For You

By Andi Rados

You’ll walk outside.

You won’t put on shoes, or straighten up the pillows and yellowing satin sheets on your side of the bed. You’ll open the balcony glass doors which overlook the city streets, alive with early risers.

You’ll see Travis with his balding hair line opening the Coffee Café. Miss Julia will be uncovering her newspaper stand for a day of trying sell maps and postcards labeled Wish you were here! with rolling hills and the Hollywood sign in the background. You will think about the time when I ran down to Miss Julia, and begged to use her cell phone. How crazed I must have looked, with a slight cut shedding a droplet of blood below my right eye, left from your ring ten minutes prior. My hair still half up from the day and my fake eye lash sagging slightly, coming unglued.

After your morning cigarette and survey of the city streets, you’ll come back inside and I’ll pretend to still be asleep. You will water the wilting palms in their pots, and pick at their dying yellow tips. You’ll brew a full pot of coffee next, and even though I prefer tea, I’ll be compelled to drink it so nothing goes to waste.

You will walk around our apartment in your boxer shorts, because it is July in L.A. You claim the heat is the reason we all seem insane these days, and I will blame over population in California. You will pace and pace. I will hear your footsteps but still pretend to be asleep.

We came here on our dreams, four years ago. You never went to college, and I dropped out in my second year. You are a guitar player and I am an artist. You stay up too late writing melodic tragedies that won’t ever leave this one room apartment. I sit on the balcony sketching strangers and tracing power lines on old notebooks and extra paper napkins, counting down the day until I can buy real canvas to work on. The large rigid kind stretched over a wood frame. I hate what I draw on the napkins but you hang them around our home as if they are priceless pieces of art being viewed at The Getty.

I will inevitably open my eyes when I hear the strings of your guitar start to vibrate against the metal frets. My head will throb, while my stomach turns with the sight of the sun shining brightly throughout the room. You will walk to the bathroom sink and take my one crystal wine glass into your hands, perhaps the finest thing I own. There were three more at one point, but we managed to break the others on the nights when we didn’t sleep, sharing a bottle of Rosé and dancing to old 70s rock music until the sun came up. The glasses were a going away present from your mom, given to me along side a check for our first month’s rent in the city. She claimed she would only cover this once, however a check in your name has shown up in our mail box every month since. She must have once been a dreamer too.

You will fill the glass with water and pop the lid off the Aspirin bottle. You will set two pills and the wine glass down by my head on the side table. You’ll run two calloused fingertips over my cheek with one soft stroke and lean down to kiss me. You know I can’t handle alcohol like you can.

When I sit up to inspect my body, I will notice my skin glowing from the moisture collected in this unvented, un-air conditioned, brick building. I will sit up enough to take the Aspirin, a sip of water, and then roll back over diagonally across the sheets. The water will taste like copper. We hate the taste of the sink water, but refuse to spend money on bottled. I will find peace in the melody from your guitar in the corner of the room. There you will sit sipping your coffee on the floor with your eyes closed, picking whatever your fingers choose. I will never tell you this, but I adore you more when you play in this manner compared to any song you sing on stage.

Around 1 p.m. I will unravel myself from the satin sheets, the ones we found at the Rose Bowl Flea Market a year ago. I will stand and try to locate my clothes which were thrown askew across the black and white tile floor due to the animal-like way you couldn’t resist me last night. My black faux leather high healed boots were the first to go and sit two feet apart from each other by the door. The door we are always forgetting to lock. My red slip dress will be closer to the bed and I will pick it up off the ground and hang it over the back of the head board in an attempt to relieve some of the wrinkles from the night prior.

You say you only write great music in the middle of the night, but that’s not true. The only music that’s ever played outside of this room are pieces you’ve written in daylight. You wrote me a song when we first moved in. It had four chords, arranged in a beautiful intricate picking pattern that made the song sound more complicated than it actually was. You’ve never played it for your band, but you whispered it into my ear every night as we fell asleep together for two weeks straight. You sang it in that deep raspy tone, the one that sounds like the words are stuck in your throat, like your pulling them out one by one. When you complain about your throat hurting, I tell you to stop smoking. You say it’s what gives you your signature voice.

You will stop playing only to watch me walk to the bathroom. I will feel embarrassed and try my hardest not to look in the bathroom mirror, it’s cloudy and scratched anyway. I will find a bra and a cropped tank top in a pile of clothes by the toilet. The pile that you keep telling me you’ll take to the laundromat. But you also said I’d sell an art piece by June and that hasn’t happened either.

