Imagine Me and You by Billy Mernit

Author:Billy Mernit
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307407320
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

I crave pizza. I want to gorge myself on thick cheese, spicy sausage, and hot hard crust, as if overloading my taste buds and olfactory nerves could blot out the incessant chatter of my brain, as if the greasy sauce could coat over and quiet the ache in my gut. I get on my bike and pedal furiously down to the pizza place, and while I wait impatiently for my two slices, I sip greedy swallows of sweet metallic Coke, pacing outside the storefront with can in hand, feeling unhinged, unfulfilled, un-everything.

Nearly burn my tongue but catch myself in time. Sit with the slices on the bench outside, glaring darkly at a happy gay couple with their giant dog, the mom with her too-pretty child in a stroller. They all have lives, lives with built-in meanings, while I’m living some senseless simulacrum of one. Thank God for pizza.

Now what? Full, but still empty, I toss my napkin in the can and get on my bike, remembering the pizza Isabella and I shared on Via Borghese, Roman pizzas all the more flavorful when you’re laughing between bites, with the woman who loves you pushing the slice at your face. Now I’ve had the pizza without the love, or at least…what kind of love do I have now? Was it ever really love, if it’s been so easily corrupted? Look at Moony, for chrissake: drug-addled, then crippled, now abandoning a career. That’s what love gets you. I don’t even know what the word means anymore. Fuck love, anyway—

A cat darts across my path as I speed round the corner. I swerve, brake, nearly fall, wobbling madly, adrenaline surging. Blood pounds in my ears, I’m muttering curses as I pull over to the curb. The cat, half a block down, turns back to stare at me with vacant, coal-glitter eyes: What’s your problem?

Score another one for the physical universe, determined to put me in my place. As I wait for my breathing to slow, I can hear the incongruous sound of laughter and a muffled electric guitar and bass. There’s a knot of people smoking and hanging out by the open back door of Bing’s, a former pool hall now gentrified into a hot spot for the martini set that’s tucked into the curve of Abbot Kinney close to Venice Boulevard. Not a place I’ve ventured into for years. But the live music has a mean pulse that piques my curiosity. I lock the bike to a parking sign at the edge of the lot and walk over to have a look. Peering through the doorway, I find my resistance to merriment dissolving as the thump of the bass vibrates through my feet.

The band’s just finishing a set as I take a seat by the wall at the end of the bar. I down the vodka on the rocks I order in two big swallows, and a new clarity descends over the welter of dark emotions I’ve been carrying, like the glass lid of a mason jar locking down, snapping its contents tight.

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