boy would want to dig up such skeletons.

It took me watching an old man cry over his sins, the sins that terrified him as he prepared to meet his Creator, to understand that my quest to expose the truth looked a whole hell of a lot like the sort of insanity groups like the Klan generate.

What right does anyone have to sacrifice the future in order to preserve the past?

* * * *

Come to hate hypocrisy and the evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from truth.

- Christ, according to The Apocryphon of James
[Jung Codex, Nag Hammadi Library]

I asked the curator of the Collection of the Damned why he'd left the Klan, why his incarnation had disappeared into barely an urban legend, a silenced joke without a punchline.

It was, strangely enough, Martin Luther King, Jr. Not the man, or the minister, or even the activist.

Dr. King's corpse changed him, changed his view of the Nig'ra people, saved him from becoming just another hateful man damned to a cultural hell of stagnation and bitterness.

You see, sometime after King's assassination, while the evening newscasters rattled off tributes and the newspapers ran stories of mourning and the demands for justice, the old man realized something that probably changed a lot of men like him.

King was a Baptist like the curator, a Southerner like the curator. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, had preached nonviolence and tolerance, and had died at the hands of a coward. A coward who, well, held the same views the curator held, who'd sought to silence agitators and protect the Old South - who'd taken fear to the point of murder.

And while those Klan meetings often began with prayers to God for guidance, nobody ever brought up that hating thy neighbor was, indeed, a sin, that murder was a sin.

The old man told me that it took days for him to remember what that sort of propaganda reminded him of. It kicked like a mule when he finally figured out the connection between his fraternity and the murder of a Nobel Prize winner and fellow Southern Baptist.

Europe.

He'd heard it in Europe, seen it as he'd marched across a continent towards the stronghold of a madman from Austria, witnessed what hate and murder really cost a man, a nation, a continent.

Adolf Hitler's not remembered for preserving Europe's traditions, either.

* * * *

I asked him what he intended to do with them after he'd confessed his sins, had asked for absolution in the form of the kind of anonymity that only a young man can grant a man close to death.

He didn't know.

But he did know that he didn't want his descendants to ever know and figured that the rest of his former knights probably wouldn't want their descendants to suffer for their sins, either. And that Negro leader? What price would his family pay?

Men, armed with such records, could blackmail, could drive others to murder others as James Earl Ray did, could seek not reconciliation but lustful, bloody revenge in the name of social justice. People are fallible, will punish whole generations for the sins of their ancestors, will reign destruction upon the brows of the countless innocent.

Let's be realistic here: People kill to acquire such records. And people will murder their own kin to bury it.

He offered me the records. I declined. I have no right to such power. And I had no right to risk the safety of my own Virginia kinfolk, either.

Information is, indeed, the most brutal form of power - and power can corrupt even a young man's promises to the old, corrupt his honor for things like money or some sense of self-importance.

I offered him a solution, however - a way to be free.

* * * *

I spent $40,000 on graduate school, learned the proper ways to select and preserve historical records, to digitize them and make them available for future generations.

Sometimes, one just has to accept that teaching a man how to un-preserve the past means more to the future than any amount of academic argument.

On my last trip back to Virginia, prior to my most recent journey, I learned that that old man has moved on, has been called back to His Father, Who Art in Heaven.

I have no clue what happened to those records, but I have a good idea.

But I'm sure, wherever he is, that he got a chance to meet that fellow Baptist Southerner, to be free at last, free at last...

And my notes have conveniently disappeared, and that book will never be published. Names? Well, my memory isn't what it used to be...

* * * *

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

- Nelson Mandela

It's the last week of September. I'm staring up at the new town hall in Farmville, the county seat of my home, built atop the ruins of a former strip mall that'd burned at the turn of the century.

I'm sipping on a cup of Joe from one of several coffee shops that now dot Downtown. When I was in high school, there was nothing remotely resembling a coffee shop in downtown Farmville. And now, on this trip back, in 2007, there are independents and national chains to choose from - I even found a shop that serves the best fairly-traded, organic Ethiopian blend.

It's a Wednesday, midmorning, and Main Street's a happening place. For more than 20 years, for most of my childhood, it'd been the home to not progress but the economic abandonment that plagues many small Southern communities.

But now, today, a group of international undergrads from the local college, speaking what sounds like Mandarin, pass behind me, bags full of touristy items clamoring as loud as their conversation. A black police officer, up the street, pulls over a pick-up full of white teenagers for violating the town's new noise ordinance, for playing G-Unit tunes too loud in a business district. An artsy-looking woman, plain and strangely beautiful, snaps photographs in front of the county courthouse.

