Even though fifty years have passed since Cynthia and I broke up, a verbatim transcript of our final argument is still scrawled on the walls of my memory. As I stormed away from her and headed toward the UCLA library, certain that the heyday of my life was over, I felt like a peacock whose tail had just been shorn off.
When I reached the library I tried to calm down, but my guilty conscience continued to give me the third degree. I’d said horrible things to Cynthia, things I couldn’t deny or retract, called her a whore and a slut, and my black mood vacillated between powerful alternating frequencies of shame and anger. What sort of future could I have without her? Certainly not the one I’d envisioned a week ago when I believed she loved me and only me. Condemned by fate and my rotten mouth to spend the rest of my life on love’s death row, I’d probably turn into one of those drug-addled cynical creeps who hang around bus depots, the sleazy type that flash their Richard Widmark grin at fresh young girls who arrive in Hollywood from Iowa and Nebraska. “Hello, my dear, my name is Oliver Martin and I’m a talent scout for MGM. We’re looking for an actress to play a secretary in a movie we’re going to begin shooting next week. I can get you the part----if you’ll be kind enough to take a screen test at my place.”
In the library lounge I popped a couple of Dexedrine in my mouth and washed them down with a cup of coffee, after which I rallied for a moment and almost convinced myself that Cynthia would forgive me if I brought her some flowers----a dozen roses or maybe a bouquet of lilies; she liked lilies. Strike that possibility, a voice from the inner chaos of my heart told me. She’d rather see your head pillowed on a gravestone than go on another date with you. Weird thoughts like that kept exploding in my head, but the only one I still remember is a saying my father, a dentist, had told me when I was a boy. Be true to your teeth or they will be false to you.
Forget about Cynthia and get to work, I told myself, because I had a term paper to write for my European history class, so I spent the rest of the evening researching a group of 18th century French philosophers who’d replaced their loss of faith in God with the idea of inevitable and eternal human progress. I could sympathize with them because heaven had fallen out of my sky a year ago, but I hadn’t filled the spiritual vacuum my soul floated around in since then with an alternative set of philosophical values. Human progress, my ass! All I had to do was look at myself to see that mankind was regressing into a barbaric state, doomed forever to live in a hell of its own making.
Zonked out on Dexedrine and starving, I left the library at midnight and headed towards Westwood Village where I’d parked my car on a side street. Of course I’d forgotten which side street, but eventually my shoes led me there, no doubt following a secret map printed on their soles. It was a warm and windy night and when I finally reached my ’48 Plymouth, with lost eyes I looked up at the moon which was perched on the shoulder of an apartment house a block away. Devoid of its usual romantic connotations, it glared back at me, arrogant and full of itself.
There was little traffic and ten minutes later I arrived at my studio apartment on 12th Street in Santa Monica. Once inside my living room I felt secure and for a few moments I was able to kid myself into believing that I was better off without Cynthia. Ours had been a love without a center, I told myself, all fingers and toes, and eventually it was bound to fail. The odds of our getting married and living happily ever after were always in favor of the house, not us. But why oh why when I’d argued with Cynthia about her brief, torrid affair with Danny Raymond, had the barrel of my mouth kept going off like shotgun blasts?
On the other hand, looking at the bright side of this disaster, at least now I had a real topic to write about for my creative writing class, a scorcher that would burn up the paper I wrote it on. Better still, writing a fictitious account of our breakup would allow me to abandon another story I’d been working on that wasn’t going anywhere, a tear-jerker about a deaf mute named JoJo McCloud who just happened to live in my hometown of Decorah, Iowa. I got the idea for this story after I’d finished reading Carson McCuller’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”. However, the more I thought about sharing the sordid details of my personal life with my classmates, the more I realized doing so would be impossible because they knew I was dating Cynthia, the daughter of Hollywood’s most famous gossip columnist, James Bacon.
No, I couldn’t write about my fight with Cynthia because I still loved her, even though I hated her. But how was I going to get even if I was too chicken to expose her cruelty? Fueled by a desire for revenge, I began tilling the sub-marginal soil of my imagination and came up with a new and shocking twist for my story about JoJo. Locked away in his blissful world of silence, he’d fall in love with Cynthia, but they’d have difficulty communicating because she was too lazy to learn how to use sign language and JoJo couldn’t read lips, so when she tells him the terrible things Cynthia told me, he’ll simply smile back at her and drive her insane. Cackling hysterically, my spittled laughter punctuated by barking sobs, I finally pulled myself together and dismissed this idea as too childish to pursue any further.
Eventually I calmed down by reminding myself that what I wanted to be more than anything else was a writer, not a husband. This was a noble, worthy goal, but not a realistic one because I hadn’t read any serious novels when I was in high school, just a few trashy thrillers by writers like Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson, so I had to play catch-up with my classmates in order to develop a writing style as advanced, subtle, and artistically graceful as theirs.
Most nights after I finished my homework I’d stay up until two or three in the morning reading novels other members in my class glibly discussed whenever we got together at parties or bars, classics like ”The Sound and the Fury”, “Point Counter Point”, “Swan’s Way”, and “Bread and Wine”. Celine, Camus, Joyce, Waugh, the list of novels and novelists I hadn’t read was endless.
At midnight I was still too jacked up on Dexedrine to go to bed so I brewed a pot of coffee in my brand new $3.88 glass coffee maker and decided to get a head-start on breakfast by having the works: bacon, eggs and toast. I’d also bought a new wire toaster for thirty-three cents which I hadn’t used yet, the kind you place on top of your stove’s gas burner, and I was eager to try it out and see if it gave my toast a woodsy over-the-open-fire taste, the kind I’d enjoyed as a boy when my father and I went camping. As usual I burned the toast and broke both egg yokes when I flipped them over, but they tasted great anyway.
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