“We do porn.”
She looks down
at me through spidery wet lashes and sips her drink, the sides of her mouth
tugging at a smile, waiting for my reaction to her statement. He sits down next
to her and strokes her shoulder protectively, the reincarnation of Andy Warhol.
He is the spitting image – bleached blonde hair, slightly disheveled to reveal
a pockmarked face, black turtleneck, black jeans. He drapes his leg over the
other and chainsmokes, flicking ash on the table and echoing her statement
with a sort of bored ambivalence.
“We do
live-streaming threesomes with transvestites. The money is good. We have an
agent.”
She has pitch-black
box-dyed hair and close-cropped bangs, strikingly juxtaposed against her porcelain doll features. She is much taller than him and dainty - swan-like. She is in love with him, and they do porn, and I’m okay with that. He seems nervous that she told me.
“I never did
drugs before I met her.”
He goes to get
her another drink, and she says we should go dance. She is on MDMA, but I don’t
realize this till the next day when I try to remember what color her eyes were.
I can’t, because the irises were swallowed by bowling balls. I never realize
these things till much later – like the time junior year of high school when
the flower fairy went around the warehouse with a medicine dropper, “open-wide
sweetie pie,” delicately dosing wagging tongues. It took me three months to
realize.
“I study
bio-chemistry on the side.”
She is
intelligent, and she does porn sometimes, and she loves her partner, and she is
happy. They met on Tinder five months ago, and she tells me she thinks it’ll last
forever with a giddy, girlish voice, eyes flashing. She pulls a pair of
sunglasses out her bag and puts them on. He comes back and hands her a drink.
He got me one, too. We dance for a while, and then I leave to check my bag,
which hangs lamely at my side and knocks into the DJ booth. She wanted to dance
near the DJ booth to feel the bass. I see them again in line for the bathroom. He
turns around and lifts up his turtleneck to show me the large back-tattoo she
gave him earlier.
“It means chaos.
See, I have a lot of Satanist tattoos.”
He shows me the
others. She looks at him adoringly, and they kiss. I don’t see them again. They
just wanted someone to talk to.
---------------------------------------
I cycle against
the wind on the perimeter of Copenhagen’s largest canal, waiting to be blown
into the water by each unrelenting gust. As a child, I always hated following my mother around the refrigeration section of the grocery store as she carefully selected reduced fat milk, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and the yogurts with the pink foil tops to peel away and collect for breast cancer charity. I would rub my bare arms and plead with her to let me have the keys
to the mini-van where there were no expiration dates to examine if she forgot
her glasses, just radio stations and talk-shows to scan through with innocent
ears. This bike ride is worse than the refrigeration section at the grocery
store. It is late, and there is no one around except for the rare Danish
runner, clad in fluorescent reflector trainers. I see the lighted pedestrian bridge
in the distance. It could be a rainbow, for all I know. The skin on my face is
tight and mask-like from the numbing wind. Maybe this is what Botox feels like.
It is autumn, which is the prime time for Orange County moms to invite my own
mother to their home Botox parties. O.C moms enter the parties with post-summer
Newport Beach tans, buffering to expose crows-feet and sunspots on ruddy
cheekbones. They leave with their knock-off purses full of expensive anti-aging
skin products and swollen eyelids disguised by real Chanel sunglasses. What I
wouldn’t give to feel the California sun on my own Botox-d face right now. When I finally
reach the lighted bridge, flat and ribbon-like over the dark water, I am glad I
didn’t take the train home. I cycle at an even pace on the bridge until I come
up on three Danish schoolboys. They can’t be older than twelve or thirteen.
They lean over the bridge to peer at the water and clear their throats loudly in
unison. I know what they’re doing. I see the passenger boat approaching the bridge from the
distance. The loogies are hocked, and I cycle on. I loathed being dragged along to Knollwood or Lampost Pizza after my younger
brother’s Little League or Pee Wee Football games were over because of similar
boys with no outlet to channel their pre-pubescent angst but through the torturous
practice of stuffing rolled up spit-covered paper wrappers into straws and
blowing their ammunition with full force at the ceiling, the pin-ball machine,
or me. Their mothers said to cut it out, Bryce or Hayden or Kyle every twenty minutes or so, but without any discipline in their tone, weighed down with the lull of three glasses of house Chardonnay. I cycle on, and scenes from suburbia are left at the Copenhagen canal where they
never belonged in the first place.----------------------------------
Eléonore, my French
roommate, looks at the dark-gray scab on my kneecap and says in her velvety accent,
“It looks dead. Like a zombie, maybe.” I laugh because she is right, but now
I am worried because nobody wants a rotting, gray kneecap resembling raw ground beef. I drunkenly tripped over a
large rock in front of a large group of international students at a party two months earlier. My knee gushed blood and all I could do was request
another drink from concerned partygoers and chainsmoke charity cigarettes on a misplaced outdoor leather couch while these strangers soberly blotted at the wound with antiseptics and bandages. I recently picked the scab on the London Underground and it reopened and I left a strange pattern of blood, like animal tracks, all over white sheets. The hardening scab snags at
all my best tights, and I can feel the graying gash through any pair of jeans. This past weekend, I sauntered through Copenhagen’s
red-light district, liquored up and ready for the night, trench coat flapping
in the wind, wrapped in a better blanket of pilsner and white wine. I
watched a drug dealer palm his customers the product as we descended a
staircase and I continued to walk, with eyes still peeled on the
deal. I missed the one-inch curb and fell to the ground, skinning the same
graying kneecap, and twisting my right metal-less ankle. The trench coat touched the ground of the red-light district, who cares about the knee, or the ankle, for that matter? My good ankle. Screws do not hold the cap of the ankle to
the tibia, like in the left. It was virgin to injury. It was not supposed
to ache in the Copenhagen winter. It was not supposed to be ruined by my drunken stupor, like the metal ankle. It was not supposed to have a stupid miscreant
story attached to its pain, most importantly. Now, my dead zombie legs drunkenly
trudge through the red-light district of Copenhagen searching for more booze
to fuel more graying kneecaps and my trench coat is dirty.
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