obsessed

Hell-A

But every time I thought I had finally had enough of LA, I would be greeted by the Sunday night traffic, settling in like a soft fog just before the Union Station exit, heading north on the 101. I would roll down my windows to breathe in the city, listening to other peoples’ radios. We had gathered over half-open windows on a stretch of freeway, completely awestruck—watching the downtown skyline light up the night, as if it was the first time we had opened our eyes.

The Glass Of My Windows

I saw him again just now. Last time I saw him, he had been telling the policemen at the chicken café on Melrose about how much he loved cops, and how all of the older, more conservative Jews like himself supported cops. They weren’t buying it, so he walked towards the door to flirt briefly with an elderly woman who had just entered, and then he left the café, heading west on Melrose and waving goodbye to the patrons through the windows. He always did that, giving the most histrionic, over the top farewells, lingering through the windows and only disappearing from view because the glass ended, not because he stopped waving. But that was his forte, really. Today he had caught me through my windshield as I was waiting at the stoplight at Poinsettia and Beverly. I was heading to school to get some work done in the research library, and he had just finished making a female trio of twenty-somethings outside of the MILK café uncomfortable. As he had caught me behind glass, I knew it was my turn now to shoulder his wrath.

His waving movements seemed mechanic in nature, presenting a consistent amount of joy as they had displayed for the girls outside MILK, even for the police on Melrose. It brought me a bit of joy, the idea that there was a human being that was as excited to see me as my beagle was whenever I visited my parents’ house, short of jumping on me and licking me. He finished crossing the street and tipped his white Cornell baseball cap at me. His crazed eyes looked at me from under his round-rimmed Hogwart’s glasses, and his crazed nipples peeked out from under his sweat-drenched McCain/Palin campaign shirt. I turned my air conditioner off and rolled my windows down in the name of humoring him.

“How’ve you been?! How you doing buddy?! Yep! Cornell! I went there many years ago! Colleges existed back then believe it or not! Yep! Cornell! Got my MBA from there!”

I laughed and nodded my head, acknowledging that Cornell was in fact a great school, and that he wasn’t completely crazy for yelling at strangers. Without giving me a chance to respond, he shifted his right arm in my direction so that I could see his bag. It was an off-white canvas tote bag with a cracked silk-screen of a Ronald Reagan stamp that had probably been issued sometime in the mid-90s. You could only really make out his hair.

“Reagan! Ronald Reagan! He’s my idol! I mean what’s not to love right? I’m sure you have your idols too. Reagan is my idol! Yep! Reagan!”

I nodded to try and lubricate our one-sided conversation. I thought of the countless criticisms of Reagan that floated around my head, but didn’t say anything, nor did he wait for a response. The light was soon going to turn green, and there was simply no time for a political debate. I absolutely needed to hear all the crucial points that he would have to make through the space above my partially lowered window, and he absolutely needed to make them before we would be separated by the stoplight—a modern day Los Angeles love story.

“You having a good day?! I’m just walking! You know, it’s good for me! My body isn’t what it used to be, you know buddy?!”

I simply nodded. I didn’t know at all, actually. I had no clue whether he had been fit as a young man. What was left of his physique now didn’t suggest a fit past, instead suggesting great trespasses of a Kosher diet with a gut resembling Homer Simpson’s, or even Randy Jackson’s for that brief period of time when he played bass for Journey. I just nodded my head—a little walking never hurt anybody, right?

The light turned green and I waved goodbye. I turned my air conditioner back on and began to roll my windows up. He waved at me and then at the girls back at MILK. I looked towards them to see smiles that indicated they were more confused at this moment than they had ever been in their entire lives. I pulled forward into the intersection and looked to the left and to the right. I looked once again to my left to check for pedestrians before finally turning onto Beverly. We had been physically separated by the confines of society; by the rules and norms dictated by traffic lights, right-of-way laws, and the deteriorating patience of the short line of cars behind me. My life had to continue, as did his. I had to continue driving until I was at the research library so I could get some work done, he had to go on being crazy. I looked back at him and watched his elderly Jewish outline shrink as he waved to me, through the glass of my windows.