I will pull on a pair of ripped jeans, not because I bought them that way, but because I fell one night on a walk home from a bar you were playing at. You dared me to walk on a ledge of a concrete planter box, like a gymnast on a beam. Except I wasn’t a gymnast, and you weren’t there to catch me. You took off your sweatshirt and used it to mop the blood from my knees. A good amount of crimson trickled down my legs, but we both stared at each other and laughed as if we were watching another Friends rerun like we did on the few nights you don’t play. Drunk with glee and too many shots of whiskey to feel physical pain.

I will brush my dark brown hair that ends at the top of my neck with my fingers. I cut it with the kitchen scissors when the temperature started hitting triple digits. You hate that I did that; you loved my long hair. But in a rare act of rebellion, I decided not to care. I will hold a hair tie in between my teeth, because I am convinced this is more efficient than setting it on the rim of the sink. I will pull my hair up and splash cold water on my face in an attempt to scare away the looming hangover. I will finally look in the mirror, rest my elbows on the faucet, and try to pop the black heads that appeared over night on my face. I will poke my eye three times trying to put on mascara from a tube that is more than likely empty. I will put on rose-colored lipstick, rub my lips in circles against themselves, and smack them together twice.

When I emerge from the bathroom, you’ll still be sitting in the corner on the floor. Your guitar in your lap as before, and you will now be chewing on the end of a pencil with one side of your mouth, and sucking on a Marlboro with the other.  You will have moved the ashtray next to your left leg. The ashtray that I move outside every night after you’ve fallen asleep, hoping you’ll get the hint and stop smoking where we sleep. You’ll tell me some line about how beautiful I look and make some comment about my short hair. I’ll tell you to “shut the hell up,” and throw a pillow in your direction.

And because I’m a hypocrite, I’ll take the cigarette out of your mouth and walk out to the balcony. You told me once that nicotine helps get rid of hangovers and be it power of suggestion or actual science, I feel it helping this morning.

I will grab my apron and slip into my black boots by the door. You will be packing up your guitar and telling me where the band is playing tonight. I won’t tell you how the thought of going out again sounds appalling. I won’t tell you that I’m not feeling up to it, or that I need a break. I will kiss your cheek and tell you I’ll be there. You will grab my ass and I will try not to think about the millions times I told you to stop doing that. I will walk out the door and forget to lock it behind me.

I will work at the café across the street from 2 p.m. till closing. I will listen to Travis, with his thick Spanish accent and middle age tendencies, lecture me about liver health or how sleep deprivation can take years off my life. He will speak about how much talent I have, while I stand behind the counter sketching straws, mugs, whipped cream, and the few customers who remain after the late afternoon rush. He too, will hang my napkin drawings in frames around the café, and swear that “famous celebrities” often drink his coffee. I will look down at my sketches and shake my head in disbelief. I will argue that they aren’t that great and he will remind me of the time I blew off a meeting with an art professor from USC, who saw my hanging napkins, to attend one of your gigs. He’ll tell me how I am wasting my time with “that boy,” and I will nod and say something like, “I’ve got it under control.”

When 10 p.m. hits, and the last hipster with big rimmed fake glasses and overalls leaves, I’ll stack the chairs on the tables and sweep the floors. All the while thinking about why someone would want to wear fake glasses when I had to wear real ones until I turned 13 and discovered contacts.

I’ll say bye to Travis and head back up to the apartment. I’ll change into a top that my mom would call “slutty” and be thankful she doesn’t speak to me anymore. But then the card she sent for my birthday with fifty dollars in it will catch my eye and I’ll feel instant remorse. I will remember the two paint tubes I bought with the money, cadmium orange and yellow ochre, which now sit dried out on the counter by the sink. I used them to paint blooming flowers and cracked leaves on the bathroom wall with my fingers. Our landlord set a can of thick white paint in the hallway by the door after our bi-yearly inspection and you covered my flowers a month later. I’ll make another mental note to call my mother once I start paying for cell service again.

I’ll walk straight through the club’s main floor, slowly being filled with people. I’ll find where you and your band are hiding and feel a slight adrenaline rush when they shout and holler my name as I walk into the back room. It will smell of thick, stale cigarettes and booze. You will greet me, probably perched up on the arm of a couch. You will wrap one arm around me, and leave one around your guitar. The other love of your life. You will kiss me and I will kiss you back and try my best to ignore the faint smudge of black cherry lipstick on your upper lip, a shade I don’t own. You will blabber on about how much you love me. You started drinking hours ago.

