The Deep End

 

She says, “I’m sorry,” but I don’t care.  It’s neither the time nor the place for such an apology.   At the moment, I’m not thinking about how it pissed me off.  I’m trying to stay focused on driving. Both my hands are holding the steering wheel in a death grip.  Ten and two, like they taught us when the world was brighter and life was virtually uncharted.    

My eyes dart left and right taking in everything at once, a form of perception that’s making it harder to navigate the unfamiliar downtown streets.  Something about that area of tightly packed roads reminds me of downtown San Francisco.   It’s the same feeling of claustrophobic closeness.  Above and around me, impossibly tall high-rises, sporadically lit, stand against an inky black backdrop.   Two yellow taxicabs appear suddenly, darting around me; they weave in and out of traffic with deceptive ease.   It’s things like these, the little things, that drag at my attention.

She says it again, because repetition and drunkenness have a way of going hand in hand.   I don’t blame her; in fact, I feel a bit of empathy.  I’m still trying to concentrate on the road and to her credit; she’s giving me remarkably good advice as to which ways to turn.   I almost feel like laughing.  My sense of claustrophobia is more of a debilitation then her blood alcohol level. 

I would laugh, if not for the tightness in my chest.   I’m nervous and not without reason. I can smell the alcohol and the sticky sweet syrups they use to make it drinkable, bathing the inside of the small car with its invisible plume.  She spilled a drink down the front of her shirt an hour ago at some out the way biker bar.   Laughing, she mop it up as best she could, pulling at the fabric of her shirt with each stoke, exposing the smallest amount of cleavage.  

She keeps leaning over and yelling things in my ear.  Most of it is nonsense but I take it with a measured sort of calm.  The music is mind numbingly loud and she has to say whatever she’s trying to get across a couple of times before I hear it all.    

A police car slowly passes, and I can’t help the apprehension it twists in my stomach.   I’m not drunk, not even close.  I spent most of the night nursing a beer and wondering how nearly eight years later I ended up on the same stretch of road.

The beer gets warm and grows stale before I can figure much more than the feeling, displacement.   Rather than get another drink, which would do little to improve my mood, I let my better nature take the wheel.  Besides, she’s drunk and someone, not her, needs to drive home.  Spending another night wondering the streets of Deep Ellum, while trying desperately to sober up before a cop can pick you up for public intox, doesn’t exactly sound like a good idea at the moment.   Not, of course, that it didn’t the three times it happened before, but that was then, in the younger times.  

 I find myself in better circumstances now.  An apartment I can call my own.  The occasional pretty girl to brightening up my place, when I can manage it.   A fast track to a worthless degree that I know doesn’t mean much beyond the bullshit it lauds.  But of course people love that piece of paper.  It says I know how to binge drink and waste money.  I’m part of the privileged crowd that can waste my best years locked away from the real world.  Still, I find myself reflexively sticking my hand in my pocket every thirty minutes of so, checking for the drugs that aren’t there.  I chastise myself for impulse.  I can’t help it, it’s just something that was trained into me a very long time ago. 

I pull out my cell phone and check the time, trying to fool myself into thinking that was what I was trying to do the whole time.

On our way back from the biker bar, she’s jabbering away about being sorry.  I only half listen.  Mostly, I’m starring at the cobbled sidewalk that hasn’t changed much in the eight years since I last saw it.   The streets are a little more clean and a little less crowded.  Most of the crowd has shifted to the Hip Hop bars that lay on the out skirts of downtown.  Years ago, there would have been hundreds of people milling about the streets of Deep Ellum.  Now only the peddlers and bums subsist.  They tell the same stories and to some degree I feel sorry for them.   If they had any kind of vision, they’d be hustlers.  But most of them are junkies who can’t think much beyond the next fix.   I was never that bad.  I say it to myself as we walk past a guy asking for a bit of change.  I wave him off, not because I’m a cruel heartless son of a b***h, but because you never pull out money on these streets if you can help it.

I got hooked and to some degree, did a bit of growing up on these same streets.  I never drove though, that’s a new experience that I’m getting to try out tonight for the first time.  The car, her car, I’ve never driven before and that adds to the sense of apprehension.   When we make it to the toll road a little bit of the unease slips away and I can breathe again.   I look over and she’s smiling.  It’s a dopey, I’ve had one too many, kind of smile that lights up the sad angles of her face, which have a habit of laying waste to her features.  For a second, I think in another world, I could love a girl with a smile like that.  I know that in the end, I won’t love her and I feel a tinge of sadness at the idea.  

She says I’m sorry again, not for the last time.  I smile in spite of myself and rub her hand, telling her that we can talk about it later.  Behind the world moves on, but at the moment I feel a bit trapped in the past.

 

Reviews

[Zissors]

I really enjoyed this. The descriptions are very well done, you don't over do it and the reader can really get a grasp of how the main character felt and his life.

Thanks for posting.