THE OXFORD (FUCKING OHIO) DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS: Super Senior Class of 2008 Edition

Some nights it's just simpler to go home with a bottle of vodka than to go hook up with random guys. Like every Thursday through Saturday... huh... since September.

- VIA EMAIL
Columbus, Ohio
April 22

No comment. Sounds like the perfect Buckeye date, actually.

* * * *

Fuck me! Dad, guess what? Holy fucking shit! I'm graduating! NO REALLY. Oh Wha? No, I wasn't swearing...

- OVERHEARD PHONE CONVERSATION
Right outside my office Thursday

Congrats, chica.

* * * *

Every guy in this town has at least one Germ-X in the Ol' Pee Hole morning.

- TANK FRANKLIN
Uptown Oxford, May 3

Sad but true. Seriously.

I once had a snake brother of mine tell me that he was glad I "looked clean," since I was three guys back in his ex-girlfriend's history. Fortunately we were both rather intoxicated, because, well, the whole conversation left wondering about the guys before me... and whether or not they "looked clean" ... and...

And Oxford Fucking Ohio is just like every other small college town in America. That's the scary part...

* * * *

LIBRARIAN! WE'RE DOING TEQUILA SHOTS, BITCH! I'M FUCKING DONE! This sucks... we could've been hanging out, like, all this time and now - NOW! - we're finally being drunk idiots offline...

- LOCAL U., CLASS OF 2008,
Pre-graduation Party, May 7

I hugged more random women this past week, Finals Week at the Local U., than I've ever hugged in my entire life. And, yeah, trust me, your BFFs are gonna think you're off your meds if you invite that guy you met online to a post Final Exam party.

* * * *

Oh God. I don't think I can get the whole thing in my mouth. I mean, it's sooo big... Hey! What's so funny?

- A CERTAIN GRADUATING UNDERGRAD BLOGGER,
While finally taking shot with another Web 2.0 comrade

Stephan!e has had more blog personas (Ogbuefi Stephi, Free Rad!cal R!t!ngs, Free Rad!cals, This is my Document, The Avocado Couch, etc.) than anybody else in town.

And, well, for a social justice, living wage, and indy media activist, she's... kinda... hot. I mean, well, it's not that I was, well, checking her out or anything, but, heh... the world needs more cute Socialists.

Last time we hung out? December 2005. We just kept saying "Hey, let's go grab a drink sometime..." for three fucking years. And now, well, she's an alum and - sigh! - I'm still a librarian with a blog.

* * * *

You know how much I love Guinness. It is my soup, my cup of tea, my mouthwash, my holy water, my milk for my cornflakes, my maple syrup for my pancakes. It is my first, my last, my deep voiced everything.

From "They're Wreckin' the Gaff,"
TWENTY MAJOR
Dublin, Ireland, May 9

For those Guinness drinkers stateside (and around the world) who haven't heard yet, the stout's parent company is expected to sell portions of the legendary St. James's Gate Brewery estate and lay off several dozen people as part of corporate restructuring plan.

Money. Screw two-and-a-half centuries of history, boys. Land prices are skyrocketing out on the Emerald Isle and there's quick cash to be made...

I almost cried reading TM's piece Friday. And this lead for a blog post is one of the most gut-wrenching I've read in months. Believe it or not, but, well, their are Irish bloggers who are a thousand times better at storytelling than their across-the-pond counterparts.

* * * *

So does it, like, make you mad when girls my age [19] talk about the 90s like they were ancient? I mean, you don't look bad for your age or anything... though you smell like a guy who works at the mall and he's kinda old... like 35 or something...

- ZFP BATCAVE FINALS WEEK GUEST
May 5, approximately 2:46 AM

I think I'm more pissed I was compared to anything found in a shopping mall than I am about being made to feel like turning 30 this month makes me a senior citizen.