Your Crossed Legs.

It was on the off-chance that I would run into you today, really. Granted that we aren’t friends, and that we’re hardly acquaintances, we had as good of a chance of running into each other as regular, run-of-the-mill strangers. Regardless, it happened, and it happened twice. The first time, I was too scared to say anything, but I wasn’t content with the closed-mouth smiles we briefly exchanged from across the room. It lingered on my mind all throughout class, and I had to make my way back in hopes that you would still be at the library, hours later. When I reached the library, I was pleased to find that all my hopes and dreams unique to the day had come true, as you were still firmly planted in the same spot you had been in when we had earlier exchanged those closed-mouth smiles that acknowledged our pseudo-acquaintanceship. However, progression had been made, and it went fully noticed. This time around, you had your left leg folded across the seat of the chair, as the other leg was folded up, resting your right foot onto the seat, and feeding the skin just above your knee into your mouth as you read over the words on your computer screen with scrutiny. Your crossed legs. I walked over to put my hand up in order to say hi, when you saw me and moved your bags over, inviting me to sit in the seat next to you. Ecstatic, I acted weary and tired, playing down my excitement but quickly securing my seat before you could change your mind, before maybe you could figure out what a creep I was.

We worked for an hour or so on our own, exchanging more glances and closed-mouth head nods periodically. Every time your head returned back to your back from one of our exchanges, your hair created small gusts, ineffective to the world, but completely arresting to me. Your hair smelled great.

I left to go to the restroom, making no acknowledgment of you, even making the assumption that you would safeguard my belongings by purposely leaving them out in the open for others to steal. There was my cell phone, my iPod, my Burt’s Beeswax lip balm. I made my way back to our corner of the library, only to discover that you were gone with your cell phone. The rest of the belongings were in the same heap that they were in when I had arrived, but you and your cell phone were gone. Your papers were scattered on the floor by our chairs, indicating that you had left in a hurry, and that the phone call was possibly important. Afraid that you would never return, I told myself that you had left in such a fluster to tell everyone about the wonderful boy sitting next to you, and not to worry, because someone leaving their stuff is a fairly accurate indicator of their likely return. I picked up your papers and placed them next to your open laptop, trying to feel better about myself. I’m never the wonderful boy that gets discussed between two women during a phone conversation, not even between my mother and grandmother. Never.

You returned and looked over to your papers that had fallen by wind of your leaving, maybe even from the sadness they felt from knowing you had left. I paid no attention to you, trying to look concentrated on my own work, like I didn’t care. I so clearly did care, but I didn’t look up. Your head went back towards your computer screen.

Soon after, I followed your gaze up towards a pretty girl in glasses, approaching our general direction. You waved to each other and you got up to give her a hug. You guys exchanged words for a quick second, and then the girl sat down at a different table.

I removed my earphones and asked if you wanted me to move. I offered to move a seat down, so that your friend could sit next to you. Pleased, you got up to tell her, and as you got up, and you put your hand on my shoulder. I’m not too sure if it was to boost yourself up from the seat, or if it was a gesture of thanks, maybe even a slight acknowledgment of my existence. You could have been casting some evil curse on me for all I care, but it didn’t change the fact that you had put your hand on my shoulder.

Your friend came over, like a wedge between you and my sick head. I went back down to my work, periodically looking over to clench my mouth and possibly exchange one of our routine closed-mouths. You had taken your sandals off again to cross your legs across the seat of the chair-a prerequisite for femininity in general. Your floral top was loose, but still told of your breathing, exposing your white shorts and the top part of your tan thighs when you inhaled. But you didn’t notice me, or my stupid heavy combat boots. Any spare attention you had was now allotted to your friend, as you smiled, discussing shoes and nails, boys, and Zac Efron, or whatever else girls talk about nowadays. I returned to my work, a little more defeated every time. We would never again exchange closed-mouth smiles, and we would possibly never even see each other again, for that matter. We would lose the closeness we had adopted for our time in the library, soon returning to a space somewhere between stranger and acquaintance, running into each other once every several years, and becoming a little closer to strangers than acquaintances with each passing glance. But for today, we were close. Our skin had met. You had touched my shoulder. I should have exploded.