Art. It's everywhere in town these days. There's even a museum where an abandoned department store used to be, on the corner of Third and Main. Plasma screen TVs fill its plate-glass storefront, a multimedia exhibit that wouldn't have been possible in 1996, much less 1956.

I turn on my heels, head south on Main. I walk past the site of the old State Theatre, remembering that my parents took me to see Fox and the Hound at a corner that now serves as an outdoor park and amphitheater. New brick high-rise apartments cast shadows down on the real estate beneath them - they're built atop property that once contained a decrepit shopping center, a liquor store, and a parking lot full of midnight drug dealers.

I stop in front of a Baptist church that now rests beneath the shadows cast by the high-rises, a church founded by former slaves, right after the U.S. Civil War.

A sign proudly proclaims that Martin Luther King once spoke there, proudly proclaims its place in history.

Without that visit by that martyred Baptist peacemaker, I wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have graduated from what became one of the most successfully integrated public school systems in North America. I couldn't proudly proclaim that I come from a community that spawned the most successful, peaceful student protest in U.S. history, a small town on the outskirts of change so monumental that some of its records are stored in places like the Library of Congress.

And King did more than simply visit, than simply speak and inspire during his lifetime. Even in death, he helped drive another nail in the coffin of one of the darkest times in Prince Edward's history.

He liberated a Klansman from his hate.

And he freed a bit of my soul, too, in the process.

The importance of burying the past, sometimes, paves the way for a greater future.

- # # # -

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-OTHER MAN II: Tasting Kentucky, Payback as a Blogging Bitch, and Other Crazy Things

ACT I:
"DUDE. SHE TASTES LIKE KENTUCKY."

If this doesn't make your blog, I'm going to kick you in the fucking balls.

- Mister Chops

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Hairdressers can be quite entertaining.

Especially in gangs of four, when they've all had way too much to drink, when you're the only relatively sober guy at the bar.

Quite entertaining. And rather good kissers, too. Even if they taste like Kentucky, smell like generic body spray, and manhandle your junk like a plumber working over a rusted valve.

* * * *

Mister Chops? The guy behind the bar?

Chops was molested by three of the four women, forced to bare his shoulder and chest tattoos for all the world to see, to strip down to his A-frame tee for tips and wages, forced to be told that, well, even married women to get off every once and a while, forced to witness flashes of ass tats and tits and...

Me? Lucky ol' me?

I went four-for-four on the night. And all four claimed that there was no way in hell I could be a librarian, that librarians can't kiss like that, that they'd all like to share me for a few minutes, to spank me, to do very naughty things to me in bar bathrooms and on books and...

* * * *

One woman, a recent divorcée, ended up getting a little too excited. I guess I stirred up some biochemical response, caused quite a bit of, er, moisture build-up, which ended up seeping through the back of her jeans and onto my hand...

Hell. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to give a woman an orgasm, fully-clothed and without any sort of intention, in front of a live studio audience, with just a kiss and a few well-placed flicks of the tongue, a squeeze of a breast and stroke of the ass and...

I even earned a round of applause.

Hairdressers aren't the only ones who are good kissers.

* * * *

Actually, I went five-for-five if you count the blonde undergrad who'd witnessed the whole thing as her party entered the downstairs pub.

She followed me out to my truck and, right on High Street in Uptown Oxford, told me, exactly, just what she'd like to do to me.

Sounded like she had some fun things in mind.

Too bad she was 3,000 sheets to the wind and barely able to stand up straight.

She had to settle for, well, pushing me into my pick-up and shoving what felt like four inches of sorority girl down my throat. Tasted like Jägermeister and fifth-year desperation, like she hadn't had the guts to just walk up to a random guy and kiss him in years.

But still - not bad. For a 22-year-old from Dayton. She'd probably be a nice person to hang out with sometime - if she's ever sober.

But not as fun to make out with as the four 30-40ish hairdressers.

* * * *

I don't do drunk women.

Make out? Sure. But sex?

Honestly, it's not only dangerous; it's also boring and pointless.

Sure, I sometimes falter on that guiding principle. But, well, while I can no longer remember the number of women, total, that I've been involved with, I can count the number of drunken mistakes on my fingers.

Less than 10. And I'm proud of that. More important, I'm just glad I survived them.