Oh well. Guess I'd better get back to the old folks' home, before I miss Tapioca Pudding Night -- you wouldn't believe the strip show Gertrude does when they put on the Jimmy Dorsey records...

* * * *

Dear Jason,
Editor, The Zenformation Professional:
I'm writing to ask for your help in building a new America. By supporting ______ 2008, you will be helping to bring about change...

- POLITICAL SPAM,
from a local ______2008 supporter,
Before the Ohio Primaries

------

Dear _______:

Okay sick of this shit. Sorry to be rude, but piss off. For the thousandth time, I don't VOTE IN PRIMARIES!!! I'm an independent voter. And I don't participate in systems meant to maintain the status quo of the two-party circle jerk.... P.S. -- I'm thinking about voting for Bob Dylan this year. At least he had the balls to go electric at Newport without anybody else's help.

- THE ZENFO PRO
Shortly thereafter
(After a few rounds in Indiana)

Seriously. I'm not going to endorse anybody for President of these United States, not going to blog about it, debate it, or pretend like any of the folks on the ballot are doing anything but playing the same ol' game to win the White House.

And frankly, I don't care who you, the reader, thinks I should vote for. Please don't feel insulted -- I don't give a shit about who my family, friends, exes, coworkers, fellow bloggers, etc., think I should vote for, either.

Editor? Lord... What part of "It's a goddamn fucking small-town life blog, and I just write when I have time, about whatever fucking floats my boat..." don't some people get?

* * * *

Man, actually, squirrel tastes like squirrel. Ain't nothing wrong with a little squirrel for dinner. Only thing better's poon. Well, sometimes, squirrel's better...

- THE HILLBILLY SCHOLAR
Whilst drinking, Late April

The Hillbilly Scholar, believe it or not, is probably one of the most likable, thought-provoking redneck conversationalists in the Northern Hemisphere. Even the young ladies we were talking to seemed mesmerized by his rural Ohio magic.

And hey, I just love me some deep-fried tree rat. Seriously. Good eats. And, yeah, when the hindquarters are prepared just right, well, it can be better than sex. Don't knock it until you've tried it.

* * * *

Paper. Finished. Need. Tanning bed. Stat. Move to Oregon. I put out. You're cute for a blogger. Thanks for scanning that.

- FROM A WEST COAST UNDERGRAD,
Via instant message, April 16

Well, sometimes an undergrad finds a blog while Googling for information concerning Oxford Fucking Ohio's official response to a local noose-filled art project. And sometimes they email requests for research help because the blogger in question, like, works at a library and wrote an opinion piece that she'd like to cite in a paper.

* * * *

...So, yeah. Fire Biscuit. It suits him.

- WALDO VON NASTY and FATSUIT MCUMMINGS,
Describing how, exactly,
their rather strange roommate
earned his nickname.

Inside joke, but, well, Waldo's girlfriend likes these Quotations posts. Um, yeah. There's a reason why that extra bedroom in my apartment stays empty.

Fire Biscuit? Yep. Fire Biscuit.

- # # # -

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-OTHER MAN: Sometimes, It's Better to Be a Lying Asshole Than to Simply Lead on a Nice Girl

“You only grow when you are alone.”

- Paul Newman

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'd swung by the grocery store after work, picked up some frozen mussels and lean turkey sausage, boiled them together in a four-quart sauce pan with enough herbs and seasonings to satisfy my craving for Deep South spiciness.

I sat in front of the television, in my favorite curb-recovered chair, hit the PLAY button on the DVD remote and the MUTE button on the TV remote simultaneously.

Instantly, my quiet sanctuary of an apartment was wrapped in symphonic wallpaper, that familiar overlap of diegetic and non-diegetic sound that often accompanies the opening scenes of a motion picture.

I suck down my dinner, watch Mallrats for the nine-thousandth time. Cigarette butts fill a handmade tin ashtray, a touristy trinket from Nogales, or Tucson, Arizona, or maybe from that trip to Cuidad Juarez.

