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

Gimme some lovin'

For You, The Stars
Chapter Fifteen: I Can’t Walk You Out
Installment 1

Cecilia and I never officially broke up. We just started seeing each other less and less often. The weekend after I got back from New York I went up to Marin to hang out with her. It was like old times but it was different. She was different. It occurred to me that when she had been new to the west coast, when I was a familiar face, her older sister’s trusted friend, she had relied on me to help her get oriented and to invent her new persona, a Deadhead party girl. Now she was established and though we sat around the same way and did the same things, even talked about the same things, she wasn’t nearly as focused on me. She had another life “out there” and I wasn’t part of that.

We both knew that I had changed too. I had a new job. I was outgrowing my tiny room. To be perfectly crass about it, I was becoming enamored of more interesting women. Cecilia had been everything Simone had not, and our whole experiment with a totally open, totally honest relationship was in many ways a success. It definitely fixed what had been wrong between me and Simone, which was mainly me telling her what she wanted to hear even when it was a lie. Worse, it had been me lying to myself about who I was and what I was capable of.

With Cecilia, I didn’t lie to her and she didn’t lie to me. Sometimes the truth hurt. She was honest that her last boyfriend was better looking than me, taller, in better shape. I didn’t want to hear that but I didn’t want some bogus fairytale story about how I was her first and only or the love of her life. I knew that wasn’t true. I’m not saying I didn’t fall in love. I did. And I never really fell out of love. It’s more like it just got dissolved in a much bigger solution until finally it didn’t have any cohesion any more.

I still wanted her too, physically. My last time up in Marin, because this was my last time, we slept together like nothing had changed. Like she hadn’t stopped rejecting the other guys she flirted with, like she hadn’t banged one or possibly two roadies in a situation that ended up being a little beyond her control, like she wasn’t now fooling around with this Evan guy. One last time it was just the two of us and she was just as playful as ever. She knew I liked the soft feeling of her lingerie and she tried rubbing it on me to see how that would feel. I realized that it didn’t work that way. Silky nylon fabrics were nice when there wasn’t a warm flesh and blood person to enfold me but it was totally redundant, really a distraction when there was. Still, I liked her flexibility and the fact that even right up to the end she was trying new things.

Sometimes I’d been frustrated with her inability to come. She still hadn’t solved that problem and I knew I never would. I didn’t blame her of course but it was this constant reminder that sex meant something different to her than to me. Or maybe it was worse, maybe it reminded me that sex meant the same thing to me that it meant to her. That it wasn’t about the actual lovemaking, or call it fucking if your prefer, but about the seduction and the capture, the attention and the validation through the gaze of another. Maybe it was all just a game.

We had planned to go to Laguna Seca all year. The Dead had played a weekend in 1987 down at the race track way south of the Bay and those shows had stood out for me as a high point of my California Deadhead career. It’s not that they were necessarily the best played shows or the ones with the rarest songs or most sublime moments of improvisation and serendipity. It was the setting as a whole, a holistic thing. It was the warm summer weather. The shows had been in May in ‘87 and the weather had been perfect. Cooling fog had burned off in the morning and the days had been warm and sunny, the evenings balmy and comfortable.

Beautiful west coast college students with perfect bodies and perfect tans bobbed and danced all up and down the side of the hill and even the dirt surfing tour rats looked their best, skipping and dancing along to Scarlet Begonias. At one moment a cool breeze rippled down the hillside and a wave of ahhhh crested through the crowd until even the lead guitar briefly bobbed on the same current. The whole cosmic oneness thing the Dead were famous for was fully in effect.

The fried calamari at the concession stand was good too.

On top of that Bruce Hornsby, whom we didn’t really know, opened, and his band played a credible, circa Europe ‘72 cover of China Cat Rider, and then Ry Cooder also brought his band blinking out the LA club scene to play a set each day with an amazing all-male five-part gospel harmony backing group.

At night, they filmed the famous Touch of Grey video that ended up being a hit on MTV later that year, the one where the band morphed into skeletons. They invited a bunch of us to hang out all evening as they lip-synched to the recently released single and asked us to act like, well, Deadheads, in the audience.

We talked about those shows for the rest of the year and when ‘88 Laguna Seca Daze (so named for the fortuitous initials) concerts were announced we got our tickets in advance. Cecilia and I were planning to go of course but then as we started not seeing each other so much I wasn’t sure what the plan was going to be. That last time I was up in Marin with her she said, “Sure, of course I still want to go,” and I thought that was kind of cool.

Problem was Laguna Seca was in July in ‘88. Much hotter. The whole scene was way overcrowded. Word had gotten out. Cecilia drove down with her crusty old cousin and once again I was struck by the eerie feeling that I was looking at a future version of Cecilia herself, presuming she didn’t gave up on her oft-stated plan of not living past thirty. We shared a tent and the first night we were there I rolled over and put my arm around her, expecting that we would get it on.

She shrugged me off. She didn’t really explain anything, except to make a sort of exasperated sound like, “Duh, don’t you realize we’ve broken up,” except we had never said so and I wasn’t sure what was different now from just a few weeks earlier. But I couldn’t argue with chemistry or lack thereof. I was a little disappointed, just like I might be any time I was expecting to get laid and did not, but I could really argue with it. Not only was it of course her right to say no anytime she wanted, but I knew that I was on autopilot, that any screwing would have been perfunctory, that we were over and I should have known it the same way she instinctively did. Not that I regretted giving it one last shot.

Still we kept talking, although not as often. Cecilia did manage to enroll in the College of Marin that fall. One day she told me she was having trouble writing a research paper and I jumped at the chance to help. Being smart, that was my specialty. I told her, “Why don’t you come over on Saturday and we’ll sort it out.” At this point I had no ulterior motive. I was completely into the idea of just being friends. I was with Giselle by then anyway.

She came over on Saturday afternoon with her book bag and asked for a beer, like nothing was different. We hung out in the livingroom listening to music and getting caught up. She was enjoying school but not her classes. She liked meeting people but she definitely didn’t look forward to two and a half more years of college. Finally I told her that we should probably take a look at her paper.

She hauled out some books and her notepad and showed me the part she was supposed to be writing about. She had no idea how to highlight. There were pages and pages basically full of yellow magic marker, as if she had not been paying attention at all. I got a handle on the topic and started trying to figure out a way she could tackle her paper, which only needed to be five or six pages, really.

Meanwhile she was pacing around the room with her third beer. I started trying to explain how to think things through and how to figure out a topic and a thesis statement for the paper, how to outline it, how to write the first sentence, and so on. I offered to take a look at her first draft and give her feedback.

“Can’t you just write it for me?” she said.

Maybe at one time I would have. There was definitely a time when I probably would have done anything she asked, because I wanted her to like me, because she was hot, because of the affection I felt for her. But this was easy. I knew that doing her work for her would be pointless. She’d learn nothing and just end up postponing the next inevitable crisis. Plus, I didn’t want to. I was done with college. This wasn’t really my problem.

“Fuck that,” I said.