she said it's hard for me to see

how one little boy got so ugly
yes, my little girly, that may be
but there ain't nobody that can sing like me

ain't nobody that can sing like me


Jeremy said to me I was in love with you once, you know. It was that night we stayed up and listened to Son of a Preacher Man over and over; that's when I knew, that's when. I didn't tell Jeremy that I was in love with him once as well, and it was long before The Incident With Dusty. It was five years before that, in fact, and Jeremy doesn't remember it but I do, because Jeremy does not know that I am the girl from the pool hall.

I was sixteen years old, and I went with a friend I was living with to hang out with her friend and her friend's boyfriend. When we found them, my friend had a magical transformation: she went from being my friend to being a chick on the prowl. It was amazing; she laughed differently, she spoke differently, she dropped the y from the end of her name, and her and the friend we met were like twins. I was astounded, I thought she was messing with them but of course she wasn't. She and the friend promptly discovered their purposes in life (who were old enough to buy beer) and I was left to puzzle it out with the boyfriend, who did not seem at all surprised by either of them and was more amused than resigned when the girls came back and announced that they were leaving. I was on a lot of drugs. In a pool hall. With the ex-boyfriend, who was younger than me (and still is). We played pool, not really, and blazed our way through more than one pack of cigarettes. On the trolley, he kissed me on the temple and said that I was the only person he knew anymore. I wanted to take him home and feed him acid and put him in my locker and wear him around my neck. Instead, it was my stop. He was wearing jeans and a mechanic shirt that did not have his name on it, it said 'Harvey'. Later I would see him with his band and I would remember why it was called that.

A year later he was a permanent fixture in my home and family, due to circumstances having nothing to do with me, and he did not know who I was. It's possible he was feeding himself acid, it's possible that he'd sustained a head injury, more likely it was just one of those things, but it was clear he did not recognize me one bit. That makes sense, because I was not at all the same girl. We grew to be good friends, and he drove my dad insane and he saved my family so many times and he kept people together when they would have not and he rang doorbells in the middle of the night and he brought Christmas to us when we had none. He made me so angry so many times, and he was always, always laughing. He came to visit the babies and he carried me to the room and one year, at New Year's, he kissed me for so fucking real under the fireworks at Balboa Park, and he has been my friend for longer than there is a scale to measure. He's the only brother my brother has ever had. I took him to the wedding when I was the maid and I went to California to see his new wife and baby and we smoked pot on the back porch and laughed our faces off, and the knowledge that I remember a Jeremy that Jeremy does not even remember makes me really, really happy.

A few days after the pool hall, my friend tore into me for staying there and Coming On to her friend's boyfriend. I said Oh. And we were not friends anymore. Not then, not next year, not three years later when she was dating one of my friends and was so, so sweet to me you could just fucking gag.

At the time, at the moment of her staring me down, taller, prettier, with her stupid fucking face telling me that I should have more self-respect and not take things that aren't mine, I was upset. Not because she was right, because she was a moron, but because she was taller and prettier and could tower over me and it didn't matter that I was smarter than her by fifty years, it didn't matter that I understood what was foreign to her, it did not matter that if I had walked out of that building and left her there alone she would have cried. It mattered only that she was Right, goddammit, and by virtue of being right, she felt compelled and empowered to impress and impose her will on the little people, the smaller, quiet people. And I was upset because I lived with her and her father, but not anymore. At the time it was, as we have discussed, something of a nasty breakup. We were sixteen.

I am an adult now. In hindsight, thank the fucking stars, Beck (no y), for making what turned out to be one of the best decisions I've been party to in my whole life. People are drawn to each other. You draw them to you. What you choose to do with them is up to you, and by the same right what other people choose to do is up to them. It is not up to us to determine what role our people play in the lives of others. And do you know why? Because they are not our people, any more than they are our trees or our roads or our airwaves. They are people, with their own circles and their own compasses and their own thing that they do that makes us stay, and sometimes it's not something anybody else knows, sometimes it is one statement or one sliding half step or one really phenomenal tribute to Kurt Cobain but whatever it is, man, I respect that. I respect that a hell of a lot more than I respect anyone telling you, yes you, what you should and should not do with the people that you choose to matter.