Evan didn’t call ahead and reserve a car like he said he would, so we wound up having to go to the Avis out by the airport. Scott put the rental on his corporate card so we received the discount, and Evan passed him cash, “I got this, man.”

He said he wanted to drive, and after offering his opinion on the car we rented – “Taurus. Jesus Christ. What the fuck are we? Middle management?” – started in on tales of recent conquests. He had met a girl at a meet in Honolulu. She was six foot flat, blonde, gorgeous, ‘like a fucking supermodel’, and ‘couldn’t get enough’. She loved the taste of his cum. Scott, who was sitting next to him, kept the conversation up. I sat in the back, neck slack, staring out the window. I couldn’t help but listen in. I was suspicious and disgusted and jealous and unable to focus my eyes.

We sliced south down Highway One, the coast to our right. The sun caught the crests of the waves, speckling them silver. Patches of strawberry plants and trees filled the hillsides to our left, delineated by dusty dirt roads and irrigation. Every few miles or so, a dent-riddled pickup sat on the shoulder, its open back gate displaying fresh fruit. I’ll give it two weeks, and then I’ll call. That’s enough …

“Dave.”

Scott was looking at me.

“What?”

“Tell Evan about last night.”

“Fuck you, Scott.” My voice cracked. I almost said it again to make sure that he’d heard.

“No, earlier. About the bar.”

Scott and I were with Jeremy, a friend of his from the office, at one of those bullshit over-stylized lounge-cum-bars with no real chic of its own. Everybody looked unnatural in their clothes, like they all took their sense of taste from the glossy photos in some pathetic local magazine’s ‘goings on about town’ section. I drank scotch, feeling generally mordant, half-listening to Scott and Jeremy talk about work and girls and science policy. I was bored and unengaged, so I went to the bathroom to do a bump. I closed the door behind me, locked it, rolled up my largest bill, and took two deep pulls from my bag. I was electric. Washed my hands, splashed my face, careful to get a little water up my nose discreetly, weaved through the crowd, made eye contact with some of the room’s more attractive girls, ordered two scotches, slammed the first, sipped the second, jumped into the conversation. Scott and Jeremy were talking to three mediocre-looking girls, and for the most part I hung back, licking the underside of my teeth, trying to keep the more obvious signs of my habits to myself. I tried not to laugh too much. When their friend arrived, weeping and bemoaning the loss of her third purse in two months, I paid close attention to her, ordering drinks, consoling. We went outside for a cigarette, and I asked her if she partied, and gave her my bag. We kissed, her body pressed between me and an alley wall, our faces numb. I could taste the drugs in the snot on her lips. I slid my hand down her pants, and she put her palm to my zipper, but I couldn’t get hard, and so I laid down on the cement, my torso throbbing from the drugs, my head purring. The pink of the nighttime clouds was incredible. We talked for a while; she was interesting, an educated Texan. I hailed a cab. We kissed goodbye, and her lips were almost too soft, and I was reminded that she had been crying. When Scott and Jeremy got back to our place, wasted and toting a 24 pack, I looked up from the notes I was writing myself to tell them that I fucked her, and that she had just left. Scott asked if I got her number, pointing to the phone in my lap.

Evan loved it. “That’s fucking hot, dude. Right there in the alley? Did you use a rubber?”

I affected a chuckle and looked out the window. My hands were shaking a little, so I knotted them up into fists. The sunlight through my glasses was blinding, so I closed my eyes and let my head loll back, listening to the wind rush past. I don’t know why I told them that.

*****

We ate an entire box of Entenmann’s old-fashioneds at the Santa Cruz Safeway, and while in line – the donut box hidden behind some white bread on aisle three – watched a sinewy chocolate pit bull pull a pretty, tattooed blonde girl around the produce department on a skateboard.

The gate was locked, and it took us about twenty minutes to get into the house. We smoked a blunt as a pizza blackened in the oven. Scott and Evan funneled some beers and I washed my face and hands. Evan told me I was being a pussy. I looked around the house while they scraped the charred cheese from the pizza. It was all wood paneling, watercolors, scavenged seashells, hand-me-down furniture, and musty second-edition mid-twentieth-century novels. The only theme to the house was its inattention, its complete disregard of itself. I wondered how much the owners would take for it.