I may fuck up, but, well, I prefer to fuck up almost completely sober. Blindfolds and cigarettes may provide the illusion of safety, but the firing squad will still pull their triggers the same, either way. Best to just face one's fate, sexual or otherwise, with both eyes square on the assassin.

* * * *

Who says Happy Hours aren't fun anymore?

Happy was me Thursday. But, by Saturday...

ACT II:
"YOU KNOW, I'M NOT AS DENSE AS YOU THINK..."

I knew exactly what I was doing.

Knew from the moment I paid for her late-night slice of pizza at Brunos. Knew as I suggested that, at 23 and 29, respectively, we were much too old, as working professionals, to be out past last call.

And, yep, I had a good idea what she was thinking when her heel snapped and she fell into me, commenting on the fact that I seem to have bulked up a bit since she last saw me. And I knew, exactly, what I was doing when she told me that she wanted to go back to my apartment, to just chill and catch up, as if we'd ever been friends.

And I knew she was married, too, married to a man who once got off on slipping an ex-girlfriend of his Special K during his Local U. undergrad days, married to a man whose ex-girlfriend ...

... ended up having a rather quick, torrid fling with a certain local blogger to get over the fact that, yeah, her best friend 4eva had been screwing her drug-slipping boyfriend for most of their relationship.

And I even had this lurking feeling I was being used to get back at that ex-fling of mine, for some unknown reason. Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the fact that my ex-fling dared to fall in love with this amazing man who doesn't slip her ketamine as an aphrodisiac, for leaving her best friend 4eva (and Mr. Big Man and yours truly, for that matter) behind.

* * * *

As I lay in bed Saturday morning, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sound of some not-so-random woman singing bad pop music in my shower, I tried to make myself feel guilty, tried to find it in my soul, somewhere, to reprimand myself.

But I couldn't.

That best friend 4eva had just spent the night with a guy she'd once called the ugliest guy in Oxford, while her beloved cokehead of a hubby, the former Mr. Big Man on Campus, was spending the weekend drinking and clubbing back in the city Carl Sandburg once called the City of Big Shoulders.

* * * *

I knew why, exactly, she'd come back to Oxford Fucking Ohio - she wanted revenge on Mr. Big Man, a notoriously unfaithful guy who, from what she told me, spent more time groping interns than he did groping her. I knew from the first lie that she wasn't interested in planned giving to my library, knew she really didn't want my help researching something for work at 4 in the morning.

And, yes, I figured out quickly that she wasn't offering to rub my shoulders because I looked stressed, that she wasn't capable of sincere compassion. And, yes, I knew exactly what I was doing when she leaned against that door jamb and brought her knee up to her nose, when she insisted on demonstrating how flexible she'd become thanks to her yoga instructor.

I wasn't anywhere near drunk, yet, somehow, I tripped. Fell right up against her, catching that flexible thigh to mysteriously restore my balance. And when I smiled and raised my eyebrow, I lied and feigned innocence, just so she'd make the first move.

And she did. Even broke one of my favorite belts.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, Sandburg wrote, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

Well, Mr. Sandburg. Some of us farm boys may be dense, may have no fucking clue how to flirt or date nice girls or even behave like rational adults, but those painted women from The City of Big Shoulders are sometimes easy to lure away from beneath those lamps.

Some of us were just born with big shoulders. It's a curse.

* * * *

Spite is a curious bedfellow.

When I'd left the bar scene behind Friday night, I was annoyed, angry.

A female friend of mine, well past intoxicated, was literally throwing herself at a male friend of mine, whispering all sorts of drunken things into his ear. The female friend has been in a bad way for months, since she went through a nasty break-up with a guy. And the male friend, recently relocated back to Oxford, seemed to be deep in the kind of buzzed enlightenment that comes with having to choose between getting laid and being a good friend.

And, no, it wasn't jealousy. Not even close.

It was memories, memories of some of my own experiences with the self-destructive chaos that fuels all drunken hook-ups and one-night stands, the sort of forewarned regret and friendship - altering choices that, in general, rarely lead to anything productive.

Just hate to see people having to wade through shit. It's really, really painful for me to watch.

I used to be good at those sorts of things, a virtual maestro of drunken hook-ups, seductive womanizing and manwhoredom. But as I've gotten older...

