cloudland

In no particular order, I've decided to write about certain people I've met. Maybe it is to gain a bird's eye view of my recent life so far, maybe it is to brush up on my writing. The first will be Jered, a guy I dated in Portland.

I met Jered in the Willamette Weekly LoveLab. LoveLab is a column in the paper that everybody reads, whether or not they are single, because they can often be pretty funny. Jered's said he was "fucking delightful" and that he liked taking baths. Sometimes I am fucking delightful and I love taking baths. I wrote him a short, snide email and we decided to meet at Backspace, the cafe/LAN center that I hung out at almost nightly.
I sat on a bench in front of the cafe, nervously smoking a bummed cigarette. I had just gotten an at-home haircut from Natalie about an hour before I was slated to meet him and my forehead felt really exposed. I saw him walking up with David, a friend he had brought in case I turned out to be a drag. I thought he was really cute. He had brown curly hair and blue eyes, and was very tall and skinny. His voice was a bit froggy and we smoked the same brand of cigarettes.
The whole point of him coming was so we could play pool. I had lied and told him I was a pool shark. I had a friend with a pool table in high school and thought my game was pretty good. He told me that he wasn't that great, which also turned out to be a lie. He beat me non-stop that night. (Later in our relationship, we upheld a fierce sort of competition coupled with hours of coach-like encouragement and the practice of trick shots, breaking and banking. This was the first of our many future contests. Who could win at MarioKart? Who could flick a cigarette butt further from the balcony?)
The rest of the evening was spent involved in a rousing game of Scrabble, when Natalie joined us, and one really boring game of chess that ended in a stalemate anyway. We exchanged numbers and I called him the very next day after work, and then we had a movie date.
We spent almost a solid week together upon meeting. Our second date took place at sunset at the top of a hill in Mount Calvary Cemetery. We huddled in a blanket, eating Whole Foods take-out from cardboard boxes underneath a monolithic white marble statue of the Virgin Mary. Coyotes howled in the canyon below. We stayed up all night talking and had breakfast together the next morning, the moment that Tiny's, my favorite coffee shop, opened. I wore his big brown coat that made me look like a crazy old woman and he made sure to give me the matching scarf.
I took him to Rocky Butte, a park that looks and feels like a medival fortress and we lay in the grass watching a thunderstorm approach. It rained on everywhere but us. He kissed me that night and so began Jered and Elisa, and the addition of a pink toothbrush to David and Jered's bathroom. I slept in his bed almost every night and made his bed nearly every morning. He lived next to Union Station and so I began to associate the rumblings and exhalations of steam trains with comfort. I wore his tee shirts and his underwear and his tube socks. I did the dishes and made breakfast for us, not discluding David, who I was rather fond of.
I knew not to ask him about the state of the relationship, because this was met with blushing and stammering and downcast eyes. He didn't know. Or did he?
One night we drove to Canby, the town he grew up in. If I squinted my eyes at certain parts, it looked like my own hometown. We went to a supposedly haunted pioneer cemetery by the farmhouse he used to live in and to a lookout spot he frequented in high school. The air stank from the paper mills perched on the river below. I petted a stray black cat and pretended to topple to my death over the stone wall at the top of the cliff. I attempted to usher the cat into my car, to no avail, and we went "home."
We didn't go out all the time. Jered was an excommunicated Jehovah's Witness, so sometimes we would look at his old bible and read each other the "funny" passages about sluts and overly-gruesome deaths. Other times we would watch movies on the couch and Jered would pass out on me, causing my leg to fall asleep. I was the one who made sure that he took his contacts out before bed, though I couldn't watch him do it; the touching of eyeballs nightly freaks me out a little.
One especially tiresome night, I was just drifting off and heard some troubling banging and clattering coming from the bathroom. The bedroom door opened and closed and I woke Jered and made him investigate; I thought David had come home too drunk and stoned for his own good. The next twenty minutes was comprised of a 2 on 1 fist fight between Jered and David versus the inebriated stranger who had broken into the apartment and kept calling me some other girl's name. I'm sure there is still blood on the carpet today. I took David to the hospital and let him listen to all the Elliott Smith on my iPod that he wanted. David is obsessed with Elliott Smith.
Things were getting kind of rocky between Jered and I. On his 27th birthday he called me very drunk from a party. He wanted me to pick him up but wasn't sure where he was at. I managed to track him down using other party guests for directions and took my friend, Kate with me all the way to an apartment complex in Beaverton. On the way home he kept talking about his whore ex-girlfriend. She was literally a whore, in a sense, he said. She gave erotic massage, he had told me. I didn't know where he was going with this, but it was making me uncomfortable. With Kate out of the car, I tried making friendly chat with him about a book I had lent him, 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami. This was obviously the wrong topic, because he was terribly drunk.
"There was no ending! I wanted an ending!" he cried, "That man's life was so like my own. He was unemployed, his woman had left him and....I just wanted an answer, you know?!"
His woman had left him?
In the bathroom, unloading a backpack full of party goods, he unpacked his trusty bottle of lube. I stared at it, I stared at him. He looked nervous. I had just about had it.
"What did you need THAT for?" I asked wryly. He didn't have an answer for me.
He broke up with me over the phone a few days later. I accused him of being back with his ex-girlfriend. He denied it. He just had other things to focus on. Like getting a job. I cried and swore. He apologized to me profusely via Myspace. The last I saw of him was when I drove to his apartment so we could exchange our things a few weeks after it was over. While waiting for him at the gate, I snagged a copy of the Oregonian out of the metal box by the curb, removed the crossword puzzle and put the rest of the paper back -- just like old times. He blushed and handed me my things. He had washed and folded my clothes and put my earrings in a little plastic baggie. I had dog-eared his copy of "Jesus' Son."
"Are you drunk?" he asked me, handing me an American Spirit, just like old times.
"A little."

Not once did I ever see him take a single bath.

A recent photo of my old flame and the ex-paramour that he "DIDN'T" leave me for:

My breasts don't do that.