Wraith

 

Aug. 6, 1980

 

She slipped into the club as slick as I remembered, all easy movement, no jerks, jumps or stumbles.

 Seeing her again sent me back in time to John's kitchen in West Paterson when she tried to seduce me and I -- like the idiot I was then -- didn't believe it, and was actually insulted by her offer. Her with hair as golden and grand as an magazine model, and skin so pure she might have been porcelin, all motel nights and empty bed mornings.

 She was one of those momuments in my life, a nagging constant reminder that I wouldn't survive well in the jet set, where women like her go home with the man who has the biggest bag of cocaine, or a wallet thick enough to buy her a fur.

 She even looked the same, as if two year wasn't long enough for the night life and the high life and life on the edge to catch up with her. I met her first when she followed the main band in 1978, when Jimmy and John were still partnered up with John and Bob, and both sets played rock and roll pop as Sleeper. She felt sorry for me, I think, being generous enough to want me to go home with her one night, only to have me insult her by issuing her a poem.

 She was humiliated. She thought she was doing me a favor by wanting to sleep with me. But I was so freaked out from being so many years lonely, I couldn't do anything but attack.

 After that, she thought I was funny, in a nasty sort of way, though in 1979 she used to beep at me when she passed me in her little yellow VW bug. I was then jogging daily up River Road in Garfield. I didn't even know it was her until later when I began to roadie for the John and Bob band after the breakup, and she floated into one of the bars, still the star, still smooth as dry ice, nodding at me, asking me how I was while her eyes laughed.

 Now, in 1980, she comes to visit the Jimmy and John show, their band playing the old dive in Cedar Grove, and me, visiting the band during the summer break from school, me working daily on a loading dock, ashamed that I've done no better in these two years, me with nothing more than a lie to brag about, telling her that the New Yorker intended to pick up one of my pieces of fiction when I knew she knew better, and her eyes were still laughing, and I felt so small I could have melted through the floor boards.

 For some reason, I needed to appear important in her eyes, and failed because my lie made me seem even less important than I was, making me more needy than that first time, making me want to cry out to her for a second chance, when I so badly bumbled the first, she, one of the two Micheles I once thought I cared about, the one I lusted after, the one who I could have had and didn't know not to blow it, standing again in the Red Baron before her, and her laughing eyes. And me, wanting to see her in another decade, when time and cocaine has stolen some of her beauty, making her more accessible, making her more human. How can any man hope to make love to a goddess? Or make an impression, when she isn't impressed with anyone but herself? And maybe, time won't hurt her the way it does most barflies, giving her a second shot at a man like me, a man who won't just take her home to fuck her brains out, but to love and cherish her.