27th And Geary

There was so much blood on the floor when I came home.  So much that my heart immediately pumped itself into an almost holographic state of excitement and panic.  There were lashings of it in the entry hallway.  You don't walk into that much blood and not feel concern about a possible mob hit.  When you live with a person who finds backpacks full of dubious drugs in alleyways you learn not to take a whole lot for granted.  Life is not slow here. 

I cautiously approached the main bedroom, where my room mate lived his raucous after hours club life.  I knew I was going to find his dead body sprawled across the hardwood  floor of his room like a sad sack of inanimate flesh cut down suddenly and violently into an unnatural posture.  A scream of horror raised itself to my dry throat and waited there for its cue.

Which surprisingly never came.

I opened the french doors and could see no one.  No body.  No chalk outline of a crime scene.  Just the usual mess of a man.  Perhaps the clothes crumpled everywhere were more colorful and flamboyant than the average man, but the dirty dishes and the discard of time were in evidence everywhere.

Was he dragged from our apartment in agony?  I loved him, in spite of himself.  I didn't want anything to happen to him.  We had been already growing apart.  I had my first serious job in the fashion industry and was starting to wonder about my future.  My boy could have had a future but he courted the present like it was a magnetic man-whore.

I went back into the hallway to see what the blood could tell me.  The smell of it was rich.  Have you ever smelt over a gallon of coagulating blood?  It permeates the air in thick iron soaked clouds of scent.  It chokes you with its dark metallic flavor.  It gets into your mouth and it doesn't leave your nose for hours.  For years.  I can still smell it today.

I fixed my stare on the bathroom door which was closed.  The bathroom door opened into the hallway by the front door.  The blood trail led up to it.  I felt the kind of fear you feel when something awful that's real feels unreal- the fear is like second hand smoke.  It's almost stale because a part of you is always outside of the now.  Outside your own body.

Bodies- I worried about finding a body.  In my world people wanted to kill themselves not infrequently but infrequently killed themselves.  We suffered a constant low grade fever to burn ourselves out before we became true adults.  Burn bright and then SNAP!  Gone before we can become disappointed Bukowskian characters bitterly chewing on the tar pit of our extinct hopes.

The bathroom door had to be opened.  I had to open it.  No hero was there to do the honors.  No time to wait either because who knows if the body might still have life?  Resuscitation might still be an option- how many people attempt to kill themselves and fail?  Though I admit that I was already smelling death.  I'd been expecting it.  I have spent my whole life in expectation of death.  This is my natural habitat, I just never expect to find myself in the environment I was made to know intimately.

I slowly turned the old knob with my heart pounding loudly like a classic heroine.  I wish I knew what I wore that day, how I presented myself?  Did I acquit myself well in this heroic scene?  Who knows.  I probably looked weird.  I turned the knob and slowly pushed the door with my eyes ready to land on more than just blood.

Nothing. No one.  No body.  So what the fuck happened here?  I come home to my god damned apartment full of thick pools of coagulated blood, no room mate, no body, and what?  What the fuck awful thing happened here?

I had to go through my bedroom to get to the kitchen and I took a tour.  Eyes keen for details, for clues.  Here was my Nancy Drew moment at last.  Nancy Drew does the big grimy city and never loses her cool...yeah, I lost my cool.  I sat down on my bloodied bed.  Yes, everything was touched by the blood.  Everything wore the evidence.  I couldn't imagine what horror must have occurred here in my absence.  What was that fool boy up to now? 

I loved him as many a straight woman has loved a gay man before.  He was one of my best friends.  A safe person on which to shower affection.  No awkward demands, never expecting me to be anything but fun.  Which is the best irony since I have never been known for being a "fun" person.  Especially when I'm pissed off.  Especially back then when I was unmedicated and pre-therapy.  My friends had to work hard to live with me. 

I was worried sick.  This man who was ten times more brilliant a designer than me could not die because he had yet to realize his potential.  He was a designer the way I was a writer.  I went to fashion design school because writers don't make money.  He went to fashion design school because he could kick Karl Lagerfeld's ass and he wasn't creepy like Karl.  Sweet, sweet friend.  Brilliant waster.  I didn't want anything to happen to him.  I was the talent's protector.

I sat down on my bed.

And that's when I saw it: the note.

The note which simply said that he had stepped on a glass of water on the floor and had to go to the hospital.  Nothing more.  No mention of which hospital, where to reach him, what time this happened, when he would return.

Sometimes a man is just a man whether he's gay or straight and I just want to punch him.

So he left me with this giant blood mess that I had to clean because the air was thick with it and I could hardly breath without wanting to hurl.  Hard to believe the British like to eat this stuff in a sausage casing.  Vomit rich smell.  I got down on my hands and knees in anger and scrubbed the blood out of the floorboards.  Until the roommate returned.

So riled by the inadequate note and classically angry in place of my real experience of fear I railed against him in his bandaged foot when he finally hobbled through our door.  Sheepish.  That's how I think of him most often: sheepish grin.  Devilish disregard.

When I scour this old montage of mental pictures, I have the sense that this was the moment, the night, the event that made me finally realize that I was ready to have my own place.  That for the first time in my life I needed to wake up with myself in utter and complete solitude.  Complete autonomy.  It was the moment I realized I had to stop taking care of people who would always need a care taker and learn to care for myself.