Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

The sunlight off the apartment complex's pool was brilliant. Not so brilliant that it could blind the eye to the girl- no, not yet a woman but, oh, so close- reclining in the green and white lawn chair near enough in proximity to the water to catch its brilliance but far enough away not to be splashed by the random child's wild cannon ball. Tanning in such places is an art form. She was probably Fragonard. Or, rather, one of his paintings a couple of centuries later if tan rather than bleached-white had been the trend.

In the relative parlance of men, she was “Playboy Hot.” That's quite an accomplishment. Sans airbrush, there is Photoshop. Either way, a perfectly constructed woman can be hacked from a half-ass photograph. In real life it is so rare to actually see. Like lions mating the wild. Mary was it. She bypassed the tickets to the shows, the runways, and all the bullshit that you can only afford if you're way beyond the pool in an apartment complex built with the stipulations that it must house those qualifying for section 8.

And she was mean. And she was cool. Her divorced parents together might have qualified for section 8 housing, but her dad was loaded. It is entirely possible that she didn't even know her mom. I don't have that much back story. There was a ruthlessness in her that the devisers of Dynasty couldn't imagine. Calculation and emotional desperation worked in tandem to get her pretty much anything she wanted. Despite all of this she was a warm human- an unstable creature in a world that wanted more from her than she could possibly cough up. Unless she stood in front of a camera and did nothing else.

She used to set at my card table inside that apartment complex, throwing spades out like she knew what she was doing. There were two Irish people and a Jew there. My girlfriend and I could read and reread ourselves. Joseph and his bobby-pinned skullcap could play spades. It wasn't exactly prison, but we knew how to play cards. She was only 18. And so smart. So beautiful. Everything we wanted as we ate pepperoni pizza (except the Jew). She won sometimes, too. Between her Monroe blond laughs, deep drinks, and genuinely comfortable moments.

There are horrible ways to sully such beautifully sunlit creations. Tales of rock-stars, blow-jobs, buses, and men with hot heads and fast hands. Drugs. Booze. There are bruised eyes, peering tragically keenly from a battered face. But even bluish and hurt that face was too much. Perfect beneath the damage. As if the damage just skipped a step and went strait to her inner being as it must have. In that place everyone surrenders everything and wishes only to be closer. Closer.

Too much money and too much beauty create an unreconcilable situation. Her name is written cleverly with a black Sharpie on my black speakers in a place I would only see when I moved them- as she knew I eventually must. I buy expensive speakers and I keep speakers a long time. Every time they get moved, her name reflects back at me and there is a dazzle to that black on black. Locked into that loopy signature is the instant memory of dirty youth, beauty, and what must be lost as we grow older and move on.

I hope those speakers last until I die. In the sublime difference between the sheen on those letters and the finish on those speakers lies a clue to being hard and soft at the same time. Between the ruthless pursuit of love and the devastating consequences thereof is the innocent laugh of a girl so beautiful that her life becomes the manifestation of destruction and loss.

The sun provides the light, the painter chooses his moment, the model moves ever so slightly. As we strive so ridiculously toward perfection, our only consolation can be that occasionally we can see it first hand.

A clear blue Kansas City sky. Beside the pool. A Mexican boy mid-jump with his legs tucked under his chin and his fingers locked over his knees. The shadows on the concrete under the lawn-chair in a line by line underpinning. Mary is in between reaching forward and deciding whether or not to. This snap-shop memory is precious and dangerous like all the things that make life worth living.

Destroying Our Way to Happiness

I was on the phone when we took down the stripper pole. No, actually, someone else was on my phone when that happened. I'd had a few beers by then and destruction was the theme. Memory is more maleable when things are coming apart than it is when they are coming together.

Carly was sitting at the rickety card table, left by the owners of “Ruff House Private Club” when they vacated in an unwilling but probably timely fashion. The space was still cluttered with their left-overs in the same way that the foreclosed houses I normally work on are. Sometimes in business the ventures overlap in funny ways. She was reading a Christopher Moore book, drinking Jim Beam and Coke, and smoking a Kool cigarette. It was a sort of destruction aftermath. Had I been younger there would have been as many beer bottles and cigarette butts as there were piles of drywall and felt flooring. Strewn about. Discarded. Demolished in the moment. At this point, the place still looked like something was being accomplished amid the rubble.

I haphazardly tossed the stripper pole in with the 2X4s, drywall, and chipboard. Ben was fiddling with the remnants of what was once a cramped kitchen's wall. Joe was using a circular saw in some fashion or another. We were winding down for the evening. It was close to midnight. 1,100 square feet of raw retail space was covered with the evidence of man on building violence. We were happy and exhausted.

Under the felt there was black and white checkered tile. Behind the walls there was nothing. Most of the interest in destruction stems from curiosity. But, the journey is the reward. Anything of interest found is cream on the cake. We had it rich.

A loud black family- husband and wife and two kids- walked past the 10 windows facing the street. The fat mom made sure to elevate her voice as she walked by our door, which was propped open with a 5 gallon bucket of the slate grey paint that covered the poorly graffitied walls. This let out the dust we'd kicked up and the smoke we we'd blown out. We ignored both the family and the walls for the most part, though it was impossible to avoid wondering about the kids running wildly about at this time of night. Joe had earlier made the comment, “All those mutherfuckers and not one knows how to use a Sharpie.” It was true. Nothing of interest in black on grey beyond names and scribblings. Loud, but otherwise juvenile, ineffectual... kinda sad.

The Buzz Cocks buzzed from a CD alarm clock plugged in next to the 18V battery charger. Loud crashes interrupted it as we tore down bits and pieces of the building. There was a certain chemistry between us that ensured no one got hurt. Not because we were safe by any practical standards. No helmets. No masks. No knee pads, gloves, first aid kits, nor permits. It was guerilla and we all knew it. So, we just made sure it all stayed strait.

Ben took the sledge hammer to the framing of a wall. Carly looked up and said, “Swing it again. I just want to see you do it.” He obliged and piece of drywall sailed smoothly into the piled detritus. “Nice,” I said. Joe decided he'd had enough. We shook hands and he left on his Harley. Things were winding down.

A few more beers were drank. A few more things were destroyed. But, there is a moment following destruction that simply exists whether you clean things up or not. We didn't even bother. That'd happen tomorrow. It was late and we were talking. Talking about old times. New times. The future of this space. What might have happened at this space before. Ben picked up the stripper pole for a moment, then dropped it back into the rubble. I lit a cigarette and and sat down on a rickety folding chair.

“This is it,” I said. “This is it.”