Trash Novel

Do you wait until you have collected all of your material before you write it down or do you just start writing and see what happens? I’ve tried it both ways and can’t really say which is better or even easier, but who wants it to come easy anyway?

Difficult doesn’t bother me, it’s boredom that makes me sick. I’d rather back myself into an impossible corner and try to puzzle my way out of it just for kicks instead of sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I like a challenge which is maybe why I like him. The trouble with that is that maybe it’s the only reason I like him and he’s barely got anything to do with it outright. He has a girl all his own from the other side of this town which offers so little and promises even less. She makes him feel either insane or blue depending on how her hormones are running on any given day of the week, but at least on the weekends he can drown her out by getting drunk on the beach among a bunch of their airbrushed airhead friends.

With the sun beaming down on her brown skin, playing upon her golden hair and bouncy full breasts, he can forget for a while that he isn’t in love and it doesn’t matter in any case. He sips his rum and soda as the water is sparkling like diamonds, gulls swooping down between the waves. All he wants is the sand and the surf all around him as often as possible. Not rings, not a wife, not kids, not responsibilities of any kind no matter how hard she tries to convince him otherwise.

There are some people who pretend so well that they convince themselves the world they are living in is not of their own making but rather it has been bestowed upon them by some other worldly being. The hand of a God, be it vengeful or benevolent, which has nothing at all to do with them. Fate is fate, right is wrong is wrong is right, and it’s all anybody’s guess until it’s all over for good, as it will be no matter who’s in charge to begin with.

Such is my obsession with intervening where I do not belong. I want the man I cannot have because I need to prove I can have him because then we will know exactly who is in charge around here and it will be me, come what may. Sometimes I wait and gather my material first. Approach him all the while knowing what buttons to push and when to hang back and let him push the buttons himself. Sometimes I just show up, buy him drinks and see what happens, which is usually my car or his truck or a hotel room on the side of the highway. Seedy? Well, sure. But I never said I was proud of anything, only that I was in control.

There’s a difference, subtle as it may be.

When we kiss in the darkness, it’s like fireworks exploding all across a midnight sky. Even in the dead of night I can feel the warmth of the beach on his smooth tight skin. What is mine and what isn’t somehow blurs between us and we are no longer a part of any of this earthly game. We twist and writhe and play high up above on the stars, spinning and spinning into the infinite beyond. There are no boundaries, no one to blame, only the sweetness of ecstatic sin. The heady thrill of a chase I secretly hope will never end.

I never ask him how he feels about what he does with me behind her back. She’s nothing to me except a part of the reason he gets me so high. But even though I don’t ask, he tells me anyway. We pull up the crisp white sheets and smoke the cigarettes the hotel forbids. Tracing his finger along the tattoo on my left shoulder, he tells me he can’t help it. He doesn’t mean to hurt anybody but the story seems to be writing itself.

.

Photo by Dainis Graveris