My buddy Nate told me that everytime you do something cause of  “fuck it,” you’re really doing it cause of “fuck you.”

            I pondered, “Fuck you to who?”

            He ordered another round. “Man, you always know.”

***

         Carly sat in the aquatic glow of the Otherlands goldfish tank when I walked in, still dressed in my tie and khakis from teaching.

            I knew I was being scoped out as a fed or tourist, so I steered the conversation to joking about my dirtbag friends, how we always fell back on this motto, “life is about experiences,” before doing something stupid and dead-end like smoking PCP. She thought that was funny.

            She had this grungy, punk, sort of mystical style. Her tinder profile was pictures of her under neon, pout and manicured claws. She wasn’t just cool, she knew something real.

            By the fish tank, there was one last test. She lifted an arm casually behind her head, and splayed herself out to me. She had armpit hair, and she looked at me. The question was: “You feel any type of way about this?”

          “That all you got?”

            She told me to come by.

I swung by my place first to grab the handle of vodka from the freezer. Schulte watched me. “You know it’s a Monday, right?” That guy.

“Got a date,” I winked. Fuck it.

At her place, a few vodka sodas in, she told me she was a sugar baby. I didn't know the term but I got the idea. She told me about her profiles on Ashley Madison, how the big hack really screwed her business. She mentioned an ex boyfriend who was in jail for drugs.

At a certain point she interrupted herself, stepped over and kissed me. It was beautiful. She sat back down and kept talking for a minute. Catching up through the vodka I said, wait no, wait a minute, let’s go back to that thing.

            She had these white soft sheets and a big tapestry on her bedroom wall: a scorpion medallion with the line “Fools Rush In.”

“I like topping from the bottom” she said as our clothes came off. She told me I could slap her, and held my hand to show me the right way to choke. She wanted an intense carotid squeeze that made the edges fuzzy and the veins in her head feel like crimped hoses about to explode.

The other bedroom door slammed, feet stomped out the front door. She stopped. “Shit. Shit, I didn’t think they were home.”

She rolled over next to me. “I just feel bad. I’m the bad roommate.”

            I got home around 2 AM or so. At 6 AM, I met Schulte in the kitchen.

“What time did you get in last night?”

I had the refrigerator open and was trying to decide on breakfast. “Pretty late.”

“You’re going to be tired, Tim.”
            He was right but that was beside the point.

            “I met this girl from New York,” I told people. “She’s so cool.”

            I wasn’t stupid, I wasn’t in denial about anything. Or at least if I was, I knew I was. I had her sitting up on the counter and I told her “hey lady you’re kinda scary.” She liked that.
            “What’s so scary about me?” She had this mole right in the dimple line when she smiled. She was doing a chart reading for me off her phone.  She thought maybe that was spooky to me.

“I mean that little coke habit you mentioned, the grocery shoplifting, that hospital stay you didn’t pay for. Also what’s your boyfriend going to do when he gets out of jail?”

 “He’s emotionally intelligent enough to know he’s not welcome.”

I got tuned into omens. One early morning when I left her place there was a sharp sickle moon in the sky with shining Venus pinned right underneath.It was like 5:15, something absurd like that, and I was looking up at murder and love. It followed me down the road and I watched it as I turned down South Hollywood on my way back to Orange Mound. Leaving Carly lying naked under the covers smelling like Camel Lights and Alien perfume while this bad sign was in the sky; what was this world even coming to.

We were on my porch, me playing this brand new banjo, her smoking and ashing into a teacup. She went inside and ran into Schulte. I heard how he said hello, kind of the strained nasally bitchy way he has when he does not approve and wants you to know.  

Days later he called me into the downstairs bathroom. A red C was scratched into the wall with what looked like red chalk or lipstick. It wouldn’t erase. “Where did that come from?” he asked.
            “No idea, man.” It stayed there on the wall the whole time we lived in that house.

One night I drank too much wine and dropped a couple tabs of acid I was storing in my sock drawer. She had sent me a video of herself in the bath listening to Elvis, and I watched that over and over.

The acid took a turn for the worse. Earlier in the street I saw a dog get hit by a car. Just a loud punch and then the dog staggering off to go die. Nobody wanted that, it still happened.

I had left Spotify playing and the song “Pale Blue Eyes” turned things around. I made the song play on loop and my room became grey velvet and I held myself in this snug core where everything felt okay.

I woke up at 10:30 the next morning, only two and a half hours late for a teacher training. I drove down, still listening to “Pale Blue Eyes.” When I walked in, the English department was discussing how to teach the rhetorical devices of Bin Laden’s letter to America after 9/11.

Weeks later I took the Bin Laden piece from the curriculum and had my seniors read it. At the end Jarvis raised his hand. "Don't you think with all that he kind of had a point though?" I had no idea what to do with that.

I got Carly over again with a little “hey pretty lady, where you at?” text.

We were on the couch and had slid down to the blue shag rug. She was wearing a skirt, and it hitched up, black lace underneath.