And I thought about "Tonya," too, about how that friends - and - lovers choice had ended. Two weeks earlier, she'd FedExed me my lucky ring - I told her to ship the thing back if she felt that we couldn't salvage the friendship out of the clusterfuck it'd become. When I opened the parcel, my heart imploded; it was the first time in months that I'd been forced to admit that, yes, I had been falling hard for her when things went sour.

And I thought about other drama, too, with other former lovers and flings and girlfriends...

My cell vibrated in my pocket, snapped me out of my deep brooding and self-reflection.

DUDE! Hey! It's me, went the voicemail. You're not going to believe this, but _____ just tried to kiss me. Apparently Mrs. Perfect is down in fucking Oxford and he really thinks I'm going to get back together with him! Seriously. Fuck em! And watch out, dude. She reads your web site, so if you go home with anybody, that bitch is gonna tell everybody up here in Chi-Town.

I laughed. As if I was planning to go home with anybody.

And then, less than five minutes later, I'm standing at the door of my pickup, turning the key in the lock.

I feel a pair of woman's hands on my back, the sound of that high-pitched, stereotypical sorority alum voice, that Heeyyy Jay-sin!!! Loong Tiiime no seeeee!

Some women are as transparent as Waterford Crystal.

* * * *

Yes, spite is indeed a curious bedfellow. But, then again, so is fate. Makes for one hell of an orgy.

And, trust me, there are now quite a few folks up in the City of Big Shoulders who now know who I hooked up with last night.

Tell your husband I said hello.

I'm dense, but I'm not naive. I read your mind, hon.

You figured that you could get back at your husband by going home with the one guy he hates, that you could play me like a fiddle because, well, you'd been reading about my problems and relationship woes, and that you could just waltz right in, use me, and gloat.

And too bad you were singing in the shower. You would've realized that I rarely, if ever, walk into an ambush - I called your former best friend 4eva and told her everything.

She's now in a healthy relationship, doesn't care about who you, your hubby, or even I fuck. But she did think it was funny that you really thought you were getting away with anything.

And, actually, I'm not that easy to seduce. Bit of an urban legend, actually. Think you had it backwards, there, hon.

Can't really play the guy who just served you with the rule book.

* * * *

Oh, and by the way...

No worries about returning the tee shirt. Looked great on you as you went through security at the Cincinnati airport this morning.

It belonged to your former BFF. Butt-ugly thing, that shirt. She always looked horrible in yellow.

I am curious about one thing, however.

How did your husband react when he read Librarians Do It By the Book printed across your chest when he picked you up at O'Hare this morning?

Just curious.

And thanks for reaffirming my enduring belief that, no matter how physically attractive, sex with dumb women is just about as exciting as staring at my bedroom ceiling, waiting for somebody else to finish...

- # # # -

SEX, LIES, & MISTAKEN TATTOOS: Waking Up (Next to the Wrong Person) is So Hard to Do...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- So... ahem.

Where do I even begin?

When I fuck up, I fuck up.

* * * *

Last Saturday, I awoke to my first weekend sunrise back in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Fresh from vacation, rested, feeling like my old, youthful self - cockhard reckless, in fact - the way I used to feel before the librarian days.

The first thing I noticed, opening my eyes, was the four-alarm hangover. And then came the fuzzy memory, the conscious awareness of cottonmouth and the lingering taste of jello shots 'til Last Call.

It's been a while since I just let loose on the ol' college town, in any one-horse town for that matter, east of the Mississippi. Out west, despite ending a relationship, I realized that, well, I'm still under 30, still in my prime, and, well, I really need to just let work stay at work, chill out a bit.

Almost all of my furniture shipped off to the new apartment, everything save for the bed and a lamp and a desk, the lack of any kind of window covering lit up my bedroom like a thousand fireworks. The room glowed yellow and hot, the sounds of High Street traffic and bustling car show attendees echoing off the bare walls and the freshly puttied nail holes.

Despite the slight headache, there seemed to be no harm done. The world had still spun on its axis, the sun still ready and willing to bitchslap the drunkenness right out of me.

And then I stretched.

As soon as I felt the naked body in bed next to me, I knew I'd done something very, very stupid.

A quick lift of a sheet, a hand slid carefully along the mattress, confirmed the sex part.

That, and the three polyurethane condoms hanging off the lamp.

* * * *

A quick pick of the alcohol-impaired brain revealed that there were four possible suspects.

No. 1 , a woman I'd been sorta seeing before I'd gotten ill, a woman who'd just broken up with the guy she'd been seeing after I went AWOL. I remembered that I'd spent four or five hours hanging out with her, taking shots, and chatting it up.