It's 7:30, Eastern Standard Time. I glanced up at my cheap wall clock every 20 minutes or so. Despite my best efforts to do the simple time change in my head, I kept counting back the three-hour difference on my fingers, aloud, like a brain-damaged First-Grader.

I waited, nervously, for her call, expected sometime at or around six o'clock, Pacific, nine o'clock Eastern. I'd hoped beyond all hope that I'd figure out some way to reiterate the "You know this doesn't mean anything, right?" agreement we'd reached back in December.

An agreement I thought we'd reached. Correction. One party decided to renegotiate. For the record, there is no right way to have such a conversation, but there are literally hundreds of wrong ways. And such conversations do not get any easier with age, experience, or distance.

* * * *

Just about the time the film reached one of its major turning points, a scene involving a three-nippled fortuneteller in a strip mall, my cell phone bounces across my end table, the air around it vibrates and sends the sucker dancing into the tin ashtray. The sound the Mexican metal makes reminds me of a cowbell.

I hadn't made up my mind what to say. I answered and just started bleating into the mouthpiece, random salutations and bad jokes and comments about my ongoing dedouchebagification, my new year's resolution. She laughed, asked for the second time that day and dozenth time in a week what I was doing, who I was spending my time with, and, well, if I thought about her at all while...

I stopped her, mid-sentence.

I started to tell her all about how I thought she was starting to get the wrong idea about my intentions back in December, that, well, I still thought we could be friends and that she was a really cool person to spend time with.

What came out of my mouth was, of course, different than what my brain and heart really wanted to say.

"Well... I met this really cool chick the other day... you know. Up at the bookstore. We've been spending a lot of time together...you know... hanging out... grad student..."

Not a fib, not an untruth. Not even an impromptu distribution of strategic disinformation.

A blatant, bold-faced lie.

"Oh... Soooo.... Are you doing anything with her later?"

Once one lies, well, there is no turning back.

"Um, yeah. She's coming over and we're gonna go to a movie or something."

"Oh."

"Yeah. You know... Hey, you ever ask that guy from the surf shop out?"

Silence. Silence so painful my eyes could literally hear the flashing MUTE button on the television screen before me, could feel the freeze-framed image of Jay and Silent Bob eating away at my soul as I winced in anticipation.

I'd been leading her on.

For fuck's sake, dude! A girl calls that much, you're beyond the friends with benefits excuse.

YA FUCKED UP, YA FUCKIN' ASSHOLE.

Didn't mean to do it. Just happened. Hadn't paid attention. I'd been leading her on, in fact, since December, since I responded to her first text the day after, since I answered her calls and emails the weeks afterward.

* * * *

In a different life, one not separated by thousands of miles and the too many differences in personality and interests, I would've handled things differently.

Sadly, however, there are no different, interchangeable lives beyond the singular ones we are given.

"Well... Better be going. Don't want to keep you from your date."

"Okay. Talk to ya later, chica."

"Sure. Whatever."

Click. A hard, angry click on the other end, so firm that her own mouthpiece broadcast the slapped slide of her instantly disconnected mobile across an entire continent.

* * * *

The lie - one of the oldest and most cowardly ways to start and end It's Just a Hook-up, Right? conversations - does work. Works when a guy's 19, just as surely as it works when a guy's 29, 39, or well into his nursing home years. Women use it, too.

Unfortunately, it's also the most gut-twisting way to handle the ending of a fling.

It ends friendships, too. Ended one last week, in fact.

Someone once asked me why nice girls get lied to so much, why being a good and decent person often leads to such lead-ons and put-ons and other affronts to mutual respect.

The truth of the matter lies in the fact that nice girls are the only ones, at the end of the day, a guy worries about hurting - especially if a guy knows, deep down, that he's just too damaged to get involved with someone who deserves an equally nice guy, someone he knows dreams about tiny beach cottages and kids and perfect marriages and things he'll never want.