Combat Bootz

She was Allison, a grungy looking girl with a head of choppy blonde hair. Her hair was rough and tousled and it lacked a general homogeneity in direction, hinting that she had been scratching it profusely throughout the morning. Her eyebrows were thick, well-defined eyebrows that made her look more concerned than anyone should be about anything. They were a dark brown, matching the roots of her hair that were just beginning to peek out under the spotty blonde enveloping each clumpy lock, and they provided a canopy over her even-set, apologetic teacup eyes. Her eyes immediately made you feel sorry for her, for no real reason, and blinking even seemed to take longer than anyone else’s simply because there was just more surface for her eyelids to cover during the act. Her nose and mouth were timid fixtures, easily forgotten, but not by any measure a bad set of features. They were medium in size, and pleasant in the background of everything else that was happening around them. Her shoulders were sloped, covered with an oversized flannel shirt with the sleeves haphazardly forced up past her forearms. It was an odd blue-green for the most part with the front of the shirt partially open from certain buttons intentionally left unused. The shirt was obviously much too large for her, but never at once did it fail to make to outline the slim silhouette of her young breasts and soft stomach, matching the precedent set by her boyish hair in enhancing the fact that she was a young girl, and there was no arguing about it. It wasted no time in making the deliberate point that regardless of its own ratty qualities, inside was a precious young girl, with small moles along her barely visible midriff, making it near impossible for you to decide which point to affix your eyes on—the one point on her body that might deserve a little more appreciation than all the rest.

California

She had a pretty face from what I could tell. As she smiled at me, her teeth came out from under her lips—the opening scene of a play peering out from under parting curtains. They were an incredibly white set of teeth that were straight enough to be natural, but had just enough of an overbite to be believable. Surrounding her smile was a pink set of lips, slightly chapped but symmetrical and right between thin and plump. The patches of peeling skin on them made it evident that they had spent plenty of time in the sun, and that there was a radiant layer of creased skin underneath just waiting to sprout up. Matching her lips was her textbook California complexion that almost looked as if her skin had been borrowed from the pages of a magazine. Her face was smooth and bronze, with the entire top half hidden behind a set of gold Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. From here, two patches of freckles crept out from the bottom of the lenses onto the visible part of her cheeks. The freckles were deliberate in their placement, but subtle in their efforts, blending into her skin so that no individual freckle would be particularly noticeable, but instead that they would be observed as a whole—as a corporate body of freckles scattered on her face. But it wasn’t just her freckles that tried to hide, as nothing really stuck out, giving the impression that all her visible features were in a struggle of subtlety against each other. While anywhere else, the efforts of her features might have been successful, in a town like Los Angeles, the efforts of her features went to waste, and almost seemed counterproductive. For Los Angeles is a town where everyone struggles to make themselves so visible, that in all her subtlety, she couldn’t help but to be anything but noticeable. The silence of her features had spoken volumes above the general murmur of Los Angeles. They had established that she was foreign and set apart, leaving me no choice but to sit completely enamored in my car as we shared a stoplight. And between the red and green, her features worked so diligently to blend into each other, and I was right behind every one of them, piecing her apart into bite-sized pieces, for I couldn’t stomach her as a whole. I had divided her beauty and placed each piece on a pedestal, trying altogether to forget the bigger picture, so that I might be able to try and understand her. I wasn’t accustomed to the idea of a girl who wanted to disappear in Los Angeles—a girl who wanted to be so unmemorable that she had become the most memorable of them all. She wasn’t even particularly beautiful, but she had smiled at me.

hey,

at least cancer has the decency to kill the people she torments. i hate you.