I will take the traditional shot for good luck with everyone in the room before you go out to play. It’s never a packed venue, but you and your band treat every performance as if it were the SuperBowl halftime show. I will sit at the bar swirling a glass of whiskey around in my hands as I watch you groan, strum, and try to pull words from your throat and into the mic. Your plain white shirt will hang loosely around your torso and lift gently with your guitar strap, exposing your jeans, which are held up by a single red shoe lace.  I will relax when I see your eyes close and your body twist to the rhythm. You will lose yourself to some unexplainable power and maybe that’s what I love about you.

But then you will sing your last words, take your last bow, and the girls with tight skirts and breasts bigger than mine will come up to praise you. They will run their hands through your golden hair, and I will try not to watch as you scan their bodies up and down, one by one. Their high pitched laughs will make me order another drink. You will tell me later that this is part of the job, and I, slightly intoxicated, will tell you that this is not the life I want anymore.

On some occasions I will ask you about the black cherry lipstick. You will swear that you love me and only me. I will smile and roll my eyes, and neglect to point out that wasn’t the question I asked.

When we get home, you will light the four candles we own, and we will make love. You will fall asleep before me. I will stand and pull on one of your Rolling Stones t-shirts and plaid boxer shorts from the tile floor. I will take the half empty wine bottle from the counter by the sink, and the ashtray from the corner, and walk barefoot onto the balcony. I will set the tray down by the glass door and take a swig of the wine while standing with one knee popped and one straight, leaning against the metal rail covered with cracked white paint, in which I will chip away at using my thumb.

I will look up at the sky and think about how when I was a child I used to lie in my parents’ front yard, trying to find constellations.

“The Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt!” I would shout while I pointed upwards into the dark. My father would praise me and tell me how I was the smartest of my three siblings.

My shoulders will slouch and my vision will blur as I think of the social security card and birth certificate he placed in my hands before I walked out of his house for the last time. When he had given me one last choice, and I had chosen wrong.

“Never come back,” he hissed while my mother sobbed in the background. I wished just for once she would say something in my defense. But she could never stand up to him and that day was no different. I will always remember how your shirt smelled of fresh laundry detergent and Marlboros when I pressed my face into it and cried.

When I look up now, I will only feel the buildings pulsing around me in my inebriated state. I won’t see any stars in sight. They are drowned out by light pollution radiating off the city. How weird, I will think, to be in a place called ‘The City of Stars’ but not actually be able to see real ones in the sky.

I will think about friends who I went to school with, friends I made before I dropped out. Did Jodie ever become a doctor? Is April working at Microsoft yet? And on some especially glum nights, I’ll let myself wonder where I would be if I hadn’t fallen in love with you.

Occasionally I will stare through the glass doors at your sleeping face. You aren’t one of those people who are pretty when they sleep. You look like a drooling dog most of the time, with your mouth hung open and breaths too deep to be peaceful. I imagine you waking up, rising from your slumber, and joining me on the balcony. You would wrap your arms around me and we would sink to the prickly cement ground which would leave little bumpy indents on our knees. I would cry when you started apologizing:

“I’m sorry for that time we fought, when things got out of hand. You ran downstairs, away from me. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m sorry you told people you ran into the door frame in the middle of the night.

         “I’m sorry for the dark cherry lipstick that I can’t deny, and won’t ever tell the truth about.

         I’m sorry you have to put up with me.”

Those words will never leave your mouth, for you will never wake up once you’ve fallen asleep for the night. I will think about how easy it would be, to gather my things and walk out of this apartment. But the noises from the streets will sound loud and vicious as they echo and float up to my ears. I will think about the savings account I keep meaning to start, and the phone I would buy once I obtained a job as an artist. Upon taking another long drink from the wine in my hand, I will laugh at the pure absurdity of the thought. And if I finish the bottle, I will start to wonder if there is no solution at all. I’ll gaze down at the street below, and wonder if you might apologize when tonight my head hits the ground and not the pillow next to yours.

But then that song, my song, that fucking song you wrote and whispered into my ear so many nights ago will echo throughout my thoughts. It will fill my entire body until I cannot feel anything else.

You keep the sun above me, the warmth within me.

                   You keep my world revolving, while my earth is shattering.

I’d give you it all if I had it.

         You deserve more than I can hold.

                                     You are all that I will ever hold.

When the moon starts its descent down the backside of the Earth, and the sky begins to glow with orange hues. When the crows bark and land on the power lines. When Miss Julia looks up at me as she arrives at her stand and smiles sympathetically because she knows something no one else does. I will feel like bird trapped in a cage. I will convince myself it’s the alcohol making me think like this. I will wave back to Miss Julia and walk inside, quietly shutting the balcony glass doors. I will strip the t-shirt and boxers and climb into bed next to you, and you won’t ever know I was gone.