* * * *

I flipped my phone shut and pressed the antenna to my lips. I felt like I was going to puke up my spicy steamed mussels, almost spewed half-digested turkey sausage into that very fine Mexican ashtray I'd already filled with a dozen nervous butts.

I stared at Jay and Silent Bob, still frozen in digital clarity. I tried my best to remember how she felt, how we'd laid in bed and talked things out afterwards, how I'd felt like she, of all people, would understand that, well, sometimes, friends just fuck each other and write it off as nothing more than a simple act of mutual, spur-of-the-goddamn-moment attraction.

I couldn't. I could only think about what was in front of my face.

My hot grad student, my completely fictional imaginary date, was actually a fat guy in a trench coat and a skinny, foul-mouthed stoner.

Alone. Completely alone. With only a dirty soup bowl, dishes in the sink, and a flickering television for company.

My conscience throbbed inside that silence like a cancerous heart.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: I Never Learned to Play Lead as a Kid, But I Sure Figured Out How to Destroy Guitars

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- As a guitarist, I readily admit that I suck serious ass.

Always have. Always will.

I've sucked serious ass, proudly, since my first band, since the Unus Marx (short for Unusual Marxist - I was 15) days, since I figured out that I really have no need for that bottom E string, gave up on trying to play glam rock, and learned to love the good ol' Power Chord.

* * * *

I was 14 when I tore apart my old starter electric, one of those suckers with a cheap, flat tremolo bar and an amplified speaker built right into the body. My parents paid a whopping $50 for a guitar with one working pickup and rust on the tuning pins.

First, I pitched the goddamn whammy bar, gutted that three-inch speaker and replaced it with the severed head of a teddy bear.

Yes, a teddy bear head was my first guitar accessory. It seemed logical at the time, almost abstract art.

And then came the ritualistic mutilation, the tagging. I stripped off the shiny black finish with a belt sander, painted the thing primer gray. With a blank canvas, I used industrial spray paint and black lacquer to add texture.

A skull and crossbones carved here and there, with a dull chisel. BLACK FLAG and SOCIAL DISTORTION and NIRVANA and MELVINS written on with Sharpies, a huge anarchy symbol carved into the neck with a pocket knife.

That guitar even survived this one night in high school when my friends and I, in our infinite need to prove our machismo, decided to hang the damned thing from a tree, use it for target practice.

I played my first gig ever, in front of an audience of three girls and a Dead Head stoner, with that Chinese-made Silvertone, the .22 rounds still buried in the plywood body. The sound was horrible and self-loathing and implosive, a barbaric YAWP! for the waning years of my teens.

I realized, a while back, that I was never asked to join bands because some group of guys need a rhythm guitarist or bassist anyway. I was asked, usually, because, well, I used to be a big dude and I liked to drink, do all sorts of nasty drugs, and fight.

But how I loved that damned, piece o' shit guitar. Bullet holes and all.

* * * *

Some guitarists are all about the finesse, about the rhythm and meter and form. Even the best solos are, to some degree, nothing more than formulaic and repetitive exercises in scale. I've never bothered to learn a lead or solo part in my life - that's for musicians.

Me? I maul at the fretboard like a retarded orangutan, with just about as much charisma and skill as one would find in your average drive-by shooting. Strictly a chord strummer, a rhythm hunter in the darkness, tone-deaf and uncoordinated.

That original electric is long gone, the teddy bear head and neck and body and pickups carried to Heaven, as smoke from a burn barrel. And the drugs are gone, the unchecked juvenile rage subsided.

Despite my ass-sucking levels of musicianship, I still enjoy playing every once and a while.

* * * *

As the rain came down a few nights ago, as it poured off the roof and the box fans rattled in the window sills, I picked up my old acoustic, this shitty Korean 3/4 size I've owned for more than a decade.

