by Bert Murray
Karl had squashed me. Flattened me to a pulp. I was his goddamn best friend! That didn’t make a difference to him. The guy had no soul. He didn’t give a damn about anyone. He just cared about himself.
I slowly lay down on the floor. Everything seemed so black. What did I have to live for anymore? I felt like shit. I had lost Jasmine for good. I was a fuckin’ loser. Karl had castrated me.
Who was I going to talk to about this? I certainly couldn’t tell my parents. The semester was screwed. There was no coming back from this. I really had fucked up. I had lost Jasmine forever. Dad could have predicted it. He always told me I was clueless.
6.
I DIDN’T WANT to see Big Ty or Chester the day after the betrayal. My life seemed like a cruel joke. Everything that had made me happy had gone up in smoke. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew or who knew me. But Mrs. Vesquez was different, more like a ghost hovering around the campus, an alien, someone who didn’t belong, and I didn’t have to pretend to be happy or put together around her. I called her and told her what had happened.
“She left me,” I said.
“Why?”
“Karl was the back-stabber. She left me for Karl.”
“Horrible. This is crazy. Meet me at my apartment.”
I grabbed a couple of beers out of the fridge and quickly chugged them. I stuck another beer in my jacket pocket and headed out to meet Mrs. Vesquez. We decided to go for a walk. Quixote was following her on a long leash. We walked across the Quad, past the outdoor running track, to the old cemetery. It was late afternoon, about 5. The sun was setting. Even though it was still day, you could see a half-moon.
I felt dead inside. “I thought Jasmine and I would be forever.”
“And you saw them together?”
“Yeah, I caught them in the act.” The moment was burned into my brain. I’d never forget it.
“That’s awful. What a horrendous thing to have to experience. How could your girlfriend hurt you that way? Is she insane? What’s wrong with her? Cheating on you with your best friend. It’s vile.”
Was everything I thought Jasmine felt for me just a mirage? Maybe the whole relationship had been one-sided from the beginning. But then why had she had chosen me as her lover for so many weeks? She could have had anyone. Why did she choose me?
Mrs. Vesquez stared at me. “Wasn’t your friend Karl the one giving you advice all along?”
“Yes. It’s so damn humiliating. I feel like I’ve been tarred and feathered.”
“Karl is a snake. He’s finally showed his fangs.” Mrs. Vesquez was looking around nervously. “By the way, my son’s buried there,” she said pointing to a tombstone.
God, I didn’t know she had a son who died. But I’d walked through the old cemetery once before. I knew it was filled with people who had died in the 19th century.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “When did your son die?”
“Three years ago and now he’s underneath the earth. In every cemetery I walk through. Juan’s there. My darling little boy. I’m with him again when I walk through the tombstones. It doesn’t matter where I am. It makes no sense, but why should I make sense? Did Alice? When she went through the looking glass? When she talked to the White Rabbit?” Mrs. Vesquez put her hand over her forehead. “Death is not logical. It’s ghastly. Abominable.”
I started to hear Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit playing in my head. Alice. The White Rabbit. The Red Queen. The Mock Turtle. All there in my mind.
Mrs. Vesquez spoke quickly. “Some nights I think I can’t live without my son. Sleep doesn’t come. I see the sun rise in the morning without having slept a wink. Without Juan, there is nothing for me in this world. I am completely alone. I feel closer to him here. Among the tombstones.”
She turned and walked a few feet away from me. “He’s begun to decompose. My poor darling boy. My little Juan. Soon only his bones will be left.”
“Please don’t talk like that.” She was making me feel worse; lower and lower even though I thought I’d reached bottom already.
7.
WE SAT ON a bench in the center of the cemetery. Mrs. Vesquez had both her hands over her eyes. “Juan is close. If only I could hug him one more time.”
I was waiting for her to put her hands down. I grabbed the beer out of my jacket pocket and sipped it. The black cat sniffed a tombstone. What did she see behind those hands? Ghosts. Ghosts coming at both of us.
