Things Gone Wrong

(film fogged by airport X-ray machine--evidence of things gone wrong)

My phone lines are down. A moving van came through yesterday and pulled them off the house, and so I am without internet. I am stealing this from the neighbor outside on my laptop so that I can post today, so my post will not be lengthy. Things are falling apart all about me. Not just around me. It goes deeper than that. But it is both. Some examples. I sent certified checks to vendors, one for my camera and another for the lens. One was for the wrong amount and the other was never delivered. I still do not have the camera and lens. They are not even in the mail yet. I left work early yesterday to go to the beach and take more surf photos. It began to rain as soon as I got there. I used some of the film I took to NYC in my Holga at the beach last weekend. When it came back from the lab, the rolls were almost black, fogged by the airport X-ray machines. I feel dread and the looming of gloom, and I must begin a regimen that will keep it all at bay. It is the season of violent and destructive storms here. Discipline. I must be vigilant.

* * * * *

The routine continued day after day. There is something about a routine, though, that is comforting. You know what to expect and there is a rhythm like the beating of a heart. So I bathed and ate and watched T.V. and waited for Sherri to come over in the evenings. And fortune of fortunes, PBS began running a series that carried me through the weeks, "An American Family," the exploits of the Louds. In this documentary, a film crew took up part-time residence with an all-American California family. Week after week, under the camera's gaze, the family disintegrated. I couldn't wait for each installment.

And so the routine. Day's with my mother, weekly trips to the doctor, T.V. shows, and weekends with my father.

And Sherri at night. She was a happy girl, always beaming. She was from the south and had a syrupy accent that was charming, too. At first, I wondered that she came over every night, but in my youthful naiveté, I came to accept it as some tribute that I was due and put the thoughts and wondering aside. As all young men feel without thinking, without the knowledge that they feel it, without the ability to articulate it. . . .

But of course even a routine cannot remain unchanged. Slowly, imperceptibly, one element here, another there, there are subtle shifts and dislocations. And then, of course, comes the moment when everything in the structure is subject to a radical restructuring. Boom!

Sherri and I were friends. She stopped by with gossip from school and stories about her life. She told me about her family, about her father dying of cancer in her senior year of high school, of her mother, a southern aristocrat who had always been privileged, who had always been cared for, now debilitated by the tragedy, of her older brother and sister, both married, both parents, both living in other states, and of her younger brothers at home to whom she now played surrogate parent. She was nineteen and already a cub scout den mother. The stories unfolded night after night in the intimacy of the bedroom of my otherwise barren apartment. I heard it all, but somehow I had not paid attention.

And so as things go, one night as she moved close to me, I saw her eyes go soft, limpid. She leaned close to me and paused, staring. Instinctively, I knew what I was to do. I was surprised by it and had not thought of it, being content merely to have her company at night, to have the distraction from the empty room and the loneliness. I had neither anticipated this nor expected it, but now it was there, the liquid eyes and the slightly parted lips and the almost imperceptible leaning, and knowing what was expected, I was too embarrassed not to. And so we kissed.

It was an embarrassed kiss, not one of passion, but then her hands were on me and my mind began to spin. Christ, I thought, I am an invalid, and for all purposes an unconfessed virgin. What was she thinking? What was she doing? But there was nothing to stop it, nothing crying "no." It seemed to me that I had something to say, as if I wanted to explain some point that might have been overlooked, but I didn't or couldn't, choked by guilt and pleasure and something else. There seemed nothing to do but close my eyes to the spinning world and enter it as it was, vertiginous and imperfect.

When she was gone that night, the bed continued to spin. What now? I wondered. She was happy when she left. She would be back tomorrow. I was no longer above the fray, no longer an aloof observer. All of that was over now. Things would surely go wrong.