Shine

I’ll see you shine. I wrote that years ago. I wrote it hoping that I’d get to see it someday. It hasn’t happened yet, but I like to think it’s happened, and I just wasn’t around to see it. I want Melinda to shine. As I’ve said, we met in Impact. She often wore a white t-shirt with the word Java printed on it. Java was a hip coffee shop on Beverley where she worked from time to time. At some point, I found a sharpie and made my own t-shirt in the same style, the same bold font, but it said Jihad instead of Java.

I remember one particularly large Black Muslim character kinda upset with such a shirt. He asked me why I would wear such a thing which seemed to mock his religion. I just said, “It’s just a shirt, man.” I guess that was enough. We walked away. But it sent a message to her. It told her I saw, and while we couldn’t talk, I connected with her through the shirt. I stayed at Impact for about nine months. At some point, you had to decide if you would find a job somewhere or stay and start training to be a counselor. Everyone who worked there had gone through there. All the counselors and whatnot did their time and stayed on. I chose to leave and get a job. I’d still live there, but I’d get to go to God knows whatever job I could find each day.

              Somehow I found a job in Glendale where they made acrylic fish tanks. I hated it. I had no idea what I was doing. I had to cut sheets of acrylic sheeting down to size and then glue them together to form huge fish tanks. A router was involved. One day I had about 50 of these things to route the edges cleanly and then glue them together with this solvent that instantly bonded the plexiglass sheets. After about half an hour of routing these things into shape, I realized I’d fucked every piece up. I’d put a perfect scratch along every edge as I was using the router wrong. I panicked and just hid the whole pile of wasted acrylic deep in the bowels of the warehouse, and I just quit. I’d only been there like 8 days, and I just walked out. I was so ashamed. I just fled. There was a girl who worked there who doused herself with rosewater each day. What an awful scent. I think it was the rosewater that put me over the edge. I just left and never looked back. I didn’t ask for money or anything. I just vanished. The boss was a bit of a prick to boot, making it a little easier. One day, a few months later, I saw him pulled over on the 5 freeway arguing with some cop. I chalked it up to karma. Everything felt ok.

              But quitting the job meant having to leave Impact. And I really had nowhere to go. I had a friend in Hollywood named Mellissa. We’d been on and off friends with benefits over the years. She said I could stay with her for a while. Eventually, it led to more sex, which was fine but also weird. I had to find some other place. It was about this time that Melinda left Impact. She and another impact friend named Rosie got a house in West Hollywood. I started staying there. I’d sleep with Melinda, although nothing ever happened. Talk about torture. Every night we get in bed in our underwear, if that and just talk and fall asleep. So close and yet so far. I was wildly in love. I may have even told her, but she fended it off and never pushed me away. Eventually, we got an apartment together in Silverlake. A beautiful old two bedroom place, I painted my room bright blue, Just like my room is now. I love blue rooms. We both had hookups with various people but never each other. It was torturous to hear her having sex, but what can you do? You just play Nirvana’s Bleach to blot out the sound as loud as possible. I started playing music again and finally bought my dream guitar. A cream white 66 Jaguar. God, I loved that guitar. It’s what Rowland Howard played in The Birthday Party. I loved it for years until someone stole it from our van one night.

              In time two single apartments became available across the street, and we moved into them. I lived right below Melinda. Our friend Winnie, who one of my dogs is named after, lived there too. So did Rosie and Marty. God rest his soul. We formed a little family of sorts. We were all sober and spent a lot of time hanging out and drinking coffee. I was working back in the Art Dept. I don’t know if it was ever discussed or if I would continue with Leslie and me. Looking back, we were back in the same city, but it just seemed like we’d grown too far apart and that I’d hurt her beyond repair. I guess I did the coward’s thing and just kept looking forward. It sometimes gets confusing because I forget that this all happened after I’d stayed in Baltimore for a year. After Changing Point, I stayed in a sober living house in the city for a few months. I got a job as an engineer at ATT.

