Chapter 5/Page 3

We kept the affair secret. The only people who ever knew were my band mates. Had I not lived with them, I might have told them anyway. Some things have to be spoken of out loud to confirm their existence and be fully enjoyed. Best Friend stayed in the dark. We hated lying to her, yet keeping our feelings so close to the vest made them all the more intense. David Bowie said, “The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar.” Amen, to that. Each stolen kiss tasted twice as sweet.

Though keeping our involvement from Best Friend began out of respect for her feelings, soon enough our twisted sense of adventure tapped into the risk factor, resulting in some intense thrill seeking. Every second that circumstances kept us apart, the tension escalated. To sit a breath away from each other and not be able to touch was torturous, yet electrifying (said the master of the obvious). When we finally would connect, it was like two storms hurled together. This was the first time in my young stupid life I shared passion with another person, really. Band mates share a passion for music, but this was a different animal altogether. Music gives back subtle things that you have to mine for. The things the right lover gives you are a lot easier to find. 3a was the right lover and the things she gave me were addictive and distracting. Great -- a new obsession to deal with.

The longer we couldn’t go public, the greater risks we took. We became reckless lovers, tempting fate at every turn. Making our way through a crowded party, we’d walk a half step behind Best Friend, necking and groping. Knowing that we’d be busted if Best Friend simply turned around to ask a question turned us both on. On the ride home, 3a raised the stakes on the finger/leg interplay. The car’s dark interior provided just enough cover that she could summon up a handsome erection in my jeans while idly making shopping plans with Best Friend. Once we arrived at the loft, the girls were a few steps away from the car before they noticed I was trapped behind the wheel.

“What are you doing?” Best Friend asked as they both leaned into the driver’s window. 3a stood slightly behind her and smiled at me as I fumbled for an explanation.

“Nothing,” was all I could muster. 3a took the opportunity to be coy at my expense.

“Are you coming?” She raised her eyebrows innocently, obviously proud of her handiwork and the pun that flew under Best Friend’s radar. Once we got upstairs, the three of us chatted with my band mates in the kitchen. I got 3a back by fingering her under the dining table as she squirmed almost imperceptibly.

We crossed lines. The three-way public flirting continued, if a little lob-sided. 3a’s temperature rose if I got too touchy-feely with Best Friend. She took her revenge one night when I turned my back on them and some guy tried homesteading. Instead of simply blowing him off, 3a flirted aggressively with him for a while and then handed him her phone number jotted on a matchbook. Drove me fucking nuts, but I was too cool (read: proud) to let on. Best Friend went home with her lead singer, who coincidentally showed up at the club that she had suggested. I agreed to drive 3a home. The home I drove her to was mine. I expressed my anger with her from behind and slapped her ass harder than usual.

“Ow! That hurt,” she protested. I’d raised some blood to the surface of her rear end in the shape of my palm.

“That’s what happens when you give your phone number to a guy in front of me.”

For a small girl, she was strong. She rammed backwards into me, knocking me off and out of her, pushed me onto my back and climbed on top of me, which is how she preferred sex.

“You idiot,” she huffed between breaths as she bucked her hips back and forth violently. “It was a fake number,” she admitted. I pushed up to a sitting position with my legs off the edge of the bed. I held her tight around the small of her back, and kissed her roughly.

“Bitch.”

“Asshole.”

She drew blood from my lip when we came.

•••

There was the matter of our sleeping arrangement. We couldn’t suddenly put an end to the nights we all crashed at my place. If for no other reason, we had a habit of getting pretty faced, and it would be dangerous for them to drive the twenty miles home to the suburb where they lived. Truth be told, neither 3a nor I wanted to change it. In the effort to keep our affair from Best Friend, it was our finest hour.

I felt so acutely alive I could barely stand it. My nerve endings were raw and exposed, my senses never at a more heightened state. As complicated as things were, this was truly the happiest time of my life. Complication was yet to really introduce itself. But it soon would.

•••

Seeing each other got a little easier. 3a started college in town and her dorm was not far from my loft. On nights when the three of us couldn’t get together, two of us could. Convenience didn’t decrease our passion in any way, however. Spending every possible moment together became essential.

For the first time ever, I was late to a show. It was the result of a last minute decision to get her, even though I knew I didn’t have time to make the round trip after sound check. Every guy in a band gets one tardy, but it doesn’t come free. By the time I finally made it back to the club with 3a in tow, the rest of the band was already on stage. My singing partner mercilessly announced my arrival to the world, taking great pains to point out that I was late because I had gone to pick up my “girlfriend.”

“Why did he say I was your girlfriend?” 3a asked on the drive home, as if she had to. I figured there was no point beating around the bush.

