The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch
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think badly of me. Remember what I told you - Lubbock is dry. So a woman gets … thirsty. And there isn’t much to “hit” in the dead of night, and even if there was you would see it a mile away.
So it was a drive around night. After a while we stopped. And I was drunk as a monkey, and I climbed up onto the shoulders of the Buddy Holly statue in a cemetery-ish park.
The Buddy Holly statue isn’t all that high, by the way. But I was acting like I was king of the world.
The main event was Phillip. Phillip cut the fingertips out of his gloves and played guitar at the base of the Buddy Holly statue. He played the acoustic opening to “ Wish You Were Here.” Which he’d picked out of the sky by ear. He played “Sweet Baby James.” Then he played “Suzanne.” At Buddy Holly’s feet. With a drunk ass blonde lifting her shirt up to the 30 degree night sky going “FUCK ALL Y’ALLLLLLL. EAT ME. WOOOOOOOOOOO.” To no one in particular except Lubbock.
I’d been with Phillip for about a year. How I fell for him was I heard his voice behind my head right after I walked past him in the dorm hall. He had the deepest voice I’d ever heard on a white boy. It was the kind of voice that curled around the top of your spine and jaw and made your mouth open, wanting. In my head was I am so far from my father I am so far from my father I amsofarfrommyfatherIamsofarfrommyfather.
When I turned around, there he was. With shoulder-length locks of hair, thick as shit eyelashes, Moccasin boots, and a guitar.
There he was that night, down in the snow playing “Suzanne.” Singing the night wide open. Me perched atop Buddy Holly sort of cross-eyed, looking at stars and drooling on Buddy’s bronzed head. Even angry girls can be moved to tears.
There are two reasons for us going busto.
Reason one: I spent the entire year making poor beautiful Phillip break into strangers’ homes at night to fuck on the floor. I don’t know why. It did a real number on him, I can tell you. He’d get so terrified, but he’d do it, and I’d run and turn a light on and he’d nearly coronary leaping with his 6’ 3” lanky ass body to turn it back off. I’d break into whatever liquor I could find and he’d try to fill the bottles back up with water and replace the lids and restore them to their sanctity. I’d scavenge the medicine cabinets and he’d chase me around in the dark trying to rescue little white pills.
And when we’d fuck I’d climb on top of him and ride the art of his cock as hard as I could, wishing I was his guitar and not some fucked up damaged girl so that his fingers would strum me to death, strum me clean, strum me calm, strum me into a woman he’d write a song for. My shirt off and my tits white moons and my head rocked back and my hair crazy. And he’d cum so hard I thought my spine might shatter - because those long and lean guys have huge cocks - and then we’d breathe and look at each other in the dark of a home we’d broken into and entered, and then he’d become terrified again and jump up and zip up faster than the speed of light, leaving me like sticky residue on a movie theater floor. Laughing the laugh of broken girls.
God. Poor Phillip. I wish I could go back and apologize. He was never cut out for a woman like me with a rage in her bigger than Texas. Although I’ve since learned that extreme passivity has its own power.
Reason two: he was too beautiful. Way more beautiful than me and way more beautiful than a beautiful woman. Have you met these men? His too beautiful voice and his beautiful hands and his beautiful cock. But the beauty went all haywire on the inside because he thought he was shit. And that thinking he was shit? It transformed him into the exact opposite of me - the most passive man on the planet. Particularly around any kind of high energy or conflict. Which was basically me, in the flesh.
And when my rage would come, he’d … well, he’d fall asleep.
He’s the only person I’ve ever met who would fall asleep in the middle of an argument, his chin on his hand, his eyes closing just as you are getting to the moment of victory. I never saw anyone do that but him. Drove me crazy. All my mighty energy with nowhere to go. I nearly imploded or spontaneously combusted dozens of times.
Phillip came from a big ass southern Baptist Christian family, all of whom sang. So there were a great many family Christian hymn sing-alongs on family front porches with family harmony rising and falling in their voices. And his father was the voice of god once removed, and his older brother was the voice of god twice removed, and the other three people besides Phillip were sisters, so that third removed god voice fell upon his slender shoulders. I mean how many goddamn times can you sing “I’ll Fly Away” or the dreaded “Amazing Grace?” No wonder he was so tired.
And here’s why the micromovements of a girl woman’s sexual history matters. Phillip’s older brother had already been through the reject god, leave home, become a pot smoking musician, have a family, return to the fold and take on the man mantle chapters. But Phillip had just hit the reject god, leave home, become a pot smoking artist and carry around a guilt bigger than Texas. He was the outcast son, unable to join the hymns on the porch.
And me, it was a secret shame I was carrying.
When Phillip wanted hand jobs instead of fucking and I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t do it, and when I wanted to suck his cock and he wouldn’t let me wouldn’t let me wouldn’t let me, we met our wounds in each other’s bodies. Guilt in the form of a beautiful gentle man and shame in the form of an angry girl became our sexuality.
The night he finally let me put my mouth on him we were listening to “Comfortably Numb,” which he’d played himself first until we got too high. In my mouth his cock made me feel forgiven. I don’t know why. But once I’d turned him, he went anywhere I asked him to go with me.
There we were that night breaking up in the snow. A still shot of drunken rage looking down on gentle beauty. Well, I went a little wacko, which used to happen a lot back then, and I started a fight with him. I don’t know why. I remember looking at the top of his head and thinking look, it’s an angel, and my very next thought was, spit on his head. I told you, I don’t know why. Why did I eat paper as I kid when I was scared? My panties were sopping and my head was spinning and it was cold and hot at the same time and it was so beautiful there in the snow and flat and quiet and music.
So I went in for the kill. I mean I snatched it out of the cold dark air as easily as he pulled songs from the sky and wrapped it in displaced rage and vodka breath and hurled it down at the top of his unsuspecting head until his neck nearly snapped. The way women in their twenties who are working out their ouch on everyone they meet do. Open wound girls. Swinging fist girls.
And we argued - or I did anyway - Phillip sort of ducked and growled - all the way to the car, a puke yellow beater mobile Pinto station wagon with faux wood paneling, and I kept it up inside the car, and he was having to drive with the window rolled down because we were too broke to get the windshield wipers fixed and it was snowing. In between trying to defend himself he had his head in and out of the window to see the road, but that didn’t stop me, did it, I just got louder and bigger and hornier and more horribly chaotically blond. My father’s rage and trespass in my voice and hands, in my very skin.
Phillip. Which means lover of horses. Or brotherhood. His voice was never meant for yelling.
That’s when it happened.
At the crescendo of my rage opera. In the dumb ass Pinto. Near my anger orgasm.
He fell asleep.
The car sort of slowed and made a limp arc toward the curb, until it stopped, and his head fell gently forward onto the steering wheel.
I remember staring at him for a minute, dumbfounded by the moment, seeing - really seeing - how goddamn beautiful his face, his mouth, his long fingered mesmerizing hands … knowing I could never, ever keep a boy like that because the shear velocity of my anger and confusion would eat him alive … and feeling as sad as a girl who will never have a boy like that could feel… crying… a long mile of greenyellowred streetlights blinking us down … and then snapping out of it and yelling at the top of my lungs “WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKER ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! YOU FUCKING FELL ASLEEP YOU COULD HAVE