But she probably knows better. And, nope, no latex allergy.

Suspect No. 2, a waitress from a restaurant I frequent for lunch. I'd run into her on my way to a bar, gave her my number. Once, she and I almost had an oops experience, the time I gave her a ride back to her apartment and we sorta started slow dancing. Every time she went through a nasty break-up, she turned extra flirty, laid it on so thick that Ray Charles could spot her interest from outer space.

Checked the cell phone. No random text messages, no Dayton area code in the recent calls list. So... No. 2 became a long shot.

No. 3? A recent high school graduate who, while taking a smoke break from the non-smoking pubs, gave me a hug, one of those drunken gropes that many younger women think conveys some sort of sexuality. I used to tutor her best friend, and she, like so many 18-year-olds right before college, was both heavily intoxicated and overly flirtatious.

Hell, there's not enough booze in the world for me to accidentally go home with someone that young and inexperienced. I may be a bastard, at times, but I'm not a total fucking bastard. Seriously. I'm too old to fake an orgasm while worrying about permanently scarring some fragile, naive ego.

The fourth candidate, a dead-ringer for Suspect No. 1, physically, was a stretch. I almost laughed out loud for even considering it. At some point, well past legal and physical sobriety limits, I thought I'd run into a sorta ex of mine from nearby Hamilton, a woman with a kid, an ex-con boyfriend, and more than a few problems with Adderall and... er ... sanity.

"Pfft. Nah. I'm not that stupid."

My imagination had gone apeshit, too, because I remembered talking to her, outside of my apartment, inviting her in to keep her histrionics out of plain view of the old neighbors and...

"Tequila's playing tricks on ya, Dude. "Chase" lives in Kentucky. It's been more than a year.

"And she's, like, married now."

I finally gave up on the guessing game, rolled over, gingerly, to try to find some answers. I carefully lifted the arm draped across me, untangled my legs from hers, eased my thigh from beneath her hips.

* * * *

Mystery Woman had scored both pillows, thus explaining at least the physical pain in my neck. Her face was partially wedged between the two, raven hair obscuring the remainder of her exposed face.

The list of suspects was, however, cut in half.

No teenagers and no waitress. A wonderful relief.

Gingerly, I parted the hair on the woman's face, hoping that I'd find some unknown variable, some fifth candidate.

Nope.

I checked for ink. Both remaining suspects sport visible tattoos of the same type of reptile, but only one has matching artwork, by the same skin artist, on her lower back.

"Oh fuck. I know that tramp stamp."

With one peak beneath the sheets, my heart collapsed, an emotional aneurysm tearing through my gut, drunken one-night shame making the whole thing a ménage à trois.

"Aw, goddammit."

Nothing screams a Grade-A Fuck-Up quite like waking up next to a psychotic (meds and all) woman, almost two years between conversations, recently married to the ex-con father of her child.

The only relief?

As I slowly pieced together the remnants of the previous night, I remembered a conversation about their open marriage, the fact that their relationship was Jerry Springer perfect in its layers of all sorts of deviancy.

At least I won't have to worry about going toe-to-toe with a guy with five years of prison under his belt.

* * * *

I knew returning to Ohio would be difficult. I knew I'd be depressed for a week or so, bummed out by the fact that my family's on the other side of the country, the whole "Tonya" thing ending, even the lack of, well, diversified scenery.

I even knew getting back into the grind at work would help feed into my self-wallowing, the lingering demons that haunt the back of my brain, voices that whisper sweet nothings about my need to, possibly, get the fuck out of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

I knew I'd, sure, go on a bender, drink a bit more than usual, enjoy the last vestiges of undergrad-free summer in this college town. I figured I'd slip up, maybe end up accidentally going home with a female friend one night, figured the sense of loneliness and isolation would drive me, momentarily, into the arms of some local 20-something, home for the summer, or some grad student, or possibly even some female faculty member.

But I never, ever thought I'd fuck up like this.

I haven't done something this damned stupid in at least 10 years, since I proposed to my ex-fiancee, the cokehead stripper, while on a bender in 1997.

As soon as I realized who I was sleeping beside me, I quietly slipped out of my own bed, tip-toed across my near-empty bedroom, and puked into a landlord-ready sink.

And jello shots ain't pretty at nine in the morning. There was some hint of Jager in there, too.