“Hold up, I have a song for this. You listen to The Velvet Underground at all?”
            I fumbled with my phone, the other hand up her skirt. The opening riff played and she was laughing. “It’s so good,” she said.

I never really figured her out. Everyone in my world had some sort of plan. They were putting up with the shit because they felt like it was going somewhere. I asked Carly what her goals were and she said, “truly no one has ever asked me that before.” A while later she said, “I think my goal is to find a person I trust enough to have unprotected sex with.”

Up in my room, Carly was in my lap. We were both naked and she was tracing her fingers over my arms. I felt exactly right. A few minutes went by and she told me, “I’m sorry. I thought maybe you were lying to me.” She had been looking for track marks.

Her ex had gotten seriously addicted to heroin when they were together. When he finally got arrested for the last time he had already sold off everything but the mattress. She knew any moment she could find him dead. 

She said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She took my earlobes in her fingers and rolled them. “You’d look good punked up a bit. I could pierce your ears. We could do it now, hot needle and apple.”

“Not into piercings, how about a poke and stick?”
            “Do you mean a stick and poke?”

Sure I did. Fuck it, how could I not have loved her?

One morning while getting ready for work, I had to stop. I laid on the floor in my boxers and dress shirt staring up at the ceiling. That afternoon I fell asleep on a beanbag chair in the library. As my eyes closed my teeth seemed not to fit together.

             We got together after she finished working one night around three. We sat in her place eating leftover Indian food. She gave me the mango lassi she didn't want. I slurped on it while leering at her like a spider.

          The next morning I woke up before she did and took a picture of her sleeping. She smelled like ash. In the morning light her face was cracked and drawn thin. I deleted the photo.

           There was one last sweet moment. We were on the patio, back at Otherlands, and she was scrolling on her phone, talking about some fashion trend I didn't understand. She said a word that I recognized from somewhere. I got excited and thought we had a connection. “Is that a podcast?”

She looked at me like I had just turned 40.

“No, it's a beanie baby.”

I started laughing first, then we were both laughing. “Why are we laughing?” she asked.

         “We’re just very different people,” I said.

It finally ended when I thought I caught something. In hindsight I didn't really have any symptoms, so maybe I just wanted a way out.

I went to the Minute Clinic and my old mentor teacher happened to be there with his toddler son. We walked around the Kroger supplement aisle. “I’m seeing this girl from New York,” I said.

            “Another New Yorker in Memphis? I’d like to meet her sometime.”

            “Yeah.”
            A minute later he asked, “So what's going on with you, you sick?”

            “Hey, now that’s a personal matter, some privacy please.”

            He looked at me. “Oh, I see.”

I didn’t wait for the lab results to confront her. It was Halloween. I went over early in a surplus Air Force jacket I had ironed a peace sign on. Her friends were there, she was already in costume as an Alien School Girl, red skirt and blazer, one of my ties, an extra pair of eyes painted on her cheeks. She was surprised to see me early. And, I realized a split second after I opened my mouth, happy.

            “Can I talk to you? Alone?” I pointed at her room.

            She got still. I felt her friends looking at me.

            “I think I got something.” I said before the door even closed. “From you.”

            “Okay. And?” She put her hand out like it was my turn to keep talking.

            And what exactly. Great question. I took one last look around her bedroom. There was a book I had given her sitting on the floor next to her bed: A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter. I thought she'd like the dirty parts. Fuck it. I left it.

We saw each other one last time. I was dropping a beanie off she had left behind.

            It all felt too heavy to mean nothing. “Look Carly, I think we can do something with this, I think this matters.”

             She didn’t say anything for a second, just blew out some smoke. “Tim, you have a master’s degree. Maybe you should take a more active role in your own life.”

           Fuck me, right?

 

            A while later Schulte asked me to ride with him to the Bass Pro Pyramid to get some fudge. At a red light on Madison he called this girl to ask her out. She said she thought he was great but she couldn't.

            He said he understood, and thought that might be the case, but he wanted to know.

            “Sorry bud, that sucked.” I said.

            “Ya.”

We drove on for a bit. “Carly and me are done by the way.”

“Yeah I know, you've been mopey.” I knew what was coming. “Tim, I did not like her. She was not good for you.”

“Yeah. I know.” I flicked my hand at the window, like I was just throwing it out there in case it was worth anything. “She just made me feel cool I guess.”

“Well you weren't cool you were being a fucking asshole. Also Phillip and me heard you guys having sex all the time. You were so loud. You should be more considerate.”

Say what you will about the guy, when Schulte’s right he’s right.

 

I got a call from an unknown number. I answered and a young woman's voice said she was calling from the Minute Clinic. “Okay, Mr Keefe, your labs came back and they're all negative.”

I somehow already knew.

I thought about texting Carly to apologize. I didn't.

I was at home applying to other jobs, looking up programs to go back to school and retrain, try again at something different. After the call I closed the tabs and looked around the room. I still had my banjo. Fuck it. I took it to the porch and practiced bluegrass rolls until I had a better idea.