When that old Silvertone died, the Korean acoustic became the eldest son, left the farm with me, transversed the United States. Given what the acoustic's been through, I'd have to say that Koreans make some pretty durable cheap guitars.

It's been spit on by two fiancees, puked on and threatened by numerous women, borrowed by skinhead drug dealers and black strippers and roommates and recovering addicts, fondled by poets and former prostitutes and soldiers and migrant laborers, dropped in the Pacific from a fishing trawler.

I like durable guitars. They live forever and, well, tell better stories than I do.

* * * *

I sat on a stool in my apartment, that folding two-foot ladder I call a stool, and I played classic punk songs, rebellious American folk songs, outlaw country - unplugged and barely in tune.

The Misfits' Bullet. Social D.'s Bad Luck and Story of My Life. John Anderson's Seminole Wind. Hank Williams' Angel of Death and Lefty Frizzell's Long Black Veil. Even Tom Waits' Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Not exactly covers. More like abstract, interpretive art. The kind of art one makes in spite of their humanity, when they're all alone and can get away with it.

Spontaneous and humorous and askew and downright perverse. Like taking a shit and seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a turd.

And I played like I always have, like a retarded orangutan, with just about as much charisma and skill as one would find in your average drive-by shooting. I tried to sing, in that old gravelly baritone, the one I used to use when, well, I thought I could actually sing like a rock star.

And the neighbors above me stomped on the floor. And someone yelled from outside in the rain.

And I just wished I still had that old bullet-ridden carcass of a guitar, just to plug it in, to just bang away with blunt force, just to piss off the neighbors.

- # # # -

BOXING AWAY A FEW MOMENTS OF A SATURDAY: How to Get Your Ass Kicked and Love Humanity at the Same Time

Another glorious chapter of Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of the great Tribble hunt?

- Odo [Rene Auberjonois]
From the episode "Trails and Tribble-ations,"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1996

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- The sound of Mexican Spanish and playing children and giggling cholas rang throughout my pounding skull as my knees buckled, my dancing done for the day.

Gossip about some female lead in a telenovela, Destilando Amor, from a group of chirping young women, sang through my body with every punch that made contact, with every point my opponent took from me.

Whump. Whump.

"Oscar" landed two solid right jabs into the headgear, enough to wobble the brain within my skull, enough to start spinning the world.

I easily blocked the third punch, but my almost child-like attempt at a comeback, a series of left crosses and right-left jabs, a last-ditch right hook, signaled the end.

My out-of-shape, winded body gave up after a phantom left popped the mouthguard halfway across the yard, a simple reminder that the summer's woes had left me nothing more than a shitbag full of sloth.

The skin-sheering heat and humidity choked me as I spun, my last view as a boxer the urban decay of a migrant neighborhood in east Hamilton, a few miles away from Pershing Avenue.

* * * *

Pershing, as in ol' General Black Jack himself, the legendary U.S. military commander during the First World War, savior of Europe.

A man better known, in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, as the Big Bad Gringo who'd once been dumb enough to pursue Pancho Villa, the Mexican legend, across the border, back in 1916.

As the Mexican freedom fighters triumphed in the only successful military attack on the continental States in the 20th Century, yet another Gringo had failed to keep a Chicano from winning a fight.

* * * *

I could've, possibly, made one last stand, could've played Davy Fucking Crockett against the one-one-two-one barrage of Santa Ana punches, but the sight of a four-year-old girl slapping the dirt with both hands, counting me out as I tried to get back to my feet, her face smeared with ice cream, finally brought the sparring match to a close.

Two and a half rounds against a welterweight Mexicano, a born citizen of the Estados Unidos, son of an Illegal Migrante Father and a Texan Mother.

The Rio Grande Kid, not even old enough to vote but counting down the weeks until his military enlistment, waiting to build a future for himself and his immigrant girlfriend, the teenage mother of that little chica, had KOed his big brother's former sparring partner.

