All Tomorow's Parties

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Cool nights wait, hanging with cool breath above the pine trees. It’s the way the light streams down on the girls and boys spread out on this noontime grass, knowing that they feeling summer dying, but still seeing the sun in their own bodies, me feeling it too, and them not knowing that I feel or exist or wonder about them. The sun crosses my face, the afternoon glides away on the wide back of the river and my eyes are steeped in summertime slipping away - the water stretching out blithely across the cool sand of the shore and pulling back down a slope of wet sunlight ripples, the rotted tree roots reaching in to damn up small dark pools where twigs sits in foamy waiting, the mosquitoes dancing on the stagnated surfaces. Salty drops drip from the oil-wet skin of lake-cool bodies that run back to beach towels knotted with burs.

Across the shore, cold shadows recess into a serpentine rock face stained a dying green, chewed cobwebs in its old crevices. Pine needle shingles slope shifting up to fresh tar highways where cedars fall and split into fresh lumber yellow. It is Sunday afternoon – duffel bags trip the entrances of A-frame cabin and warm wishes bleed into scratchy camp t-shirts.

She comes down to sit a few paces off. Smiling slight, long-legged and amazing, the light christening her forehead, her bare freckled shoulders under the colors of the afternoon dripping away from the tall pines. She lays her chin on a smooth cupped palm, somehow still only half unconcerned with the buses that pull into the gates, ready to take her home. Her skin bright, her hair auburn, her eyes focused on a chewing gum wrapper. One of her friends appears from the woods, saying loud and rushed that no one will ever believe what had just happened, but it doesn’t impress her enough. Slowed down calm.

The second musses her dirty blonde hair, slumps down beside her. And now I watch more of her mystery unravel for when, tilting her head back onto one shoulder, flicking the sand with a stick and a grin, the careless one makes some lazy joke about death, the quiet beauty answers appreciatively with a mischievous smile. It isn’t enough though, to assuage the doubts of her follower who now claws desperately for approval, swearing and daring this fucking unfathomable bright world to come take her but it is a gesture, a movement towards commonality that I intently watch from a lumpy knoll, cross-legged and boring, brooding unsuccessfully in the honest sunlight. I want to be taken notice of – blessed by some distant deference. I want to tear the still backdrop of the afternoon in half, be the last Californian hero.

But somewhere in my thoughts is my sad return to the saran wrap sky of the San Fernando valley, scooped under a tupper-ware lid of sweaty edges and dead weight. It will be me again, walking the stuffy boulevards of car dealerships and porn studios. She is the natural and I am embarrassed. Since we were eight years old, my step-father’s wildly successful 50s themed diner has paid for these two weeks – my lame childhood memories, my distant tries. I tried to tell him that you can’t hide two months of slave labor wages and sad meals of left-over Monroe burgers that have left me pudgy and humiliated under an ill-fitting summer camp t-shirt, you can’t hide pizza face acne under sunscreen. But still I think I could visit her in those shadowy hallways of Studio City, with her thin-wristed hill and city crowd, Mulholland Drive and its tight laps over secret ridgelines. We would gather up the sprawled glimpses of the city light fantastic and all tomorrow’s parties waiting to be cradled like wine glasses in living rooms open to the end of summer. My old life will lay behind me in that cooped up valley – all the mediocrity and shame, swathed in p.e. clothes, miserably diarized on cartoon cat stationary.

But now she gets up to leave, her long figure disappearing into the woods toward the bark tree hall and its broken bell, down pine needle carpets of pitter-patter paths crowded in by white-washed stones. She passes other admirers but it will not be enough – soon she will grow tired of bunk beds and bonfires without handshake drugs and bottomless excess and suddenly I know I will never see her again.