Delilah In Collision

wanted to believe they were sleeping, I wanted to believe freefalling was a defense mechanism, a state of oblivion you chose, like napping in a hammock, watching the world pass away in the summer sky, I wanted to believe they were just waiting for the adult world to regain its sensibility and coherence, to strip off the chaos that surrounds human tragedy.

I was driving down I-276 East when it happened: a man in a yellow Hummer tried to pass me on a blind curve. Now, I was a dumbass for driving 90, I can admit that much. I had just put in one of Ariel's mixes and was bending down to pick up my "SMOKE OFTEN, DIE FREE" lighter in patriotic font off the mud guard on the passenger's side, when that guy in the banana-colored Hummer whizzed by me. He was just a blur in the corner of my eye, one of those out-of-focus accidents you see on highway billboards, encouraging drivers to become spontaneous Baptists behind the wheel. Slow down. Don't Drink. Or this could be you. And by the way, Jesus is everyone's pal. Life is Sacred. The next thing I know, there's a seven-car pile up blocking the highway, and that Hummer is on top of the pile, on its back like a turtle, its wheels still spinning in slow, absurd circles, and there are little human bodies covered in glass on the roadside and I'm soaring toward a demolition heap of strip metal, punctured windshields, inverted axles and pulverized skulls.

So I do what any pacifist would do: I swerve. I clip the roof of a white Corolla. In a microsecond, as I speed past that collective accident, I realize how goddamn lucky I am. In the aftermath, it occurs to me that there was no blood and no sound. Actually, all I could hear was Sleater-Kinney, singing about a demon with a poison dart. It was a G-rated catastrophe, and without a doubt the scariest thing I've ever seen in my twenty-three years. When it was all done, I smoked like a protégé of the apocalypse. But the worst thing was, when I noticed the name of that Sleater-Kinney song later on, a catchy song for sure, but not a great song by any means, it just freaked me out: "Funeral Song." I hate captive irony, especially, on the highway.

I called 911, talked to the dispatcher and it was over. But the vision of those two little bodies strewn on the highway, anointed in shatter-proof glass, those lifeless bodies, snipped from the flower garden of human life like premature buds, pulsating with nascent life, that image still haunts me, because it could have been me, would have been me, if I hadn't stopped for smokes and water at Wilkes-Barre, because I deserved my life less than they did. They were heading for a family barbecue or going to St. Luke's church or heading to the Bronx for a Yankees game or visiting grandma in Newark and I was trying to light another cigarette to replace the taste of Stan's cum in my mouth, a taste that reminded me of oysters on a half shell.

pull up to a roadside diner called House of Grub. I turn the stereo off, roll up the windows and walk inside. There's Hank Williams music playing softly. People stop buttering their toast and clawing their sausage links with bent forks to look up at me. They mutter something to each other and then the buttering and clawing starts over. The hostess is chatting with the cook. I notice the pie rack because it spins like the wheels of an upside Hummer: an old, rotating showcase of cherry, apple, lemon meringue, carrot, black forest and blueberry pies twirling in little circles. The machine gives off a soft buzz like an electric Om and the Blueberry pie looks primeval. The hostess sighs and walks up to the front counter.

-- Hello, she says. Lunch, brunch or dinner?

-- Lunch. I mean brunch.

-- Right this way. She raises her eyebrow to a customer and then leads me through the center aisle. I notice old women scowling at my tight denim skirt. A few men stare right at my titsÑheadlights and all. But I'm used to this shit. Any excuse to size me up, denigrate me, or undress me, that's how people are. Strangers are just easy targets, that's all.

After I order pancakes, hash browns, orange juice and coffee, I pull out my cell phone.

3 missed calls.

To the counterpoint of stirring spoons, scraping forks and coffee refills I call my Mom. She must be worried.

-- Hello?

-- Mom?

-- Brie. How's it going honey?

-- Fine.

-- Where are you?

-- Penn Forest.

-- Where the hell is that?

-- I dunno, a few hours from New York maybe?

-- Penn Forest? Let me google that.

-- Go for it.

-- Penn Forest. Penn Forest. Is it P-A?

-- Yeah.

-- Penn Grove, Pennsylvania. Oh fuck.

-- What?

-- It's never heard of Penn Grove.

-- It's Penn Forest, Mom.

-- Okay, I see that. But for some reason Google doesn't.

-- Well, I'm here, and let me tell you, this place is a class act.

-- Brie, be open-minded.

-- I'm just saying, the restaurant I'm eating at is called The House of Grub.

-- Oh dear. Chinese?

-- Greasy Spoon.

-- Well, you can always eat potatoes. Potatoes are safe.

-- Agreed. How's Sammie?

-- He's fine. Still growls at the Streetcar. He found a new place to nap in the garden, next to the lupines.

-- Little Sammie.

-- I think he misses you.

-- How's PDX?

-- Beautiful. Everything is in full bloom. And all these moms are giving birth to children with names of European capitals.

-- What?

-- There's an article in the Oregonian about it.

-- Oh fuck the Oregonian.

-- Lisbon, Malleta, Vilnius, Sophia.

-- Sophia's a capital?