Sitting in a tattered gingham armchair, I tried paying attention to an old issue of Popular Mechanics, but wound up staring at a dog-chewed wooden duck. I drafted apologetic notes and impassioned, regretful soliloquies; I understood what I had done, and what I had lost, and what my actions had meant; I made sacrifices; I explained everything clearly; I cast myself as The Tragic Genius, compelled to battle the bondage of my passions, always working desperately towards change, towards something marvelous, something which would resonate for generations; I threw myself before her, asking for One More Chance; I flew to her, and wrote her poetry, beautiful and true and spartan in its concision; and tears welled as she read and I held my tongue and, in a way, I was forgiven. I forgot; I loved myself and moved on; I was adored by my friends and colleagues; I married well; I was a success, a frequently pursued commentator on a breadth of issues, a fixture in intellectual forums, welcome in elite society and slums alike; I sold well, and the critics raved, and the body of my work was seminar material at some lesser schools; and she talked about me, and the hard syllables of my simple American name set the spines of her lovers bristly; she would contact me a decade later – we were still young and attractive; she would read of my greatness and wish to reconnect; she’d tell me she always knew I was something special and, after a time, after dinner and wine, inveigle me with forgotten pet names; and perhaps my beautiful wife had died – of something romantic, like childbirth or consumption – and my many brilliant friends had grown weary of looking after me as I shuffled through the shadows of my grief, self-exiled in our tastefully decorated matrimonial Victorian; and perhaps, then, I would pull her to my chest, and press my lips to that place just below her ear, behind her jaw line, and whisper that I’d done it all for her, and we’d begin again. Or, perhaps, I would be happy, and better off without, and with cool compassion convey exactly this, careful not to hurt her.

She had always forgiven me. She may again. I was sick to my stomach. The duck stared back at me.

Scott and Evan were standing above me, soaked from their chins to their chests, bleary-eyed and beaming. Scott was stopping a length of clear tubing with his thumb, and Evan held a beer and a red funnel high.

“Your turn, fuckface!”

There was something wrong with my voice, and all I could do was mutter, “What the hell,” and get down on my knees to take one.

*****

The cabby told us Santa Cruz isn’t really a town you go out drinking in, but Capitola had a few bars, and there were generally some girls there. Good looking girls? Depends on taste, he supposed. He drove us there and dropped us off on the corner, telling us to be safe. There on Capitola’s two-block downtown were about four bars in a row, all beach-themed. I stopped at the ATM at the Capitola Library – a one-roomed, shingled shack built into the side of a complex which housed two gift shops and an ice cream parlor – and ran after Evan and Scott to catch up. They were being told by the bouncer at Pirate Pete’s that there was a cover, and Scott didn’t want to pay it, so he told the bouncer about the follies of his business’ policies while Evan and I smoked. We walked down to Margarita’s, or Cocktail’s, or Magic Carpet Bob’s, or whatever the place was called. We were the only people in there. Evan ordered 6 shots of Jaegermeister and 3 Red Bulls, I got a pitcher of Pilsner to wash it all down with, and we started drinking as fast as it would go down.

I was furious with the bar’s décor. It was like a parody of beachside themes, decorated by someone whose understanding of tropicalia had come second-hand – all fluorescent white and washed-out pastels, scintillating, light sensitive beach scene paintings and garish blown glass. It was disgusting, and I thought I might throw up, so I excused myself and went to the bathroom.

Fake orchids offset the steamship and anchor wallpaper, their cheap silk and wire stems lodged in opalescent baubles. I locked the stall, pissed on the toilet paper, and shimmied out underneath the door on my belly. I filled the orchid’s vase with water, removed the liquid hand soap from its dispenser, and sprayed the pink soap on the mirror, writing ‘gawdy’ in a looping cursive. I kicked the garbage can, and when the trash inside didn’t scatter as well as I had hoped, I reached in with my hands to toss it about. When I got back to the table they were talking with a group of girls.

I ordered some more drinks, and began listening to their conversation. It was a bachelorette party. The bride-to-be was a redhead, and was the only good-looking girl among them. I couldn’t believe these girls would take their one pretty friend to such a shithole for her bachelorette party, and I had my pint to my face to obscure my revulsion. The conversation died, and one of the girls – the pimply one, with the nice coral necklace, and the passé stubby-heeled boots – asked my name. I took a drink, swallowing slowly.

“Marcus.”

I caught Evan looking at me. Scott took a drink.

“What do you do, Marcus?”

“I’m a novelist.” The girls liked it. They had probably gone to college.

“Really? Have you written anything I’ve heard of?”

Playing pensive, I told her that this was a hard question for me to answer, and took a drink.

“What have you written?” The girls were staring at me, paying attention.

“I wrote ‘By Hook or By Crook’.”

