The Rules of Attraction

“Is she beautiful?” I asked.



She looked up, bean sprout stuck on lower lip, squinted and said, “Yeah.”



“That bitch over there?” I asked, pointing, appalled.



“Oh her. I thought you meant that sister over there,” she said.



I looked around. “Sister? What sister? No, her,” exasperated, I pointed at the girl; mean-looking, fat, black sunglasses, a bitch.



“Her?” the hippie asked.



“Yeah. Her.”



“She’s beautiful too,” she said, drawing a daisy next to the message on the napkin.



“What about him?” I pointed to a guy who it was rumored had actually caused his girlfriend to kill herself and everyone knew. There was no way in hell the hippie could think that he, this f**king monster, was beautiful.



“Him? He’s beautiful.”



“Him? Beautiful? He killed his f**king girlfriend. Ran her over,” I said.



“No way,” the hippie grinned.



“Yes! It’s true. Ran her straight over with a car,” I said, excited.



She just shook her lovely, empty head. “Oh man.”



“Can’t you make distinctions?” I asked her. “I mean, our sex is great, but how can everything, everyone be beautiful? Don’t you understand that that means no one is beautiful?”



“Listen, man,” the hippie said. “What are you getting at?”



She looked at me, not grinning. The hippie could be sharp. What was I getting at?



I didn’t know. All I know was that the sex was terrific.



And that the hippie was cute. She loved sweet pickles. She liked the name Willie. She even liked Apocalypse Now. She was not a vegetarian. These were all on the plus side. But, once I introduced her to my friends, at the time, and they were all stuck-up ass**le Lit majors and they made fun of her and she understood what was going on and her eyes, usually blue, too blue, vacant, were sad. And I protected her. I took her away from them. (“Spell Pynchon,” they asked her, cracking up.) And she introduced me to her friends. And we ended up sitting on some Japanese pillows in her room and we all smoked some pot and this little hippie girl with a wreath on her head, looked at me as I held her and said, “The world blows my mind.” And you know what?



I f**ked her anyway.



PAUL He liked me. He would sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by Frankie Valli. It was on the jukebox at The Carousel in North Camden and he would ask me to play it a lot. The townies would watch us suspiciously, Sean shooting pool, drinking beer, me shuffling over to the jukebox, slipping quarters in it, punching F17, the first strains coming on, shuffling back to where Sean sat, now by the bar, motorcycle helmets propped up by our drinks, and he’d lip-synch it. He even found the single and put it on a tape he made for me when I was in bed with a hangover. It was in a bag he brought over that included orange juice, beer and French fries and a Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s, still warm.



When he didn’t want to go to class and when he didn’t want me to go either and he found it too boring to simply not go and sit around, I’d follow him to the infirmary and once there he would have fake attacks; fairly well-planned and -acted fits and imaginary seizures. He would then receive medicine and the two of us would leave (I’d complain that my migraines were acting up), excused from classes for the day, and we’d go into town to an arcade called The Dream Machine and play this totally anal retentive video game he loved to play called Bentley Bear or Crystal Bear or something like that. Afterwards we’d walk through town together. I’d look around for a double bed and he’d look for cough syrup with codeine in it so he could get high (this was after he smoked all the pot; what a hick, I know, I know). He’d find the cough syrup and actually get stoned on it (“I am hallucinating,” he’d announce) and we’d drive back to campus on his bike as it got dark in the late afternoon. By then, classes had already ended. And back in his room, which was usually a mess (at least his side), I’d sit around and play tapes and watch him stumble around and spin, high. He was always so animated around me, but so reserved and serious in front of other people. In bed, too, he’d alternate between being melodramatically loud and then a parody of the strong silent type: either grunting softly or emitting a weird quiet laughter, then it was suddenly loud rhythmic “yeah’s” or yelling muffled obscenities, on top of me, me on top of him, both of us hungover, the stale smell of beer and cigarettes everywhere, the empty cups with the quarters stuck on the bottom of them scattered around the floor and the always-present odor of pot, hanging thick in mid-air, reminded me of Mitchell strangely enough, but he was already fading away, and it was hard to remember what he even looked like.