Bottle baby

It's too hot to live.
That's what I remember thinking as I stumbled under the magnifying glass that is the Southern California Sky. The thermometer was pushing up over 100 arid degrees, and the real estate value of shade was enjoying it's mid day boon. On days like this sometimes I hide in the back of the fiction section in the Central library. It's quiet, it's air conditioned and by and large I am left alone. Sometimes I get the call from one of the friendships and we sail on down to The Standard or The Boneventure or any other of the numerous downtown hotel pools. That's always refreshing, bathing all beautiful with our beverages and our sun blinds over our eyes, high above the rush and hustle, high above the toil, perching feloniously with the rest of the leisure class lavishing in the sun.
If only.
If only everyone could lose time off their lifeline in such luxury.
Most days, honestly, I don't roll so ritzy, most days I'm on my own to find salvation from time and temperature and I end up down at Manhattan beach, body surfing and laughing to myself; I stuff my pack with water, apples, and reading materials and I while away the time till the sun disappears and I can move around again without fear of melting or losing what remains of my perspective on consensus reality.

This one day though things were different, I couldn't find a way out, couldn't find my escape and so I improvised a solution to the heat and loneliness. The sun was going down but it was still sweltering and I couldn't find a place to hide. I wandered over to the neighborhood liquor store and bought myself a quart bottle of Pacifico, my favorite cervesa, and I climbed up the walkways high above echo park looking down on the city. I sat in an out of the way spot, the sun had vanished a while back and it didn't seem like anyone was around. I cracked my brew and began to drink it down. I let the cold fresh taste cut the sweat from my face and I shivered a bit there, in spite of the heat. Sometimes my head gets on top of me, I start to dwell, I could tell this was going to be one of those nights. It must have been a weekend or close to it, because I could hear them having fun down below, could see the girls in their fluorescent colors and angle cut hair, brazen, brash, and drunk with youth and possibility. I could see the boys with the tight jeans and striped shirts smoking their cigarettes with loose gaiety and I could feel the hollow point in my stomach and tried futilely to fill it with beer. It isn't easy to be in a city so full and so alive and feel like you exist outside of it, like you're only a phantom.

The Ghost. That's what my mother used to call me, I came and went silently. I was sneaking, I was avoiding scrutiny. I didn't want to be noticed, i didn't want to be seen. That's how i exist to them, a boy who lives his life in the shadows. For awhile that's not what the rest of the world got, I only hid myself from the family, so they wouldn't have to watch me burn. Now here, in this new place, I have completely disappeared, and so I'm left to myself on top of a hill, alone with my velocity, a cold bottle of poor man's medicine, the swirling cloud of anxieties, apprehensions, and the weight of failure so acutely manifest in my 28th year.

With each swallow I tried to sink, letting the thoughts rise, the regrets, the pain. They would come up whether I wanted them to or not, so I went down. The parade of ex-girlfriends, swallow, sink beneath them, the Matches, the losses, the disappointment, swallow and sink beneath them. You trade with the bottle in your hand. You let your emptiness seep out as you drink the freeze in, so that by the time you're done, your heart is numb and your belly is full; in your hand you hold a bottle brimming with hurt which you can handily smash onto the asphalt, letting the contents run down the sidewalks and into the drains where it mixes with like sentiments from the rest of the city. I got what I wanted that night, I couldn't feel the heat, I couldn't feel my heart, and for awhile I sat there silent, listening to the laughter and the screams, watching my wicked city glitter off into the horizon. Somewhere in the night I was able to find sleep, shallow and uneasy but that's a lot better than I do most nights. Most nights I don't sleep at all.