Your Nostalgia is Killing Me by John Weir

Author:John Weir
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636280301
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Marc and I never got to our breakfast place in Silver Lake. Instead, we stopped at a 7-Eleven on Western Avenue for caffeine and candy bars, and then let the freeways absorb us, like characters in a novel by Joan Didion, managing our anomie and dread on highway entrance and exit ramps, surrendering to weekend traffic and the refuge of the road. Now and then, we were spilled out onto surface roads where we aimed for the closest landmark and swarmed it like tourists. We saw the James Dean statue in Griffith Park. We visited the Watts Towers and Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica. We were halfway to Joshua Tree before we realized we had strayed too far from home. Marc got control of his fleet car, which seemed to jet forward without his input, and we circled back to Wilshire Boulevard.

An hour before the gala Saturday night opening of Marc’s show, we were sitting on a bench in the La Brea Tar Pits, near a statue of an elephant trapped in tar and sinking to her death, while her baby stood at the shore crying and stretching its trunk like a lifeline. Past them was a swamp of sucking tar deceptively covered by a wading pond. Oil and methane gas bubbled up through the water.

“Shimmering surface, terrifying subtext,” I said. “Los Angeles must be a Gemini.”

“It’s impossible to talk to you,” Marc said. “Astrology! You’re shallower than I am.”

“I’m empty inside,” I said, willing to indict myself if it helped Marc hate me. He needed a new muse, someone else to lose and lament.

“You’re not just empty inside, you’re empty outside,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “My favorite kind of empty.” And then he was crying. A cloud cover spread across the sky as quickly as in time-lapse photography, and it started, lightly, to rain. I watched droplets one by one staining the thin white skin of Marc’s cigarette.

“After you left,” he said, “after you left without leaving, after your virtual departure, I watched self-help TV. Twenty-four hours a day. Oprah, Dr. Phil. Cable-access AA. I followed the steps. I let go and let God. I forgave you not for you, but for me. It worked for everyone else. Angry couples from Ohio sat in leather armchairs and told each other they were moving on, while Oprah beamed. I couldn’t move on. I wanted Oprah to beam at me. I wanted to take you on Dr. Phil and hear him say, ‘That dog don’t hunt,’ while we both looked at you and frowned. Nothing worked. Everyone else in America is moving on but me. I still love you. I still miss you.”

“It’s not supposed to rain here,” I said. “False advertising.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“I listen to you everywhere I go, Marc. You have colonized the airwaves of every trendy hotspot in Lower Manhattan.”

“Why don’t you shop somewhere else?”

“Why don’t you find someone else to, you know, ‘hurt you into poetry’?”

“You could at least say you’re sorry. I know that sounds prosaic.

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