Scott said, “It’s really highly-regarded. Critically acclaimed,” and buried his face in his glass.

“Wait! I’ve totally heard of that!” The pan-faced blonde girl with the unflatteringly long silver earrings slapped her hand on the table, and the bride-to-be agreed. “That’s totally cool! Didn’t they make a movie out of it?”

Pensive again, I said that I hoped so, because I had some money coming my way if they had. The girls laughed, and Evan got up to order some more drinks, and the redhead came over to talk to me about her aspirations to write, and leaned in close, and I asked her if there was anything she wanted to do before she consigned herself to all those years of unutterable loneliness, and just then the flush-faced manager came and told us to get the hell out of his bar. None of us had any idea what he was talking about. Scott and I let Evan talk to the manager and quickly finished our drinks.

*****

“That was fucking amazing, dude!” Evan loved the novelist routine. “They fucking ate it up!”

Scott agreed. “Very effective, the novelist routine. Never seen it fail.”

“The trick is never backing down, and having your books be widely-used – be titled – be widely-used, but not well-defined sayings. Colloquialisms.” We hailed a cab. “Something they’ve heard said, but probably that they’ve – but something they probably haven’t used themselves. Sometimes I use ‘A Tough Row to Hoe.’ Or ‘One Fell Swoop.’”

Evan was still pretty pissed about getting kicked out of the bar, but Scott was entertaining him by grilling the new cab driver about our previous driver. “White guy, middle aged, knew the area real well? You know that guy?”

*****

We bought three 40s and brown bagged them, drinking on the sidewalk, smoking Gauloises. A street kid kept bothering us, asking for money and food and cigarettes, and Evan said he’d give the kid a dollar to lick the exhaust pipe of that idling yellow taxi over there, and the kid did it, and it was hilarious, and I told him to go home to mom and dad. Scott leap-frogged a street post, caught his crotch, and splayed across the sidewalk. Some girls tittered, and he and Evan slid into their conversation.

I wandered away, lit up another smoke and listened to an emaciated paraplegic and a gap-toothed homeless woman argue about something having to do with disrespect. It was hilarious. What does disrespect even mean to people like that? The man in the wheelchair gesticulated wildly as he spoke, his frizzy white afro bobbing about his head. The lines of the woman’s face were so deeply etched that she could have been a Giacometti; and she leaned over him at such a severe angle – her face twisted angrily – that her stained and shredded trenchcoat hung around him as if she were offering a black towel with which to wrap up and dry him. I soaked in their senseless nattering, planning to relay it to Scott and Evan, took out two cigarettes and two strike-anywheres, and offered them to the homeless people.

They both thanked me, and I took a deep drag and said, rather than ‘of course,’ or ‘my pleasure’ – in a leading man’s voice; the voice a good-natured dad may use with a wayward daughter when he really wants her to think hard about the decisions she’s making; a voice that conveys care, and the potential for slight but persistent disappointment – ‘do you ever stop to think that there’s a chance, a real chance, that you may be crazy?’ They looked at me in a way that made me think that perhaps I had gotten through to them, and they were about to thank me again, I’m sure, but I heard my friends – they were standing with four blonde girls – calling out to me, so I bobbed my eyebrows at the them over the far end of my brown bag, and left.

I tried to tell Scott and Evan about the two crazy people, but I couldn't remember what I had said, only how I had said it, and what the two had looked like. I wished that I had thought to bring my Dictaphone out with me.

We decided on a place called Eliza’s and sat at the bar. Scott bought the girls a round of drinks, and we paired off. The girls were good fun, Banana Slugs around for the summer. I isolated the stylish one, and found out she had just done a year in Nice, studying literature. I gave her ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’. Evan took the tall one. Scott’s girl had just run in the San Francisco marathon, and he gave her a hard time.

“I mean, I guess I just don’t understand marathons. Why run, you know, a bunch of slow miles just to say you did it? Mediocrity, a bunch of mediocrity doesn’t make it any less mediocre. I mean, why not just run 5 miles really fast? 5 great miles. It doesn’t make any sense.”

By the time Scott had her giggling, had his hand on her waistline, I had already kissed the stylish one, and Evan had left with the tall one, and the fourth one, their friend.

*****

We took the girls back to the house, and met Evan and the other two girls at a bonfire on the beach. He had bought a bottle of scotch and a 24 pack, and was telling some recycled story about the Olympic trials, and I yelled out that he was a horseshit decathlete and that he should stop lying to himself, and he tackled me and we wrestled a little bit, but I made sure to laugh, and the girls thought it was all pretty funny.

