1994, in the evening…

1. "In the beginning,
We closed our eyes
Whenever we kissed.
We were surprised
To find so much inside…"
-Wilco, "Pieholden Suite"

2. "And these are the days when our work has come asunder…
And these are the days when we look for something other…"
-U2, "Lemon"

3. "When you’re ripe you’ll bleed out of control."
-Deftones, "Elite"

4."I feel the reason as it’s leaving me no, not again,
It’s quite deceiving as I’m feeling my flesh make me bad…
Does it make me bad? Does it make me bad?"
-Korn, "Make me bad"

I’ll show you, fucker.

Goddamdamdamdamdam. I’m walking quickly to the bar. Drunk, stoned, fucked up. Just fucked. I stopped crying hours earlier. Nothing left there, either.
For the last few months, his continual infidelity taptaptapped on the thick glass of my denial. He thought I didn’t know about the others, as opposed to my full scaled, self-inflicted ignorance of our current situation. He would cheat on me, and I would lie to myself about it.

Then I found the letter, sometime in the morning after he left, from some trick in Fort Lauderdale, where he was headed that weekend. "I can’t wait to have sex with you again…to swim with you, to watch movies with you, to have sex with you…" This heartbreak in a letter dated two weeks earlier. And he had saved it.
Bile and upheaval. Holy shit; it’s all true. All of it. I knew it from the beginning and now was unable to deny the truth any longer. My vision blurred; equilibrium reeled. Glass was everywhere. Then I was on my hands and knees, vomiting in the toilet, absolutely hating him. Hating myself for my denial. I’ll get you for this, ___.

That night.

After drinking a lot of beer and smoking a lot of weed, I went to One Saloon, where I used to work. It was a fairly busy Saturday night, and I walked directly to the back bar. Gregory got me a beer and I gulped down half of it right off. I put the beer down and looked up at the guy five feet away who was staring at me. I stared back. He walked over. I stared at the back door, just off the dance floor. We walked through the dancers and left without talking.

Elapsed time: Approximately two minutes.

Going back to my place wasn’t an option. I wanted revenge, but sex in our apartment would be too much for me: too final. I wanted no continual reminders of the guilt I was preparing to commit. We walked to his hotel. He is a steward with Lufthansa. He is cute. He looks like Max. I try not to say too much because the shit sloshing around my head is not the type of conversation you talk about with a horny trick. A detraction from the fantasy. Shhh… Lance, don’t talk.

He is sharing the room with a female co-worker who decided not to go out that night. She is in the other bed and I tried to be quiet, but not too hard. The fact was I was fucking this guy three or four feet from a sleeping girl in a hotel room I had no business being in, all to get even with my boyfriend’s infidelity through revenge fucking. I’ll show you—I’ll hurt myself.

He laid on his stomach and I fucked him from behind. Over him. Looking down on his back, then to his fists clenching either side of the mattress. His grunts and gasps were involuntary. A little later I left, and threw up a couple of times on the way home.

He came back from Lauderdale or Miami (whatever the lie was this time) the next day. Not sensing anything wrong with me or us, he unpacked his suitcase and left a short while later, "for a bit."

I went to my room. Closing the door, I laid down on my back and watched the ceiling fan. I lost weight the next week because I couldn’t keep anything down.


I guess I showed him.