I fell in love with a girl a long time ago. She was smart, capable, engaging, and a natural beauty. She brought fun into my otherwise rigid and rehearsed life. I was 11. She was a classmate. I moved away, but I kept in touch with her; mailed her lengthy letters filled with short stories and drawings. With my friend, The Mormon’s, help, I upgraded from letters to audio cassettes, punctuating our commentary with poignant songs. This went on for years. She never wrote back. But I still loved her in the way that only children know how to love: blind and unconditional.

I could already feel the chemicals swishing around my innards like the chemical catalyst to a bomb. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, hoping that when I woke I would be safe in my apartment with the night behind me. No such luck. Steve turned on the radio and, being midnight on Saturday, all the stations played techno, rife with “bwoops,” and “zoots,” and sound bytes of Martin Luther King Jr. Furthermore, my head was reclined far enough back that my face was no longer beneath the roof of the car, but instead under the incline of the rear window. What this afforded me was constant acid trip flashes in my eyes through my eyelids each time we drove under a streetlamp, which were many. The techno and the lights all melded with my stupor into a private rave inside my head.

Nobody ever thinks they’ll need personal counseling–at least not in the way people think they’ll find riches, happiness, and love. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how therapy works its way into a person’s life. You’re a baby. Everything is new. You get older. You watch your Saturday morning cartoons. You eat your cereal before it gets soggy. Life is good. You get older and your parents are busy working, fighting, or worse, not communicating and you wish life were better. You get older and you see that your attempt to make your life better is failing and all the lies you were told about the straight path to success fade from your ears. You get older. You flip on the tube to take your mind off the mundane mediocrity of your life and you’re bombarded with ad after ad, scaring you into buying the latest happy pill. 250 mg Zanax. 500 mg Prozac. Coke chaser. Next thing you know, therapy has you. You’re sitting in a chair telling your darkest secrets to a stranger who doesn’t really care.

As we drove up the bumpy road to what I can only assume was Larry’s neighborhood, we passed a young black girl, probably around seven years old. Larry leaned over me and yelled out something unintelligible yet friendly at her. The young black girl started after his car. A few moments later, Larry yanked the wheel sharply to the left, taking us off the road and up a steep, leaf-covered slope where his “home” was. What I suppose would have been considered his front yard was littered with old machine parts and derelict appliances. Next to a pile of worn tires stood a rusted oven range with a pair of shears stabbed straight through the range top.

Someone has to be undesirable so that others can be. I know my place in the world and I accept that. I choose to deal with Fate on her terms. So I go through life, squelching any impulses of pursuit whenever I come across an attractive girl. As the years pass, it’s getting easier to deny my motivations, almost becoming reflex. In this manner, I have caged Fate — or caged myself, however you want to look at it — and kept myself away from Fate’s deadly grasp. Sadly, I suffer from moments of weakness now and again when I carelessly step too close to the bars and Fate takes a lethal swipe at me.

Old Dude is the kind of person who has never seen a happy day in his life. He has the opposite of a poker face, meaning he communicates through his facial expressions. If he doesn’t like something you say, he’ll roll his eyes. If he’s disappointed in you, he’ll sigh and look down and away. If he can’t understand something you’ve said, he’ll squint, shake his head sharply, cup a hand to an ear and gape his mouth in a silent, “Wha-?” Even if he was capable of smiling, it would be lost beneath the folds of his trumpet player’s cheeks; the ones that hang down the sides of his mouth like a bull dog’s and stripe the sides of his chin with the mandible lines of a ventriloquist dummy.

I cupped her cheek into my right palm and drew her close with my other hand. When I could feel the warmth of her breath I closed my eyes and kissed her gently. I could feel the soft short hairs around her mouth against my thinly parted lips. I kissed her gently again, but held it longer. Then with the tips of her lips, Rebecca urged my mouth open and devoured me. Surprised, I inhaled deeply through my nose, which heightened Rebecca’s excitement. She redoubled her efforts, voraciously teasing my tongue with hers and exploring my body with her hands. Saliva was slowly slipping into the cracks of our lips and we continually shifted the angles of our heads to seal the breaches. What had started out as a friendly kiss was turning into an oral ravishing. This was the most earth moving, mind-blowing kiss I had ever had and it rocked me to my ts. It was Rebecca’s way of adding an exclamation point to one of the greatest missed opportunities any man can have in his life. When she finally released me we were breathless and the brisk weather was no longer biting, but refreshing.

This is the kind of secret comfort that waiters–another job I’ve worked–enjoy and that restaurant grs fear. In the back of every diner’s mind is the fear of food sabotage and they know that the only thing that is keeping their food safe during the journey from the kitchen to their table is the mood of their waiter. Sure, customers may delude themselves into thinking they have the power because they control the tip, but what is threatening a waiter’s tip when compared to the possibility of a certain amount of spit or mucous or urine or semen being passed into their clam chowder? Fantasies like this make jobs tolerable.

Now, I appreciate that everyone thinks they’re a good driver and I appreciate that 90% of those people are incorrect, but I fall in the top 10% definitely. See, I understand the dynamics of the road. I understand the intimate relationship a driver must have with the car in front of him/her and with the car behind. It boils down to trust. Do you trust the driver in front of you not to brake too early and do you trust the driver behind you not to brake too late. More importantly, if you can’t trust those drivers are you skilled enough to compensate for their shortcomings? I can and that’s why I rock as a driver. I can be in the minds of everyone around me at the same time, which allows me to spot dumbass driving and Road Rage flare-ups, thereby avoiding accidents through minor adjustments in car positioning.