Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Dude, where's my car?

As Alex shut the last door to Dimov’s apartment complex, he remembered with a twist at his side that he had wanted to tell him that parking in West Hollywood was a bitch.  He came to the front of the sidewalk facing a tight line of cars and remembered absolutely nothing of where he had parked his car.

Sighing, he began the skipping saunter down the inclined sidewalk.  Every couple feet, the pavement was broken by tree roots into slipshod tents. The dark rustled with the piney scent of the cypresses and the distant uprising of laughter from somewhere among the amber window views.

He did not want to think about Dimov demanding things, deciding things. Sex with him was nice, the unforgiving, relentless brutality of it, but everything else around it was bullshit. Why bother with bullshit when you could have the most splendid of life’s pleasures for free? Headlights rushed upon him, expanding a glare over his face and neck, and then retreated upwards to where glittering dark of the road met with the inky outlines of the Hollywood Mountains. 

With the passing of a stray headlight, Alex’s feeling sunk to gloomier angrier depths. The sight of Dimov, bending over his knees, looked hollowed out was unacceptably upsetting. Yes, it pained him a little. He liked to think he was a fun guy with sprightly humors.  And the tingling fact of this paining him ruffled him more.  These sorts of things were not supposed to his concern; rather he had no time to spare over humble feelings of hurt. It defeated the purpose of cost-free sex. But he was pained, and he did care, and there really was nothing he could do about it. Shrugging, he resigned himself to Dimov, boulder shoulders, stone muscles, being just a bad delicate egg. Bummer.

He came to four way stop, still mumbling unsurely about his car.  The sounds of cars swift over the main road was closer now, and he could see down the road the fluorescent white silhouettes of a storefront.  His phone rang in his pocket.  It was his father, David.

“Hey, I’m not disturbing you?” The husky baritone flooded over the phone.

Alex grimaced at his father’s indecorous formality. “No. Looking for my car as we speak.”

“Em … Is Frank walking?”

“For graduation you mean?  Yeah. His family has a whole she bang planned.”

 “I take it you’re also walking then…”

 Alex wondered eerily by what escalator of logic did David arrive at that conclusion.  “Actually I’m not. Mom doesn’t seem keen on it.”

 “Well, we’d like you to walk.”

The “we” hovered morosely over Alex’s ears.  Would Susan absolutely love him taking pictures with David’s twenty-something girlfriend?  His pace quickened as his thoughts yo-yoed between yes and no. Finally, bleeding sweat under a streetlight of the main road, he said, “I’ll talk to Mom about it.

 David ended the conversation with lunch plans, leaving Alex dumb and stupid at the traffic lights. At one point in his life, he had counted on David being nothing more than a lamp fixture in the living room, turning on and off according Susan’s nagging about the garbage.  David did not contest or praise his homosexual thoughts on anything, and he did not care for his straight opinions on anything either. So it was surprising when soon after the divorce, David invited him out to lunch.  These morphed uneasily into monthly affairs in an establishment with menu offerings of canned food and plastic cheese. He could not find the wherewithal to refuse or to suggest another restaurant.  Since David suffered the awkwardness of asking, he might as well suffer David’s knife screeching against the dinner plate. 

 But fascinating insights did occur during these lunches. He could still remember when David burst out of his wall of silence and asked him how his mother was doing. He replied a curt, “fine.” Alex supposed ‘fine’ covered Susan wobbling against the walls, wheezing by stairwells, fainting in hallways. But his father went to say, “I know your mother makes noise about the University of Chicago being far away and expensive, but if that’s what you want to do, then that’s what you want to do.”