England. That’s where it had all started. First John’s mother. Julia. She’d been run over by an out-of-control car when John was 18. It turned out that an off-duty cop was behind the wheel. One day she was there and the next she was gone.
Then Stuart Sutcliffe. John’s artist friend from school.
“How’s everything?” Stuart asked me. I could swear I saw him right there in the cemetery. He was standing a few feet from me, looking sharp in a black suit. He really knew how to dress.
“Things have been better,” I said.
Spooky. He was the one who looked like James Dean. He was a Beatle for only a short while. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 21.
I gulped down the beer. I was seeing things. Dizzy. My head was going ’round and ’round. Who was that in the corner? The Mock Turtle. Wasn’t it? He stood up straight and was as tall as I was. He was standing in front of a large black pot and had a silver spoon in his hand.
“I’m making some soup. You must be hungry,” he said.
“Who are you making the soup for?”
“Not for you,” said the Cheshire Cat, grinning and putting a large paw on the pot of soup.
I stared at his mouth full of teeth. They were like Karl’s. “Real smug, aren’t you?” I said to him.
Mrs. Vesquez turned and stared at me. “What did you say? Were you talking to me?” She looked around. “Is there somebody else here?”
“No,” I said. I shook my head hard.
She whispered. “Didn’t you see the handwriting on the wall with your friend Karl?”
“No. I totally trusted him. Like a brother.”
She didn’t say anything more. We sat in silence until I had to speak and break it.
“I’m really sorry about your son.”
“I shouldn’t have told you about my Juan. It was wrong of me to burden you. You have your own problems now.”
“It’s better for me to concentrate on someone else. How old was your son when he died?”
“Nineteen.” She began to cry. She wiped the tears from her face.
My splitting headache started moving across the back of my head, but my temples kept on hurting, too.
“Jesus? Nineteen. My age. Way too young to die,” I said.
I couldn’t imagine dying. I couldn’t imagine one of my friends dying. Losing Jasmine was the worst I could think of.
The cemetery was sucking all the energy out of me. I didn’t want to stay. But I could tell that Mrs. Vesquez didn’t want to leave. She gazed at the old graves that lay in front of us. She whispered. “Mary Alice Walker, born September 14, 1845, died October 3, 1898. Timothy P. Stevens, born December 2, 1823, died November 8, 1892.”
I noticed that Quixote’s tail was standing straight up. “Maybe we should go,” I said.
“The last thing Juan said to me was that he wanted to move to America. He wanted to leave Spain,” said Mrs. Vesquez.
I could tell she wanted to talk about him, and I listened for her sake. “Why did he want to come to America?”
“He was going to live with his girlfriend. She lived in Miami.”
“What happened? How did he die?”
“He was driving to the grocery store in Madrid. His head went through his car’s window. A head-on collision.”
“That’s awful.” Hearing it in a cemetery made it even worse. Black shadows were creeping over the tombstones. I didn’t want the ghosts to come back. Shit. My head felt messed up. Still dizzy.
‘“Yesterday,’” Mrs. Vesquez sang to herself. Quixote rubbed against
her legs. She scratched him behind the ear.
I couldn’t concentrate on Mrs. Vesquez’s sorrow anymore. My own was calling me. “Shit! I still can’t believe the two of them were having sex. I’ll never be able to get to sleep tonight. My mind is racing again. I can’t turn it off.”
She whispered. “Try to stay calm. It’s no good to get yourself worked up.”
“All I can think about is how the two of them have done a job on me, made a complete fool out of me. I feel like I was pushed off a cliff.” I could see myself mangled, torn apart, lying on the cold earth.
“You need sleep. Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself crazy focusing on the mess. I could give you some Valium. It will relax you. I take one every night. It is the only thing that helps me these days.”
“Thanks, I already bought something to help me sleep today at the pharmacy.” Then I remembered what I’d wanted to ask her. “Are you still married?”
“My ex left me when Juan was 2.”
“That sucks.”
“He also is a writer. He’s won a lot of literary awards. Maybe we should go back to my apartment now. I’ll make some tea.”
“No thanks. I’m really tired.”
I kept thinking of Eleanor Rigby. Mrs. Vesquez was alone. She couldn’t accept the death of her son. She was living in the past. And now that I had lost Jasmine to Karl, so was I.
8.
I LEFT MRS. Vesquez and went back to my dorm room. But after five minutes I started thinking again, about Jasmine and Karl having sex. I couldn’t get away from them. I began pacing around my room.
I decided to go to the Campus Pub. I knew I shouldn’t put any more beer in my belly. But I did anyway.
I sat at the bar and ordered two bottles of Beck’s. I pounded one bottle after the other. It was 6 p.m. and the bar was almost empty. The Bee Gees’ Staying Alive blared from the jukebox.
“Don’t you hate disco?” I asked the bartender.
“I wouldn’t waste one of my quarters on it,” he replied.
Ted, the only bartender on duty that afternoon, was a staple at the Campus Pub. Technically, he was a student, but he was on the seven-year plan. His parents had stopped paying his tuition years ago, so he spent most of his time working at the bar.
He was twenty-five years old, although he looked a lot older. His brown hair was thinning, and it was obvious that he didn’t spend any time at the gym. But he was an extremely personable guy and tried to learn the name of everyone who came into the Campus Pub.
“They just don’t make music like they used to, do they?” I said.
He nodded. “I’m with you, man.”
I gestured toward the jukebox. “I mean, listen to this crap.”
“I know. Try listening to it all night long.”
“It’s fuckin’ fluff! What happened to life-changing music like the Beatles? That music meant something. Bring me another bottle.”
“You got it.” Ted pulled a beer out from under the bar and wiped it off with a rag hanging from his belt. He removed the top and placed the bottle in front of me. “Elvis is still king if you ask me.”
“Elvis? Are you kidding? He didn’t even write most of the songs he sang.”
“Does it really matter with a voice like his?”
“Fine. OK, I’ll give you that.” Make Ted happy—why not? Didn’t matter. Let him have Elvis.
I guzzled the beer and slammed the top of the bar with my hand. “Another one, Ted.”
“Hey. You might want to slow down, buddy.”
“Are you kidding? I’m just warming up.”
Ted brought me another bottle, along with a bowl of popcorn. “If you’re gonna drink like that, you might want to eat something.”
I held up my bottle to make a toast. I had a little trouble keeping my arm steady. “Here’s to John, Paul, George and Ringo. And Elvis, just for you,” I said, pointing my finger at Ted. “Here’s to the greatest rock and rollers of all time.” I took a swig. I quickly finished off that bottle and demanded another one. Ted removed the empty bottles in front of me and brought me a fresh one.
“I have no business saying this, but I’m gonna. Slow down and take it easy. I don’t want to have to clean up after you,” said Ted.
I gave him an irritated look. “Don’t give me a lecture. You don’t know what I’ve been through today.”
I stared at the Casablanca poster behind the bar. Ted was a fan of old Humphrey Bogart movies. I’d play Bogart tonight and drink like crazy. It was just the right role for me.
“Listen, if I’ve learned anything from working behind this bar, it’s this: When a guy comes in here late in the afternoon looking to get drunk, there’s a girl involved. So tell me, buddy, is this about your girlfriend? What’s going on with her?”
“That whore? Oh, she’s fine.”
“Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming,” Ted said, taken aback a little.
“Oh yeah, she’s probably getting banged by my best friend again right about now,” I said, hitting the bar for emphasis. What a loser I was. I really hated myself. Losing Jasmine sucked. How could I have screwed everything up like this? Why did shit like this happen to me?
Ted shook his head. “Your girl and your best friend? Man, that’s cold.”
“You know what? Fuck ’em. Fuck both of them. I don’t care about that bitch anyway. All I care about is getting me another bottle of Beck’s.”