We passed the scotch around, and charged fully clothed into the waves of the Pacific, and tried to get the friend into a threesome. Some weird woman with dreadlocks and headphones came up and hung out and drank our beer and refused to talk, but it was cool, and some Mexican guy grabbed at Evan’s dick through his ocean wet boxers and stole his wallet from Evan’s drying pants. And before we noticed, he was gone. But we ran after him, ran and ran, Evan and I, the dew-wet sand pushing back on our bare feet, the moon a line coming forever toward us on the water, the cool night air a torrent rushing past our ears, my lungs burning, and the sand pushing back and pushing back, and we ran and ran.

*****

A headache all but sealing my eyes, I woke up naked, my hands scabbed and bloody. I leaned over the bed and threw up bile. I dry-heaved. The sockets of my eyes throbbed a blinding, starry red with every heave and gag, retreating back into my head slowly whenever I sucked for air. When the vomiting shuddering to a stop, I hung my head in my hands. Saliva streamed silvery towards the floor.

The girl with the dreadlocks was sleeping in a ball in the corner, jazz emanating softly from her headphones. Seeing her – remembering her – made me laugh, and I laughed until I coughed, and coughed until I threw up again, and shook my head side-to-side to stop it all. I put my boxers on, and searched unsuccessfully for my glasses. She just slept.

Evan and Scott were at the kitchen table, drinking thin coffee. Evan poured me a cup.

“How you feeling, buddy?” he said, voice hoarse, eyes dopey, grinning.

“Been better.” They chuckled sympathetically, and we started recapping the night: the girls, the beach, the Mexican guy, chasing him, not catching him, Evan’s many lost hundreds, blaming the girls, trying to apologize as they left, throwing flaming logs at the cliffs, tearing the lifeguard chair down, and the girl with dreadlocks being totally fine with it all, totally unaffected.

“It sucks about your wallet, Ev, but fuck… I’m glad we didn’t catch that guy,” I said.

Evan just shook his head, and took a sip of coffee, but Scott said, “Yeah. I think you would have killed him, Dave.”

*****

At the beach that morning – after calling my mom and asking for money so I could buy some new glasses, while Evan was playing with a beautiful, red-coated dog – Scott asked me, passing a beer, patting his pockets for an opener, “You remember crying the other night?”

He had tried putting me to sleep – after I had finished my baggie, and helped he and Jeremy with the 24 pack – after hearing me weep and bellow, and prostrate myself to her, and issue foolish ultimatums; after hearing me call her terrible things, and the only thing in the world I care about; after he heard the phone slammed down again and again in forty-five second intervals; after finding me on the floor of our bathroom with my shirt soaked in sobs and sweat and vomit and spit – he had dragged me to his futon, and thrown a blanket over me, and asked me to try to stop. You’re going to regret this, Dave. Just go to sleep. Don’t end it like this.

But I couldn’t sleep, so I went back at it, screaming and demanding and blaming and self-recriminating into that answering machine three time zones away, coked out of my mind, with nothing in my head besides a suffocating immediacy, with nothing to say besides how could you? and I’m so sorry, just please pick up the phone. Just please talk to me. Just please – I’m so sorry.

“Yeah. I remember.”

He looked at me, eyes squinting out the sun, and then down looked at the sand, digging his fingers into it.

“What are you going to do?”

I had no idea.

He said that he had tried to stop me.

“I know, man.”

I couldn’t really speak, so I turned away.

*****

And so when Evan made the comment about the topless pig-tailed toddler, and how he wasn’t sure if it was the looking, or the thinking, or the discussing of it that made it a sickness, I decided that this was a question that needed further examination, and told him so. And I viewed my handling of this awkward conversation as diplomatic, and sapient, and not without grace. And I looked at the three of us there on that California beach – drinking foreign beer from sweating green bottles, smiling and carefree and enjoying our own company – and I saw in us the Modern Man. I saw in us great, sweeping themes of hope and self-realization, of struggle and conflict and resolution. I saw in us – in the headphones of that silent, dreadlocked girl, in the sheen of the sun off that red dog’s coat – metaphors which people would identify with, which would help them identify themselves.

And I saw a Victorian matrimonial home, and respectful, adoring colleagues. I saw dinner parties and dimmer switches, the red of spilt wine on the white of fine linen. I saw opportunity and access; I saw Berkshire summer homes and Saabs and her and I relishing in our lives of extraordinary, enviable promise. I saw the potential to make it all alright, to love selflessly, and the ability to apologize by simply shutting up.