Broken Cigarettes

This is what happened:

I walked into the Tower Records/Books/Video on Beach Blvd. with the specific intention of stealing a copy of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and I was stoned, so the fluorescent lighting was humming this low frequency with a polite annoyance. There were these college kids browsing the literature section wearing obscenely baggy Abercrombie jeans that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. I could peep the checkout girl through the aisles, black Louise Brooks-style bob, checking her nails like she was waiting for her real life to start and I knew she wouldn’t notice, because she never noticed anything.

The book went into my jacket like it had always lived there. This is the part where I should say something about Miller, about the irony of stealing a book about a man who stole everything and was stolen from in return, about transgression as homage. I won't, because it wasn't any of that. It was just a dipshit shoving a book into a jacket.

When I approached the counter to retrieve my bag—they made you check bags, policy, whatever—she grabbed it and just tossed it across the Formica without even looking at me and when I heard the thud, I had a heartbreaking premonition of my American Spirits breaking inside the soft pack (why did I buy a soft pack?) and something went cold in my chest. I stared at her and she stared past me at nothing, at the door, at her shift ending in two hours, where, apparently, something far more interesting than moi was happening.

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell this bored creature that she was everything wrong with Orange County, with customer service, with this particular strain of minimum-wage spite that masquerades as existential cool. That her apathy was not, in fact, not a personality. That Generation X had promised us a certain quality of disaffection and this maliciousness was not what any of us had signed up for. What a fucking drag.

I didn't say any of this because hatred is exhausting, and I had a stolen book in my jacket and broken cigarettes in my bag and the automatic doors were already sighing open with a pneumatic resignation that seemed, in the moment, to be aimed specifically at me.

Oh, her name was Jenny.

Two years later we would fuck with grim determination in her apartment in North Hollywood; the one with the water stains on the ceiling, the waft of Korean food from the restaurant downstairs, and the gloriously theatrical gay roommate who hated me. She wouldn’t remember Tower Records or my cigarettes or any of it, and I wouldn’t tell her because by then it didn’t matter. We’d order Thai food at two in the morning after popping some ecstasy—she could really feel it, and I’d nod and smoke the cigarettes she kept in her freezer and watch her face melt and the room ripple while we listened to Sisters of Mercy. I often thought about that day, that moment, how much I’d hated her in the past and how little it meant now, and I thought: this is the closest I am going to get to a satisfying narrative arc, and I should probably appreciate it, but I didn't.

We saw each other a few times after, with the mild goodwill of two people who had tasted each other's worst morning breath and no longer felt the need to perform. The Tropic of Cancer is on my shelf as a sort of anthropological artifact. It sits there doing the thing stolen books do, which is nothing, which is the whole point, which is what I apparently needed badly enough to risk a misdemeanor over, at twenty-two, in Anaheim, under fluorescent lights, while a girl who would later let me swap bodily fluids and take the ecstasy she could really fucking feel stared past me at the wheezing door.