cheeto puffs and cigarettes part II: they met indoors

Who she wanted to be

Who she was

She met him in a room. She didn’t remember which room, but she remembered the meeting took place indoors. He wore glasses that made his eyes look bigger than they were, which also made his capacity for listening, a sense of eagerness, appear magnified as well.  This was misleading, she later found out. He was not very much interested in her or what she had to say at all.

He did introduce her to a life of petty crime – stealing gummy worms out of the jar at Tug’s Candy Shop down on Main Street, pocketing small items as big as her palm at vendors on the Venice Boardwalk, and swiping bags of Cheeto Puffs off the counter at, well, any drug store, really. Cheeto puffs had become her vice now. They reminded her of something, but she wasn’t sure what. It was just a feeling - a mixture of excitement and comfort, the perfect combination. She smiled every time she saw that overzealous, egomaniacal cheetah staring back at her behind his big black shades. She smiled because she had given something ordinary, significance. And she felt quite profound whenever she did that.

His name was Pete, and he told her a story once – about how he had stolen a bag of Cheetos, the regular kind, when he was 10 years old. This immediately bonded them in a way she could not describe. Who knew that some chemically enhanced, metallic orange snack food could bind two vastly different people together?

Unfortunately, for both, the crunchy treat proved insufficient, and was not the glue that kept the two lovebirds together. She had wanted to play the role of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. Luring the suave detective to her. But that was all a pipe dream that never came to fruition. According to him, she only shared insanity and intensity with Astor’s character. She lacked the intrigue, the seduction, the power. All qualities she could easily acquire and maintain if she wasn’t so damn accessible and desiring of love and attachment and warm embraces underneath the pier and cotton candy kisses and tender touches and giddiness about silly things and...oh femme fatales are not romantic! She had to remind herself. The femmes are cold and cruel, that’s how they get their men. She had to accept that she was not like that. And maybe it’d be the true crime to change. She could not eat her mate after sex. No. She could only cuddle.

She sat out on her grand-mother’s balcony, inhaling the nicotine, feeling it pollute her lungs, the disintegration of her whiteness, the impurity escape and transcend through her. She was staying with her grand-mother now, in the apartment she had once called her home and now called her celestial palace, with much sarcasm. The apartment was blue and that’s all you really need to know about it. She looked up at the stars and back down at her shaking, trembling fingers attempting to grasp the cigarette in a “cool” way. But it wasn’t cool. It was desperate. 

Looking up at the sky, however, made her feel strangely calm. Listening to the silence that wasn’t silent, all the quiet sounds suddenly became illuminated. The snicker across the street in the neighbor’s yard, the sexual panting next door, the typing of a keyboard, a distant bicycle whizzing by into the late night. But it was the moon. It was the moon that really soothed her. No, she didn’t believe in God. But she believed in Him. The man in the moon.

He watched her, looking down from his pasted position in the blackened sky peppered with salted stars.  He smiled at her sadly when she was in despair, wishing she would just hush. He was always gentle, always there, always watching. Always sympathetic, it seemed.

The balcony felt cold and claustrophobic. It kept closing in and in until she filled the entire rectangular space, the entire block, the entire town, the entire world with her thoughts and her feelings that she couldn’t rid herself of even when she talked it through with her grand-mother, her therapist, her friends, her former lovers (why did she fucking tell them?). Why wasn’t talking it through enough? GET OUT OF MY SYSTEM, her mind cried. But her system remained full. At all times. Like a beat boy’s blaring boom box – straight out of the 90’s.

She stared at the white circular pattern outlining the balcony - the barriers, as she saw them. Preventing her from coming and going, from leaving at will, protecting her through entrapment. She remembered how her cat would carelessly slither his body in and out between the circles, as if the two-story fall was non-existent. She missed her cat, Bowtie. His purr used to lull her into a rhythmic sleep. She envisioned his small grey face nuzzling into her armpit, and his tail swaying happily as he strutted along, owning that balcony – his very own runway.

Trying to erase this memory and all the others that made her stomach sick, she chomped on her cheeto puffs, ironically, smoked her cigarette, and pretended. She was calm and not claustrophobic and not scared out of her mind and agitated and antsy and sad and yearning and disappointed and stuck in a daily purgatory.

She pretended lots of things. When she was little she played psychologist and would make up stories for invisible patients and write down prescriptions to their problems on a legal pad. Now she pretended to be happy and stable. I suppose they tie into each other quite nicely.

She was fine, just fine. At least that’s what she told the world. At least that’s what her painted veil of a face said to strangers when they first met.  That’s what she told Pete, when they met indoors, in the room. But when he told her to be honest, it was like a lie detector test, and she couldn’t lie and the words came out and her skin came off and he saw her skeleton and her bruised bones and her imperfections and he did not embrace them like they do in romance novels or the movies. He said goodbye. And she cried because she was worried they always would. All she wanted was to hear hello, instead of goodbye. But maybe that was too much to ask.