On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

It is extremely difficult not to edit my 10-year-ago self as I'm typing these entries. I am now taking the step to censure myself as well. I think I have about five more handwritten pages of this story, but I don't like where it was going. Eric, the lead, turns out to be a very weak character. Normally, I wouldn't care. Some characters are weaker or stronger than others. They are very much like real-life people in that way. But as I was typing today, I remembered who was the basis of this character. As I'm rereading, my contempt is obvious for a person who I was calling my friend. That person and I went through some crazy shit together and somewhere in there, we lost all respect for each other. I'm just now realizing that the woman in the frag that Eric Ellisor hates more than any other person is me. So I'm not going to post the rest of the story. That would be very close to posting a dated page from my journal and, for everybody involved, it's best that I not come anywhere close to doing that. Dammit, where's my tequila? I know I have some around here somewhere...

Drunk and half-asleep, he called her. Six hours following his empty promise that he would. Her attitude was dry, his was irritated. Neither knew nor cared who hung up on whom. He stretched, naked, the length of the couch, disinterested, really, in the hand job he was treating himself to. Head back against the sofa’s woven fabric, eyes closed, eyelashes becoming damp with the first tears he’d allowed himself this hell of a day. He hated her with heat that would go unmatched by any love he’d had or would have once more in his life. In her ugly way, she demanded reason out of lunacy and cultivated only lunacy out of reason. Would it, she wanted to know, have been different if she’d told him first? Would it, he pedantically repeats to himself for the thousandth time, have been different if she’d told him first? Sighing, he rose from the couch [2006 edit: like a phoenix from the ashes of cliché] wiping away the water from his face and acknowledging that, no, it was improbable that things would have been entirely different. Back in the shower for the third, no, fourth time that day to wash Plymouth’s blood and burnt skin from beneath his fingernails, from his hair, off the layers of his own skin, he realized, simply, that he’d have wanted a choice in a situation where he had none.

He dressed slowly, pulling on wrinkled navy Chinos and a t-shirt. Before slipping on a pair of loafers, he pulled on a shirt—the last Christmas present he received from his sister Rachel. Two years ago, Rachel woke up for her calculus final with a crushing headache and died twelve hours later, her doctors having yet to explain how or why. Eric buttoned the shirt, ran a hand about the stubble of a beard and did not think of shaving. At Rachel’s funeral, the campus chapel pews filled with crying sorority sisters and stunned faculty, Eric thought for a moment he had spotted their father somewhere along a back wall. He blinked once, the man did not reappear. Eric sat alone in the front pew reserved for immediate family. Their mother had died two years before this—Rachel was all he had left. When his tears began, a friend of his sister filled a space beside him. He lay his head on her shoulder, she stroked the fine hair on the back of his neck until he thought it was there he could sleep.

Dressed now he was to go no one place. He stepped onto his front porch into the night air and walked, with no destination, for many blocks. Hadn’t been on a city bus since high school, but he came upon a bus stop and began to wait. He tried reading the posted schedule by street lamp then gave up once he saw he wasn’t wearing a watch.

He was embarrassed as he boarded that he had no idea what the fare might be and that he had only a ten dollar bill, a fifty and his American Express card. He folded his ten dollars and stuffed it into the fare box largely due to the glare from the bus-driving succubus, and took a seat near the rear.

Boy, the light was brilliant. Eric thought that, perhaps, in the understanding that free will hides from nothing, the city should not take so seriously its helpless noctuids, flawed by the company they were forced to keep: runaways, drug-pushing minutiae, heroin-addicted private school prom queens. He watched through the dirty glass the morphing of suburbia into urban blight as the bus began its circuitous tour of downtown. He felt hungry around Commerce and Temple. When the bus approached Commerce and Rome, he noticed an all-nite [2006 insert: dang, I had a hooked on phonics phase, too?] diner a block away, got off the bus and headed in its direction.

More gracious and polite was the lighting in the diner. It allowed Eric to choose his own mood instead of having one thrust upon him. Unlike the self-loathing he was forced to recognize on the bus as he saw himself mirrored in too many of the passengers, in the diner he felt sage and mellow.

He slid into a booth, surrounded now by blood-red vinyl, and ordered—all for $3.99—grits, two scrambled eggs, two pork chops, wheat toast slices and a pot of decaf. This from a pretty waitress-girl whose bountiful lips whispered a promise of good head. He walked by the jukebox on the way to the bathroom as Steely Dan yanked him back to his mother’s kitchen and into his favorite striped turtleneck and corduroy pants. He retook his seat to Prince and the Revolution, almost feeling the sting of the slap from his first college girlfriend as she accused him of a never-proven infidelity. Purple Rain is a hell of a long song, and his depression deepened as it played. His spirits lifted once those head-promising lips floated above his table. Her name tag proclaimed his server to be Ruby as she set his dinner before him. Humming to Karen Carpenter, Eric began to eat for the first time in more than 24 hours.

For those who must know, Eric ends up fucking Ruby the waitress, but only after he takes a cab home, picks up his Range Rover that ran the poor Plymouth off the road earlier in the story, and goes back to the diner to wait for Ruby's shift to end. For the record, hell, I might be the Ruby character as well. I seem to be all over this one.