“I guess because you are my girlfriend,” I said.

How strange and quaint that word seemed. It had never come up in conversation before. Odd. Rather than the embarrassment my band mate had intended, his ribbing only served to push us closer together, adding a measure of tenderness between us. We parked outside her dorm and necked. For the first time, instead of unfettered passion, our kisses were slow and deliberately gentle.

“I like being your girlfriend,” she whispered and nibbled into my ear.

All the way home I worried about the precedent I’d set. I was the responsible one in the band. Nothing got in the way of a performance, especially not a girl. That night I couldn’t help myself. What a strange sensation.

•••

I wish I could, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was about. The worst part of being an impulsive, emotional person with a temper is that there’s usually no just cause for using it. The minutiae that set me off usually mean nothing, not even in the middle of my rage. Afterward I benefit from anger amnesia, unfortunately at the expense of some innocent bystander I’ve injured. I will go to my grave not understanding why the three of us got into the fight. All I know is that something happened, I got pissed off, and suddenly I wasn’t speaking to 3a or Best Friend. Things had been so volatile between 3a and I that turbulence was almost a given, tenderness notwithstanding. That doesn’t explain what broke up the trio. But I was young, headstrong, and more than anything, always right. I’m sure it was something very important.

•••

There was a teller at my bank -- exotic, beautiful, and a little mysterious. I always seemed to land at her window. In our small talk I learned that she had already seen my band. I made a point of inviting her to the next show. The night of the show I made a point of seeking her out and chatting her up. Her quiet, distant manner was in fact advanced shyness. She wasn’t given to putting on a happy face without cause, so most men, on first look, went with mysterious, as I did. Women went with “bitch.” Whatever. Once she got talking, I really couldn’t shut her up. Her exotic surface belied somewhat of a Harpo Marxist sense of humor.

She was witty, read incessantly, and was two years more mature than 3a -- another point in her favor at the time.

“Funny how I keep ending up at your window,” I said on a break of an otherwise unmemorable show.

“Yeah, well...”

“Well, what?”

“I sort of time it that way.”

I was flattered. She was invited to the next loft party.

That party ended up one of our wildest. Like West Side Story without the interpretive choreography, two opposing factions of the music community were present: the Punks and the Dinosaurs. Why everybody couldn’t just get along was lost on me. One of the Punks hurled insults at one of the Dinosaurs and the Dinosaur’s evil henchman hurled the Punk down the stairs. Usually I’m the Mr. Fix-it (control issues), but that night I couldn’t be bothered. Bank Teller arrived and I busied myself being charming.

In the cutthroat world of band interpersonal relationships, nothing is sacred. To illustrate that, or perhaps to repay me for an earlier transgression, my band mates invited Best Friend and 3a to the affair. Not to get under my skin. No, my friends just wanted to try their hand at getting into the girls’ pants.

The loft, when fully opened into the public areas, was large enough that I didn’t have to encounter the girls up close, but small enough that I could give them a real good death glare. I was, after all, still angry about something. They looked like sad puppies and made a hasty exit. My friends didn’t get to fuck them.

I found a quiet spot and got to know Bank Teller better. We shared the same taste in music, thrift store fashion, and bad local restaurants.

“Okay,” I said, “We shop at the same stores and eat at the same restaurants and go to the same movie theater. Why have I never seen you before?”

“Must be my winning personality,” she deadpanned.

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “A lot of people don’t notice me.”

“I think you’re lying about going to all these places. I would have noticed you.”

“You didn’t notice me at your shows.”

“You have a point there.”

“Can you see it,” she asked, running her hand across her head, “I thought my hair covered it.” I laughed.

She was a cat person. The warehouse’s guard cat, Fear, had mysteriously stopped using his litter box. The landlord wasn’t amused when he finally got around to shoveling out that big ol’ dirt pile he’d been saving in the basement. Fear took to Bank Teller immediately and rubbed his body all over her legs to assert his ownership of her.

The party raged on into the morning. Bank Teller fell asleep on my bed. I curled up on the antique dentist’s chair the previous tenant left behind, but thoughts about the girls kept me awake. I drank till I passed out.

Bank Teller was less complicated than 3a. She was just as opinionated, but not as adamant about expressing herself. 3a was in a stage of life where everything was about challenging what she knew and what she thought others knew, as well. Bank Teller’s relative calm was a welcome respite from the turmoil I’d been living in. That’s not to say she was boring or didn’t have her fair share of internal storms. But over the next few weeks, it was very easy to get wrapped up in her distraction. So wrapped up that before I knew it, she’d become 3b.

•••

Fate is a motherfucker and Timing is its snotty-nosed asshole cousin.