* * * *

Hard to believe there are dumbass peckerwoods throughout Butler County, self-righteous rednecks throughout the U.S., who think "Oscar" and his young family don't belong in this country.

No one asks my opponent where he was born, if he's a U.S. citizen by birth - every job the kid's had, he's had to prove his birthright based solely on the fact that his skin is brown and he speaks Spanish.

Why aren't these assholes talking about building a fence along the Canadian border? I mean, we've had friggin' terrorists sneak across that side of North America.

Hell, we had a U.S. citizen carrying a highly contagious strain of friggin' tuberculosis fly into Canada, then drive on over, Border Patrol failing to detain him because, well, he was coming in from Canada.

Oh yeah. The majority of Canadians have white skin and speak English.

And I'm sure that fueled some rage inside him, the anger of any teenage father told that the mother of his child doesn't have the skills to be a U.S. citizen, a woman who wants to open a beauty salon one day, who told me he once lost his temper at a Germanic shopping mall clerk in Colerain for calling his daughter illegal, even though she's just as Ohio as the next kid born in this state.

With that much pent-up fury, I'm lucky my head stayed attached to my body during the bout. Fortunately for me, "Oscar" is a gentle soul, a true boxing artist and gentleman.

A good fighter turns rage into fuel, never wastes that fuel on something as stupid as uncontrolled violence.

Especially on an innocent older guy, a friggin' librarian with a blind spot on his right, with lead footwork and who drops his guard to talk smack.

Why waste the energy?

* * * *

No permanent damage.

I stayed on the ground, tossed off the gloves, and stared at a convoy of ants dragging the carcass of a beetle through the dust. Oceans of sweat poured from my head, turning the convoy's path into a muddy trap.

I could feel my left hand swelling, the knuckles gnarling up from my miserable showing. I spat pink, salty saliva - no loosened teeth but a few open wounds bleeding behind the molars. And, though my nose cartilage was intact, untouched in fact, I was certain that if we'd been sparring without headgear I would've been on my way to the emergency room.

* * * *

To be quite honest, I don't think I've ever enjoyed getting my ass kicked so much in my entire life.

Some lessons are best relearned, textbook free, in a notoriously bad neighborhood in the middle of goddamn nowhere Ohio.

And sometimes, the only way to relearn what makes a man a man is to play Black Jack Pershing to another's Pancho Villa, to swing for flesh and gasp for breath as one makes contact with nothing, to hit the dirt like a comic strip Palooka and accept that the world sometimes beats a man down just to teach that man how to get back onto his feet.

Oscar's girl brought me a bag of frozen mixed vegetables. For the hands. And a handful of Motrin and iced tea, as requested, for everything else. In broken English, the Indio-featured teen, large hoop earrings swinging behind jet-black Indio hair, told me that I fight good, fight good.

She took the victor his cold glass of sweet tea, helped him out of his gloves and tape and wraps, gave the victor his victory kiss long and hard. The winner's daughter sat in the dirt next to me, singing songs in gibberish, in that universal language only other little girls can understand.

"I think ya'll are gonna be alright, kiddo."

The child doesn't speak English, save for a few phrases picked up from Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and other kids' TV shows. She cocked her head, giggled, and went back to tormenting the ants beneath a scorching sun.

* * * *

And I think I'm gonna be alright, too, actually.

It's good for the soul, really, to lose some fights. Reminds a person of the importance of being alive, of watching the sun rise over the horizon, of the sheer positive energy that lights up across the cosmos like fireflies in a jar.

So what if I ended up spitting out a chunk of filling from my teeth a few hours later? Or if my already pulled groin feels worse, or if my south paw aches from the work my right should've done? And who cares about a damned headache, a jarred sense of self?

I am alive.

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? Walt Whitman once asked, And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Hell.

If ol' Pershing hadn't gotten his ass handed to him in Mexico, that White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant illusion of the United States would be just about as American as Kaiser Wilhelm II.

- # # # -

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.