The Airport: Part One.

She sits; usually she sits but this time she sits with conviction and a smirk that couldn’t be wiped off with a hammer. Wouldn’t that be adorable, a striking, dainty young thing with a punched in face and chip on her shoulder? She wouldn’t fall for something so ludicrous, not anymore. The strength that she’s found in the last few months could withstand the weight of the ocean, hell, of three oceans. At night though, it pours over her like hot wax: She should have known it was an empty promise, his eyes were vacant when he said it, even over the phone one thousand miles away.

“It’s been months; I haven’t thought or touched anyone else. All I want is you. I am coming for you. I am leaving everything behind for you. I am going to marry you”.

Everything? Really? She thought. Oh excuse me that you’re love has taken you away from your low-life, beer guzzling, whorish friends who couldn’t give two shits about you. Everything, pff. He had taken thirty seconds to spout off those words and it only took her a year and a half to realize that they weren’t even close to being true.

She had moved from Riverside to West Hollywood and settled into an apartment with two men she found on Craig’s List. They were outrageously gay and both shared the name Javier. The living room was lined with teddy bears, pictures of their family, and designer pillows. Frightening? Well you try meeting ten people in the greater Los Angeles area and you’ll see that none of them can beat even that low standard of normalcy. Besides, they seemed welcoming, and in the grasp of their handshake she couldn’t imagine them hovering over her bed at night envisioning what her insides looked like, so it was there that she waited. She waited weeks, but it felt like two short breaths. The day crept up the way that winter does right when you’re just starting to enjoy Autumn’s pallet. She looked up the buses she needed to take to LAX. There were three. The last one was bus 111. Great.

Her nerves ran a stampede in her stomach like the over taking of Jerusalem, and she did all she could to keep her dinner from last night where it belonged. At the airport she found Alaska Airlines and stood there uneasily. Her pocket vibrated. His text: “I’m here”. Shit. Not wanting to look like she was as elated as she was she ran outside and smoked a cigarette. When she went back in she saw the back of a man, tall, thick bushy head of hair and her heart climbed down her rib cage and cannon-balled into the pit. He slowly turned around and their eyes met and they ran to each other.

“Uh hey, yeah, so I’m here, it’s been crazy, yeah… Uh, Hi”, He stuttered.

“Um, okay, so now is when you hug me or fucking something!”

He picked her up, she poked her head into the clouds and wrapped her arms around him as he spun her round and round, when he planted her back into the ground, her head was in a tango and he kissed her hard. Minutes may have passed by, it didn’t matter, the game was back on. He smelled of malt liquor.

On the buses back they laughed and commented on the silly miniscule things that they thought no one else ever noticed: Their secret language.

A key cracks open the door, “Welcome to our new home. This is the living room, ignore the creepily staring stuffed animals and come this way. This is the bathroom. It’s topped off with a pink toilet and tub. And this… This is our room.”

She shut the door and he hijacked her to the bed. She had almost forgotten how warm his blood was, almost boiling with eyes that threw flames even in complete darkness. His taking off her clothes felt like skin peeling off, her heart finally beating. His tongue lapped between her thighs, her clit pulsated, and he could hear it, a tiny baby drum begging. He flicked and danced around and over it with his tongue and just as she burst he slide himself inside of her, the deepest he’d ever been. If you could pop your cherry more than once this would’ve been the time it happened for her, he had a dick you could feel at the pit of your stomach. Three minutes later the “magic” was over.

“It’s been a while”, he said.

The next few weeks blistered, they were heavy and full. They traveled everywhere the bus system would let them. Up down, downtown, Chinatown. They ate LA up like taffy, it had a town for anything. They’d buy a fifth of whiskey and sit like bums on Sunset Boulvard.

“What does Pinches mean?” She inquired one night.

“Fucking” Jake responded.


“So you’re meaning to tell me that that place over there is called ‘Fucking Tacos?’”

He sighed with a slight laugh, “Yeah fish butt, you wanna go?”

“Did you even need to ask? I mean COME ON! Let’s go get some fucking tacos baby!”

They’d run along the boardwalk of Venice and Santa Monica beach. She would carry a bag that hung to her knees, packed with beer, canvases and books. They’d plop down anywhere they felt like it and start painting.

“What are you painting baby”, She’d ask, knowing he’s never held a paint brush a day in his life.

“Um… you know I’m really just to go for the abstract late 70’s look. Yeah, no really, I have no idea, I’m pretty sure this looks like an angry banana hurting an angry pepper.” He adds a few more strokes into the jumbled mix of color, and exclaims “I shall call it the eruptions of the Javier’s!”

“That’s just lovely Birdy, just lovely”.

Passer Byers would curiously watch them. They'd think: So young, with their faces fresh and their hands moving quicker than their eyes can catch. Some would stop to chat with them, telling her the painting she had done showed “promise” and his was “interesting”. She couldn’t help but wonder how many of them could see the reality, the inevitable? How many of them could see her disfigurement after the last two years of slowly draining tub-water. But they were happy now, everything was better now.

Those blur of days were nothing short of enchantment, every-day was absolute home. She realized that she had never fallen in love with Jake before this, that it was now watching him bum around with vagabonds on the boardwalk, and try things he’d be too scared to do in Seattle that she saw the purity of his spirit like crystal. For the first time she swore she could melt into him but there was always the knocking of rational thought.

This romance skipped a beat one night when Jake and Belle were having one of their mis-firing phenomena nights. These nights they stayed up talking all night, revealing the most inner-workings of their brains, dancing together on moonlit streets. These nights usually ended in fists and restraint and tonight would prove not to be an exception to that rule.

“We’ve been through so much babe… and we’re happy now, we’re like one of those really gay success stories that people write books about” she said. They both lay there replaying the last two years in their heads. Hers automatically went to re-living the sting that stung the longest. Ashley Perkins. “Hey how long has it been since you talked to Ashley? Was it when you fucked her back in December?”

He choked. He blinked so concentrated she could hear it, like a judge’s wand. Something snapped out of place inside of her that she knew she could never repair. He was lying, he had done something before he left, she knew it, she knew him better then he knew himself and it was with this certainty that raised a drunken fist and started a forty five minute wrestling match that resulted in a black eye, and her head on his belly, softly crying.