* * * *

Rather than link to the half-dozen or so posts I wrote in 2005 and 2006 about my experiences with one of Hamilton Fucking Ohio's Finest, I figure I'll just sum my previous experiences with "Chase" in a few lines:

I hung out with Chase's brother a while back, my last attempt to regain my punker chops, to form a hardcore band. I liked Chase. Chase liked me.

Chase neglected to tell me, well, that she sorta had a kid and the baby's daddy (her new groom) was in jail. She also sorta, kinda forgot to tell me that her Suicide Girl thing wasn't an act (she's on five doctor-prescribed medications) or that she had just a tiny substance abuse problem (Speed and Pot. Great combo.)

Boy tries breaking it off gently. Boy gets blamed for girl's problems by mutual friends. Boy remembers why he quit playing in hardcore bands. Girl then, well, quasi-stalks boy, because boy used to date adult video performer and girl wants to jump her. Boy dodges girl for more than a year, even quits shopping in Hamilton when girl follows boy into store, forgetting her toddler in her car in the middle of summer...

Dear Lord.

Honestly, I don't know what else to write. I could go on, but I'd probably just have to puke again...

* * * *

After vomiting, I cooked up my first post-hookup escape in almost a decade, an escape from my own apartment, the librarian on the run from the psychotic aspiring writer/part-time college student/full-time stripper from Kentucky.

My plan was simple. Keep on moving out of the old apartment, and pray that she'd leave before while I was over at the new place unpacking. Simple, clean, efficient.

I don't think I've loaded so many boxes of clothes, dishes, toiletries, or anything else, so quickly and quietly in my entire life. Almost every remaining box in my old apartment's living room was out the door and into the back of the truck in under an hour.

I left a note on the bed, right next to her, explaining that I had to be out of my apartment by the end of the day (a lie), would be back late that night, (a bold-faced lie) and that I enjoyed seeing her again (holy hell, I used to be so good at this when I was 19.)

Unloaded the boxes slowly, went for coffee, even checked out every vegetable stand alongside every road in Oxford.

Two hours. In two hours' time, she should've been gone, out the door, back towards the ex-con hubby and the Kentucky border.

* * * *

I waited an extra hour.

As opened the door to my apartment, I caught the silhouette of a woman, pulling on her tight skinny jeans.

Aw, Goddammit.

"Chase" had waited. She wanted to talk.

She wanted me to know that the night before had been a huge mistake.

That was true.

She also claimed that, somehow, my lifeforce had drawn her up to a friend's bachelorette party, that I seduced her at the Circle K with black magic, and that I'd taken advantage of her accidental Xanax overdose, told her how much like Winona Ryder she looked to get in her pants, and that I'd somehow used tarot cards to bewitch her.

Aside from the fact that, well, she's addicted to Xanax and does, indeed, look exactly like Beetle Juice era Winona, the rest is completely batshit.

She even pointed out how disgusted she was with herself, not for going home with an almost-blacked-out drunk dude who'd once threatened her with a restraining order, but for having sex with a guy who has also slept with fuckin' Mexicans and black bitches.

Let me say, for the record, that I plan on shooting myself in the face if I ever get so drunk, so stupid, as to go home with a psychotic White Supremacist Wiccan Winona Clone ever again.

Ironically, the numerous jello shots that led to such a revelation were made by a Mexican-American bartender buddy of mine.

* * * *

Despite my supposed unwanted seduction, my alluring chi or whatever else she could could pin on me, "Chase" wanted to go to breakfast. More accurately, she wanted me to take her to breakfast, to pick up the tab, payment for my sins.

And we talked about all sorts of things, important things, like the latest issue of Cosmo and her breast implants, how her husband was almost off the probationary phase of his sentence, how her mother was nailed for dealing meth, how she didn't regret having sex with me because I've had sex with famous people before and...

Did I mention that I plan to go all Ernest Hemingway, plan to suck on buckshot, should I ever, ever do something this stupid again???

... And she even mentioned that we wouldn't be able to hang out anymore once she moved to Nevada to become a famous showgirl.

As "Chase" chattered away on the benches outside Bagel and Deli, knee tucked under her chin, staring off into space, I only paid attention to one phrase.

Moving to Nevada.

Thank you, all that is Holy in the Goddamn Universe.

- # # # -

NOTE - For some reason, I missed an edit earlier. "Chase" is moving to Nevada, not Florida. Male library colleagues in the Sunshine State can breathe easy. Clark County? Sorry. You're fucked.