I have zero recollection of what I did there. Absolutely zero. At one point, someone from some other department called me to ask a question about some piece of work I’d done. I panicked. I adopted a faux Brooklyn accent and told him Mike wasn’t in that day. Jesus. I’d have to face him eventually. Surely he’d see me at some point. The next day I went to see him with the same Brooklyn accent and just tried to bluff my way through it. I guess it worked. Or maybe he was so blown away at the balls on me that he let me slide. That job lasted a year.

In the meantime, I bought a car. It was a beautiful 67 blue Fairlane. God, I loved that car. It was the typical car left in a garage for decades, and I got it for almost nothing. I also met Trish. I was always falling in love. Eventually, I left sober living and moved in with her. We had plans to move back to California at some point, although she wanted to go to San Francisco. Oh boy, not me. Every day is Sunday in San Francisco. But we had time. After a few months of living together, she told me she was married. That’s not nothing. It had been a green card marriage, but it was still weird to hear it.

And so I kicked around Baltimore for a year and made pipebombs and cannons with my friend Paul. I slept with a couple people before Trish, and eventually, I just gave in. I got loaded. I shared that Arron and Paul were coming out to drive back to LA with me. Paul found out I was using the first night there. Jesus. I really have a knack for disappointing people. But off we went. We set off fireworks in the car with all the windows up, seeing who’d break down first and open a window. We did crazy stuff like that. I was long out of dope, but I made it. I got high the first night I was there, and everything started back up. A few months later, I was in Impact, and I was living with Melinda a few months later. After Impact, I stayed sober and went home to see my parents. It was nice. One night I was talking on the phone to Melinda, and she told me she’d had an abortion recently. I don’t know who the father was. I didn’t want to know. But I remember writing a song about it a month later. When I got home from my parents, I couldn’t find the keys to my apartment. I think Melinda had picked me up at the airport. She said just sleep with me. I was still so shocked about the abortion deal that I petulantly said no, even though I wanted to more than anything. I just pushed my door open like some cop would. She seemed sad and went upstairs. I went in and just felt like shit. But a funny thing happened. The next night I did sleep over, and we had sex for the first time. It’s like we just fell in love, just like that. I was elated and reborn. It was so surreal. We spent all of our time having sex, eating ice cream, and drinking iced coffee. I lasted for a month. And then she was gone. She told me she couldn’t be with anyone once it got too familiar. Whether it was the truth or not, there it was. I was crushed. And so began the 2 years of me being Heartbreak Guy. I wrote so many songs about her. Good songs. Brilliant songs. Eventually, they got me a record deal. We’d hook up every now and then. We’d pawn stuff, go to Vegas for the weekend, and just fizzle out. She’d spend a day or two in bed with me and then go back to some other guy. Christ, it was horrible. One day I was laying on the couch watching People’s court. The plaintiffs were named Mike and Melinda Coulter. Jesus! It’s a sign! It was a sign, alright. Those two suckers lost their case, and Melinda wound up married to the guy who directed Dumb and Dumber and Something about Mary. I have to see those billboards everywhere. In time it just fizzled out, and new women came into my orbit. There’s so much more to tell but we can only bear so much at a time. Listen to the record if you really want to know.

Here’s the song I wrote at the end of the 2 months that Melinda and I spent together:

Two Months

It’s Christmas, and I’m down

Feeling like a loser

Talking about an abortion

Trying to get married

And wanting to cry

And now it’s three weeks later

And it’s all summertime

And I don’t care about nothing except the cats and the dishes and a quarter to seven

And now I’m cleaning her house and now I’m drawing her a bath

And now she’s sitting on my lap, and I don’t hate work anymore, and I’m not as late

It took a lot of time to get what I wanted. But two months isn’t worth it, and I don’t ever want to feel this way again

Last night I told her to leave me, and I watched the last two months, and medium coke and some cigarettes walk out my door and leave me.

And I called Winnie, and I cried.