Chapter 2: Chapter 2
I digress. I do that. A lot. See? I’m doing it now.
Anyway, my thought that October night was to head over to Olive’s, a little dive bar and restaurant on Ballard Avenue, where Kurt Cobain was once rumored to have played. No, there most likely would not be any potential love connections there (although that’s not saying it couldn’t happen; just because a bar is labeled “gay” doesn’t mean you’ll always get lucky…and the inverse can often be true; hey I can attest!), but there would be Rainier beer, a dark, crowded room that might contain some grungy, nerdy, cute straight boys who may or may not be amenable to expanding their sexual horizons, and—I hoped—some good music to just float away on.
I threw on black jeans, a black T-shirt that read “Scum of the Earth,” my Cons, and a leather band for my wrist. I glanced at myself in the mirror, making sure the tribal armband tattoo stood out beneath the form-fitting arm of my T-shirt and decided I looked good enough to be going out solo. I ran my fingers through my dark hair, enjoying the way it stood on end, a calculated mess. I looked good.
* * * *
It’s early morning and the rush hour traffic on the bridge pays me no heed. Yet, I know that one of them, sooner or later, will dial 911 on their cell, talk to the police, tell them there’s another jumper on the Aurora Bridge. There will be official vehicles. Perhaps someone trained in suicide prevention telling me that no matter how bad it is, someone else has been through it before…and come out okay.
I don’t want to hear it. And I want to be long gone before any official vehicles arrive. I do not want to think about what I will leave behind.
I had considered the bright yellow and blue phone boxes mounted on the bridge on my way out here, to where I now stand. The boxes are here for people like me, in case we have second thoughts, in case we want to talk to someone…
I had tried talking to someone.
I had tried talking to you. Again and again.
Which brings us here, with a sharp, downward view that almost makes me giggle with exhilaration…or hysteria.
* * * *
I closed Olive’s that night. It wasn’t so much the crowd, or the beer, or even the cute allegedly straight boy in the cargo shorts and Cold Play T-shirt who made eyes at me throughout the night.
No. It was you.
And your music. Back then, you were just the lead singer in a band called Voiles and I was mesmerized by both your look and your sound. A bass guitar and a drummer backed you up, and if I passed either of them on the street today, I would not recognize them. For me, you stood all alone on that tiny plywood stage with a black curtain behind you. When that incredible, melodic, craggy voice emerged, it was as if the physical confines of the room disappeared. I could see only you…and what a view that was. Your tousled auburn hair, streaked through with gold, practically obscured your face. Your rail-thin body, packed into skinny jeans and a Ramones T-shirt, was like some post punk boy’s fantasy. And when you jerked your head to get the hair out of your face, the motion revealed a chiseled face, dark chocolate eyes, and a look that seemed both faraway and incredibly sad.
It made me want to take you in my arms.
I suppose that’s the effect you were after. I hate to think that the mournful gaze and the counter-culture, retro rock star clothes were calculated, just another part of the act as much as the microphone on its stand, the drum kit, the lights, the amps, the electrical cords.
I hate to think that.
But it wasn’t just your look that caught me, entrapping me in a snare that I would find impossible to free myself from for the next three years. It was your song. Your sad, sad song. Your voice was that of a man who had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for decades: scarred, veering on raspy. It was the voice of a man much older than your years, which appeared to number in the twenties. You were the love child of Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright.
Your lyrics, coal black, smoldered around age-old topics like lost love, loneliness, alienation, and an inability to find home. Cheery stuff.
It had me sobbing into my beer most of the night.
And when I wasn’t sobbing, I was imagining what you’d look like naked.
There was a curious combination pulsing inside me that night: lust, despair, hunger…
But I never had any real hopes that I would actually be meeting you that night. No idea that I would actually see what the wiry body under those clothes looked like. No clue that I would come to know the feel of those swollen lips on my own…
* * * *
For just a moment, I consider walking away. After all, this whole miserable mess with its potential for getting much messier, could be solved by my turning to my right or my left and simply heading back to terra firma. The sensible little man within me tries telling me you aren’t worth it, that my solution is no solution at all, that brighter days will appear once more.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone