Falling Backwards: Lily

You know that thought?  I’m sure you’ve had it, the one that goes: 

“Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Now that my 19 year marriage has failed - crashed and burned, gone down in flames, exploded on impact, wiping out an entire village and leaving me walking though the smoldering wreckage like a shell shocked zombie - I think I should start looking up all my old girlfriends.” 

Yeah, that thought.  That brilliant thought. 

My advice?   Leave the old flame burning. Warm your hands by it.  Enjoy the fantasy.  Just don’t ever try to go back.

Lily

“Come up to Indian country Paul, there is powerful magic up here. I promise you will be healed.”

By the time Lily sent that message we had been talking - flirting really- online for several months. Being certain I would never actually see her in person, I had been surprisingly honest with the pain I was going through around my divorce. A divorce so recent I had yet to tell many of my closest friends.  Her feedback tended to be pretty lowbrow. It usually came after she’d finished her bar shift, 3 am or so California time, obviously sloshed. I would wake in the morning in Hawaii to her drunken ramblings, and take comfort in them. I got exactly what I needed from it - a pleasant memory of an old crush, and a sympathetic ear.

Lily was one of those people that caught on to things a little faster then the rest of us. She skipped a few grades and entered high school at 12. I look back on that now and just think, poor kid. She was a little pixie. I remember she dressed as Cindy Lauper one year for Halloween and then just kind of stayed that way for the next few years.  In the 80’s, in our little cow town, colored hair and crazy makeup really stood out. I met her working backstage at a school play. Yes, I needed more drama in my life, even back then. She was 13, I was 16 and I was madly in love. But outside of the play I never had the guts to talk to her. 

We didn’t date until several years later. I had just moved back to Eureka from SF and was living in a studio apartment above a used bookstore in Old Town. In the City I had been seeing a girl named Pamela. She had just told me she was in love with another man. Some guy from South America she had met at her job parking cars.  It wasn't a great time for me. I saw Lily walking by on the sidewalk below and ran down to her. We both decided to change our plans for the rest of the week. That's how it always worked with us. We never really dated. We somehow would find each other at just the right moment when one or the other was in need of some healing from a broken heart. We would fall off the earth together for a night or a week, then not see each other again for a month or a year. We had a name for it. We called it stopping time.

Back then we were partial to amphetamines, before we knew they burned holes in your brain, before we knew cigarettes gave us cancer, before TV had color. Our habits were not the same but I can say that now only with the benefit of hindsight. I mean, my parents would have surely called us both addicts. I remember one day laying next to her, our bodies still entwined, I asked her softly “Why aren’t we together?” Her answer was just above a whisper, “I would disappoint you. I’m only this good when I’m with you.” I didn’t argue. I was naive enough then to believe an 18-year-old meth addict knew herself that well.

Now with the safety of 1500 miles of water between us I asked her to open up, to fill me in on the last 20 plus years. She had been reluctant to spill, I had a feeling she was hiding something big. Eventually the story came out. About 3 years back she had been living in Santa Rosa of all places. (my town) She was married and off speed for the first time since High School. Her husband, her “once in a lifetime soul-mate” as she called him, started up using again. So she too decided to fall back into the pit. She did a rail, got woozy and passed out. There was a roommate home at the time to call 911. When the paramedics arrived she was blue, not breathing and had no pulse. They got her heart started again, got her breathing and took her to the ER. She was in the hospital for a few weeks. She had had a stroke. When her sister came down from Humboldt to pick her up she was told the brain damage from lack of oxygen was likely permanent, but Lily's speech and most of the muscle control of her face could eventually return.

After her stroke she tried to get as far away as she could. Hoopa is a tiny town on the Klamath river in northern California. It’s an Indian reservation. There is a gas station, a grocery store, a post office, a fire department, and a bar that has been shut down many times over the years due to an alarming number of deaths by axe. 

“Come on up" she said, "I’ll give you a tour of all the local watering holes. We can stop time and spend the day laying by the river and eat and drink away our hangovers.” I was back on the mainland when I got that invitation to drive there, 8 hours or more into the wilderness.  The picture she had painted of her life was not a pretty one. The brain damage, the 2 decade speed habit and the chain smoking that went with it. I knew this was one of those memories better left alone. In other words, there was nothing that could have stopped me.

* * *

“Hold your hand out flat, like this, she won’t bite.” Lily was showing me how to feed her horse an apple. I wasn’t really listening. I couldn’t stop staring at her. Maybe it was the magic of my old memory clouding my vision, maybe she was actually a 40 something wrinkled toothless hag and I was blind, but this girl I was looking at was beautiful. She looked exactly like I remembered her. Young, happy, healthy, SEXY. There was no sign of the stroke. No sign of the drug use. I was beyond amazed. The only blemish I could see on her otherwise perfect skin was a fresh mosquito bite on her neck.

"Wanna see the house?" she asked

"Of course I do1" 

As we walked back up the gravel road I continued to stare at her. Her tiny curvy body. Her perfect ass. I had no hesitation about where I wanted this weekend to go. My head was flooded with memories of our teenage escapades.

As soon as we got inside I noticed the old style I remembered, antique suitcases holding up one end of a coffee table, Victorian chaise lounge draped with leopard print fabric, torn lace curtains. She didn't offer me a tour so I just poked around a bit, a quick peek in the kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter; down a short hall, a hanging dark velvet fabric for a bedroom door. Paint flaking off dark maroon colored walls, more ratty vintage lace curtains. Clothes on the floor. A smell that was part musty old moth-eaten blanket and part cat.

I walked back to the living room and sat down, set my overnight bag on the floor. She sat across from me in the only other chair in the room, the suitcase coffee table was between us. Then she hit me with the first bomb.

"I'm still a drug addict, you want to do a line?"

I'm quick to hide shock, I always have been. "No, thanks, can't go there anymore."

"You don’t mind if I do?"

"Course not, knock yourself out.” I was thinking about her story, the blue-and-dead-for-12-minutes-stroke part. My face must have given me away.

"Surprised?" she said, watching me.

"Well, I guess after the whole DYING thing, I figured you had quit."

"Fuck no! First place I went the day I got out was to my guy. By the way, I only shoot it now. Do needles bother you?"

I shook my head, no. I was beginning to withdraw in a strange way. I was losing track of where my hands and feet were. The next few moments are ones that will live in my mind for the rest of my life. While she had been talking she had been fixing up a needle, very skillfully and quickly.

"My arms are all tore up, I can’t use them anymore," she said to me, tapping the little air bubbles out of the needle. I had noticed the low cut, light green, long sleeved shirt but hadn't given it much thought other than how great her tits looked in it.

As she said that she stood up and took two quick steps to a small vintage mirror hanging on the wall near the front door. Without a moments hesitation she plunged the needle directly into her neck, pushed the entire contents into her artery, pulled it out, put one finger over the hole, turned and sat back down, staring at me.

The mosquito bite.

 
I tried to think of something to say. "So that must take like what, 3 seconds to hit you?" I asked.

"Oh, faster than that, even before I pull it out, its already hit my brain.” She sat there a minute smiling at me. "Gotta give me a sec, my eyes are all googly for a few minutes."

"Take your time," I said, still not able to move. Or feel if my hands and feet were still attached. I realized I wasn't breathing at some point.

Within a couple minutes she was back up. "Okay! lets go out! I'll give you that tour of all the dive bars on the mountain! But you'll have to drive!"

I hesitated, but only for a moment.  I had come all that way to see her. I decided to let inertia take me. And it did, all over Trinity County that night. Strange little roadside bars in the middle of nowhere. She knew all the bartenders and most of the patrons. After closing one, well after 2 am, we stumbled onto a rave. Yes, really. A warehouse in the middle of some place that I could not find again in a million years. We danced with a bunch of touchy-feely twenty somethings. Someone offered us some ecstasy.  At some point I began to notice the distance she was keeping between us. She was very careful to not touch me when we were in sight of anyone.

After we left the rave she wanted to go find her connection. We drove for awhile up a mountain on a bumpy gravel road. “Right here,” she said as we came up on a dingy single wide trailer, trash in piles around the outside.  I pulled up next to a red Ford Fiesta missing both rear wheels. My headlights lit up a washing machine on the front porch. There were no lights on in the trailer. No other cars we could see. Lily didn’t get out of the car.

“Fuck. She’s not home”

I said, “Hey, c’mon. Its been a fun night. Let’s go home.” She looked at me and didn’t say anything. “What are you worried about?” I asked in the best reassuring tone I could muster for that hour of the night.

She gave me the strangest look and then just said softly,”Okay.”

When we got back to her place it was after 5 am. Inside her house I went to the kitchen in search of a clean glass for some water. I remember thinking how good her bed, that moth eaten, cat smelling bed, was going to feel. When I turned around she was looking out the window. Something wasn’t right. I looked around and now saw the odd clues I had missed before. There were two dirty wine glasses on the table. A mens black leather jacket hanging on the side of the kitchen chair.

My face dropped.  "You have a boyfriend don't you?"

She smiled, embarrassed. "Yes, its only been a few days and I was afraid if I told you you wouldn't have come up."

I nodded slowly, well this puts a new twist on things.

"He's Indian" she said. "He was here after we left.” She picked up a note off the kitchen table and read it out loud. "When you are done hanging out with your friend, text me. I'm up on the trail.” She explained to me that the Indians have a network of trails, up in the hills connecting all the houses, that avoid the county roads. "He’s probably watching us right now."

"Uh-huh,” I felt that odd feeling of losing touch with my arms and legs coming back. I drank the entire glass of water. “Does he know you're still on speed?”

"Yes, but he wants me to quit. Maybe you can sleep on the couch?" She was nervous.

"Ahhh, ya know, I think I better head back over the hill." I grabbed my bag from behind the chaise lounge.

"I'm so sorry Paul, if you had come up a week ago like I begged you to.... I really like this guy and he is good for me, I really want it to work"

"Lily, I'm happy for you, you deserve to be happy after everything that you've been through. But you should have told me."

"You wouldn't have come."

She was right. "Maybe not. But you should have told me anyway.

"I’m sorry” she paused for a moment, looking around, handed me my jacket. "You better go now actually, I don't think he expected me to bring you back here." As she said this she looked toward the kitchen window.

It was an awkward, hurried goodbye. I walked to my truck in the dark feeling the eyes of the mountain on me.

The clouds were starting to glow with the first hint of sunrise as I drove away.  At the top of the mountain, above the tree line I saw the first orange rays glistening off the frozen tortured grass. I came over Berry summit and started the long drive down to the coast.  I got a text from Lily when I got back into range. "I wish we could have stopped time again." When I got into Eureka I pulled off at Ramone’s Bakery for some coffee. I walked around the corner on 2nd street, past the used bookstore and sat on the stoop of my old apartment building. I was empty of all feelings. My fantasy was gone, And God Damn I missed it.