I pounded on the bar.
“Hell, I need a beer, too,” Ted said. “This one’s on the house.”
9.
I GULPED DOWN the beer. I was trying to drown myself in the bottle. It wasn’t working.
“Hi, Colin,” said a soft voice next to me.
I turned to my left and saw Liz. She took the stool next to me and grabbed a handful of popcorn.
Her long brown hair was thick and wavy. It curled a little at the ends. Her blue eyes were lined with matching blue eyeliner, and her lips were accented with frosted pink lipstick. She wore an oversize pastel blue T-shirt that hung off one shoulder, exposing a red bra strap. The black belt wrapped loosely around her hips matched her leggings and the Madonna bracelets she wore on both wrists. She was a few pounds too heavy, but overall she looked really good.
“Oh, hey, Liz,” I said.
“I’m surprised to see you solo. Where’s Jasmine?”
It hurt to hear her name. Like peeling off a cut too soon, causing the wound to start bleeding again. “Jasmine and I are done.”
“No way! That sucks. Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, it really does suck,” I said, crumbling pieces of popcorn onto the bar. “But I’m better off without her.”
“Can I keep you company?” asked Liz, touching her ear and playing with a heart-shaped earring.
“Why not? Ted, how about a beer for Liz.”
“Coming right up.”
Liz took a box of Parliament Lights out of her bag and pulled out a cigarette. She put it in her mouth and rummaged through her bag for a lighter. Finally, she gave up.
“Ted, can I have some matches?” she asked.
Ted walked over to us and placed the beer in front of Liz. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a matchbook. He held up a lighted match and Liz leaned in. She sat back on her stool and exhaled.
“So, do you want to talk about it?” she asked as she swiveled in the chair to face me. Her knee accidentally hit my knee. I thought again about the time I was dancing with her at the frat party.
“No.”
“Maybe it will turn out to be a good thing,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “You have your freedom back. You’re single again.”
“No, nothing is good right now. Everything’s just so screwed up.”
Liz took her hand off my arm and took a drag on her cigarette.
“I’ve been through what you’re going through so many times. I know exactly what you’re feeling. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
&n
bsp; “That’s a bunch of bullshit,” I said.
“I’ve always thought so, too. But you’ll get through this. I promise,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.
“I don’t know how. This is a really tough breakup.”
“There’s no such thing as an easy one.”
An hour later we left the bar.
10.
LIZ LIVED IN Peabody Dorm, which was at the other end of the Quad from Livingston.
She stuck The Police into her tape deck. Every Breath You Take streamed out of the speakers. I looked around her room. What was I doing here? For a minute I couldn’t remember anything.
My eyes darted from the poster on her wall of George Michael singing onstage to the poster from the movie The Breakfast Club. There was a big stuffed brown bear with sad eyes sitting on top of a beanbag chair in the corner. A collection of shot glasses was lined up on her night table next to a box of M&M’s and a pack of Parliament Lights.
I lay on her bed. She stretched out next to me. Her eyes were bloodshot. Liz asked me to roll onto my stomach and straddled my back, her ass on top of mine. She started to give me a back rub. I was surprised how good her hands felt. It was better than any Jasmine had ever given me.
“I love this song. I have such a crush on Sting. I think he’s the sexiest man alive. I’ve seen The Police in concert three times,” she said, slightly slurring her words.
“Yeah, they’re a good band.” I wasn’t going to discuss Sting with her. Too tired. Didn’t care anyway.
“Is this okay?” asked Liz, squeezing my shoulders.
“Yeah,” I muttered.
“I could put a videotape on if you want. What kind of movies do you like?”
She just kept trying. Nice girl. She deserved a guy more into her than me. I felt half-dead. “Westerns.”
“Any in particular?”
“Shane.” I mentioned the first western that popped into my head.
“Oh my God, I’ve seen it five times. That amazing scene when the little kid cries, ‘Shane! Don’t go, Shane!’ always gets to me. I go through two boxes of tissues.”