The waitress hovers over me, tray in hand. She announces each item before she places it on the table like it's an ESL lesson: pancakes, hash browns, orange juice, cream for your coffee?

-- That'd be great, thank you. I cradle my phone with my hand again.

-- Are you doing okay?

-- Yeah, I'm just tired. I've been driving all night. And I feel like I eat the same thing at every restaurant.

-- Well take it easy. There's no rush.

-- I know. I think I'm going to check into a motel and nap.

-- That's a good idea. Your body is probably freaking out.

-- I love it when you get slangy Mom.

The waitress walks by, dips her hand in her apron and lays out five baby creamers on the table like a professional craps player. Loretta Lynn sings in the background. She sounds firm and miserable, just like I am. I light a smoke. What else can I do?

-- Brie, you're not still smoking are you?

-- No. Definitely not.

I wish my Mom were here, drinking coffee with me. That way she wouldn't have to ask me these inane questions, questions she knows the answers to, questions she can't help asking because I'm not there to argue with her. I worry about my Mom sometimes, I know she's lonely and more determined than a thousand single men in a bar and stronger and more emotional than all of them combined. I'm not like her in that way. I take after my Dad, who's flighty and unstable, just like me. Of course he walked out when I was eight to join the Church Universal Triumphant, some syncretic cult in Montana that constructed nuclear fallout shelters in case the Messiah woke up on the wrong side of the bed. We never heard from my dad again after he gave away all his money and signed away his will. I barely remember what he looks like anymore, though I think he used to remind me of that Australian guy who wrestles alligators on TV, at least, that's how I like to picture him.

hese hash browns taste like steel wool. They're hard and tasteless and ketchup seems to do nothing except create texture contrast. I guess that's what I get for eating defensively in a strange land. Like the wheels of that Hummer, like the revolving pie platforms, I twirl little checkerboards of criss-crossed potato in a circle because I don't know what else to do. My nerves are shot, my right arm is shaking a little bit and I'm honestly wondering what the fuck I'm doing with my life because right now I have the luxury to think those kind of thoughts during this period of expiring existentialism. Behind me I hear a man asking for a coffee refill, and then that familiar sound of fluid filling empty cups, and before I know it, I'm thinking of him, not the men I've loved in my life or psychoanalyzed in my blue notebook, not the ones I cheated on, sucked off in the passenger's seat because it was reckless enough to feel spontaneous, not even the boys that got me high and fucked me too hard, somehow still filling up a primal space inside where Cody's agonizing glare used to be, no, I start thinking about Stan, the rocker boy I met only last night, the boy who gave me nothing but diluted Cuba Libres and a bite mark on my left shoulder, the boy I gave a blowjob to, the boy who fell asleep for half the afternoon in complete darkness, the boy who seized me in the middle of the night like an incubus, and then slumped to the side afterwards, rigid and unmovable like a fallen statue, before pleasure peaked, before I could taste wholesale serenity, before my lips could bite down on anything fleshy. It was a feeling I knew so well: building up so much tension and then holding it all inside afterwards until your chest gets seismic. Sure I thought about murdering that little bastard in his sleep, putting every last one of my methaqualones into his half-empty bottle of Captain Morgan's. I thought about swiping his cash, stealing his groovy set of wheels and all his clunky band equipment, I even thought about even setting his bed on fire, calling the fire department from my cell across state lines. Instead, I went into the bathroom and masturbated. Felt like I was releasing birds from the sinewy cages of my diaphragm. I'd never felt lighter in my life.

The waitress, as if she's my partner in criminal flashback, passes me and smirks.

-- More coffee, honey?

-- Sure, why not?

The truth is, if I drink any more coffee I think my heart is going to explode. I just wanna hear that sound again, the sound of liquid filling empty space, the sound of volume filling stale porcelain. I feel like voids disappear when they're filled. I can only deal with so much emptiness before anything feels better than nothing. That's why I smoke, that's why I wander, that's why I'm wearing the Strokes t-shirt of a rough-draft rock star. It fits me like saran wrap, I tell you.

I felt so good, actually, when I came in his bathroom, an orgasm that had been building in small tidal waves of potential energy, and I just had to use his jeans to clean myself up, and before I knew it, I was back in the bedroom with a pair of plastic blue scissors and a Mach 5 razor, reaching for fistfuls of rocker boy's hair and cutting it off into dirty clumps until his forehead looked like an upside-down bar graph.

He thought I was getting all romantic with him, playing with his hair in the dark like some clingy hoebag, he even tried to brush me off in his sleep, told me to go to bed, like that ever works with women. I waited until his breathing stabilized, and then with the softest and most gingerly touch I knew, I grazed, and then I shaved, his eyebrows off with a delicate, upward motion, like a portrait artist sketching a caricature, removing the cluster of little hairs on the left side first, and then, for symmetry, the ride side. It was amazing, he didn't even stir, didn't make a single noise, I thought for sure he'd wake up, but no, he was passed out, expired, now snoring, and then, because I'm nothing if not a bit ceremonial, and God knows how much I love to leave gifts for people, I sprinkled the floor with his bangs like Albino rose pedals, making a little path for myself. And then I went outside, threw his motel key in the trash and smoked a cigarette that was nothing short of exquisite.