When I heard 3a's voice on the other end of the phone line, my breath halted for a second.

“Whatever I did, I’m sorry,” was her opening shot. She followed it up with a powerful one-two combination.

“I miss you. I love you.”

Fuck, shit, piss. Now what? She blind-sided me. By that point the thing I had been angry over was breathing its last in my memory. The three of us kissed and made up. Best Friend knew that 3a initiated our reunion, but she still had no clue to the depth of our relationship. In whatever conversations they had during our break, 3a held her tongue about that.

The months that followed stand as the most gut-wrenching, trying times of my life. I split my time between 3a and 3b, but I was never sure if I’d found a real footing with either.

Meanwhile, the band had reached a Mexican standoff with the rest of the world. We’d sold enough records independently that today would bag a major label deal. This was before the majors viewed the indie market as a viable commodity. We hit number two on college charts. Again, before anyone apparently knew that college radio had a sizable audience. We played our last show to 5,000 fans. The major label act that preceded us couldn’t hear their own instruments over the crowd shouting our name. We were on fire in our area, and the majors couldn’t have cared less. I decided to get out before I got too old. California beat New York in the coin toss. Suddenly I had plans to make, and choices. So many choices.

I still have a hard time owning up to everything I did leading up to the move to Los Angeles. More than anyone I knew, I was fucked up in the head. I couldn’t begin to tell you what broken Magic Eight Ball I was using for guidance. I was in love with two girls. There was passion for both of them. What tipped the scales? I dared not say it out loud.

3a’s parents had moved to a small town outside Chicago. Pre band break up, I dropped her off at the train station (how romantic is that?) for a holiday visit. She clutched me and whispered a teary “I love you” before she disappeared into the station.

“Wow,” one of the other guys in the band van said. “What are you going to do?” I shrugged my shoulders, suddenly remembering I wasn’t alone. I loved 3a and 3b, but I wasn’t doing justice to either.

Ill equipped to handle the situation and with no one I could turn to for advice, I started freaking out. I desperately needed something -- anything that made sense. There had to be something that would make the decision clear. I began treating 3b poorly in hopes that would scare her away and I wouldn’t have to make the decision. 3a was treated to an earful about her age.

“You’re too young to get involved in a serious relationship,” I decreed.

“I know what I want. I want to be with you.”

“Maybe now. But I couldn’t take it when you get curious about other guys and leave me,” was my brilliant excuse for pushing her away. I was twenty-three and so much older and wiser than her. I knew everything.

I didn’t know shit. If I had, I would have known that all my actions and decisions were born of fear. Fear of making the wrong choice; fear of being the bad guy and hurting one of the two girls I loved; fear of the hurt I’d be in for if I was right about 3a; fear of the responsibility attached to this decision. I was so lost.

Ultimately it was Best Friend who tipped the scales for me. My decision to move was finalized. We went out alone for the first time since 3a’s seventeenth birthday.

“Have you asked her to move to California with you?”

“Who?” I temporarily forgot she didn’t know about my other triangle, but caught myself. “No, no I haven’t.”

“You should. You two are good together.”

She was right. 3b were good together. 3a and I were also good together, but had a turbulent relationship that had the potential of ending very badly. I didn’t get that feeling with 3b. Fine, but how stupid was that, predicting the future? Could I grasp at any shorter straws? Best Friend had no idea what I was doing to her words in my head. Had she known the whole story, she may have said something entirely different.

If I couldn’t put off the move, I should have gone to California myself and let the chips fly where they may. If either 3a or 3b really wanted to be with me, they’d find a way. Why did I let Best Friend’s comments make this decision for me? I was a pussy, that’s why. The responsibility for the choice was no longer mine. Her comments, however uninformed, got me off the hook.

The night before we were to move, I met friends for farewell drinks at one of the clubs I had played in residence. 3a hovered across the room.

“Hi,” I said sheepishly when I got over to her. She wasted no time wrapping her arms around my neck.

“Take me, don’t take her,” she pleaded softly as she clung tight to me. Her tears dotted my shoulder.

•••

We crossed southern Utah under a magically bright moon. The road was ours alone for a hundred miles. The air had residual heat and the sound of the tires on the road lulled me into an alpha state. As we wound through the red cliffs that rose to meet the starry sky, a huge white owl appeared and broke my daydream. The beautiful bird dove down out of nowhere and snatched up a prairie dog right in front of us. I started to call out, but the moment was over before I could utter a syllable. I let 3b sleep and turned my eyes back to the road. My thoughts drifted back to one night on the stairs outside my loft. I was hypnotized by a bit of uncertainty, a snap of electricity and a moment of adjustment. And when I came to, we had made St. George.

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