A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

One more star sinks in the past

For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 4

Though we could see that our affair was finite (and I started thinking in terms of that word “affair” - it felt very grownup and old-fashioned and even romantic to me) if anything we were getting along better than ever these days. I think as we were maybe preparing ourselves to ease apart we were reaching a kind of level of comfort and friendship that I would compare to siblings if that didn’t have unfortunate overtones in Cecilia’s case. We were becoming companionable. At the same time she was making new friends, through Sheena and on her occasional trips to Lake Berryessa that I never went on. I could tell she was establishing herself and becoming just a little bit less dependent on me for a social life. She was talking about going back to school, maybe enrolling in the College of Marin in the fall.

But it’s not like we were literally getting ready split. If anything, we were continuing to plan ahead, getting tickets for summer stadium shows and for the big weekend concerts down at Laguna Seca. We still went out together in the city several nights a week. I was less and less interested in my work and didn’t mind coming in late, taking long lunches, skipping Mondays and Fridays, wandering around the tenderloin when I was supposed to be working. I pretty much lived for our nights out, and Cecilia kept meeting interesting new people through her flirting ways. She had a long conversation with one of the guys who organized the loft parties and he told us interesting stories about who he had to pay off and how the whole thing was getting a little too underworld for him. She said maybe we should try to organize one when she learned that this guy sometimes took in several thousands buck a night in profit, but I laughed that off. Not only did I have no time for that kind of thing but I knew that we both lacked the organizational skills required to pull it off.

We kept getting invited to afterparties and late night raves. She met this muscleman type guy, not too much taller than me, with a thinning blond ponytail down to his ass and built like a steroid user, who told her that he sometimes performed in an underground sex show at parties in people’s houses. She swore he wasn’t hitting on her. He was vague, too, about whether it was really a full-on kinky hardcore kind of thing or more like himself in thong and a girl in a bikini oiled up and doing a kind of sensual dance together. Either way, the idea of watching this guy “performing” didn’t appeal to me at all. Cecilia tried to interest me by pointing out that the stripper type he would do it with was likely to be hot, but then the dude ruined it by bragging about her huge fake boobs. These things seemed to be everywhere suddenly. Utterly unrealistic hard plastic breasts shaped liked perfect spheres. Who was into that, I wondered? I guess it was guys like this, from the way his eyes lit up as he gestured with his hands as if molding torpedos into blunt round shapes chest high in front of himself.

On the other hand, I was kind of curious about what kind of people would host a party like this or show up to it. It sounded like the realm of ultra-hipsters trying to be ironic more than any kind of old-school Mitchell Brothers type San Francisco decadence circa the 1970s.

She ended up going to one of these parties with Sheena on a night when I was busy and told me about it afterward. She was actually sort of disappointed. The people there were cool, yes, but not that radical. “They kind of reminded me of you,” she said. “They had jobs.” Also, the party went really late and the main performance kept getting delayed. Finally her friend and his partner did their show on a plastic tarp. She said it wasn’t really that erotic. People kind of hooted or kept talking to each other. The whole thing took place in a little apartment with just three or four rooms. There was a cash bar in the living room and some pretzels and nuts. She said it ended up being pretty boring and around 3 pm she and Sheena went out to one of the late night bars to dance until they started serving again.

If anything this reassured me. The thing was demystified and instead of sounding like Caligula it came off more as a kind of intellectual prank. I kind of wished I had gone just so I could brag about it. Also, the bodybuilder guy really hadn’t been hitting on Cecilia. He seemed to be dating the stripper anyway.

Then Cecilia told me about another party that was in the Gomer neighborhood, right by the same apartment on Judah up by Parnassus Way that we’d been to just a month or so before. As the events got later and later and took place in smaller and smaller venues, basicallly just someone’s home eventually, I found it a lot harder to just show up and hang out. I wasn’t good with total strangers and I wasn’t good in intimate surroundings. I remember at one of those parties pushing by some huge guy to get into the kitchen where the kegorator was and hearing the guy say to his friend, “Hey, look, it’s Woody Allen,” or at least I thought that’s what I heard him say. Do I look that nerdy? I thought to myself. Is my hair thinning that obviously? Is it my glasses? I need new glasses. I told Cecilia and she said I was being ridiculous. “Would I let you look like a nerd?” she asked me. “Your glasses are fine.”

As my hair got longer I was slicking it back off my forehead. We both agreed that there was nothing wrong with losing your hair as long as you didn’t comb it over the top of push it forward to try to hide it. That was just pathetic. She said I was going to look like Jack Nicholson if my temples kept receding and that that was totally cool. I tried to believe her although I knew no one would ever mistake me for Jack, and not just because I lacked the killer squint.

Still, I let her drag me out to yet another one of those parties. We had a buzz on and had trouble finding the right place till me noticed noise and light coming from the third floor of an apartment on the downhill side of the street. “That must be it,” I said, pointing. We crossed the street and only then noticed the little brass numbers screwed into the cement fake stucco by the entrance. They matched what she had jotted down on the inside of a matchbook.

The front door was propped open so we barged in and headed up the stairs. The walls and ceiling of the staircase had these little glittery bits of something embedded in them. We were tripping slightly, I think on x, so that was no doubt exaggerating the gleam, making the walls sparkle. There was something very late fifties about the idea of little pointed starbursts or whatever they were in the wallpaper.

I put on a heavily exaggerated New Yorker accent like something out of Ralph Kramden and said, “For you, my darling, when you’re with me, the stars will always be shining, up in the sky, all day, every day, for you.” I drew it out, reeling out each phrase like a cheesy suitor trying to impress his best gal. “For you, the stars will shine down, from up in the sky, when you’re with me, shining every where you look, every day, for you.” Cecilia was cracking up at my impression of some stereotype thought neither of us really knew where it came from. “For you,” I kept going, “the stars, will shine, t’rough t’ick and t’in, like diamonds, shining down on you, where you go, when you’re with me, the stars, kid, will keep on shining.

“Stick with me and the stars will shine,” I kept pointing out the twinkles as we stopped on the stairs, both out of breath from laughing, “for you. There will be stars, where ever you go, shining down, from all around you, when you’re with me, kid, for you. For you, the stars will always shine.” I just kept going. Tiny variations, slapstick bravado, a kernel of true feeling, confusion of our senses. We finally sat on stairs looking at each other and just laughed and laughed.