Never Love A Wild Thing

He must have thought I was crazy and he must not have loved it.  I was dancing by myself in his kitchen while he remained seated on the couch in the living room.  Maybe he was watching me but I wasn’t seeing him.  I was seeing my hair – splayed gold strands of movement.  I was seeing my threadbare white socks move against the tiled floor.  I was seeing the places and the people I longed to see again.  I was losing myself inside the song– but really, I was finding myself in a way I never could when I was just sitting and talking and trying to smile.  And I was transported.  And that was the important part.

He said I should think about seeing someone – someone I could talk to about these things.  He said it as if it wasn’t normal to feel what I was feeling.  But I think I would have to be a less conscious version of myself to not go a little crazy in anticipation of committing to living in the same city and working the same job at the same time for the same five days a week for a year or more of my life.  I think that anyone who doesn’t go a little crazy before they give themselves and their freedom up to the requisites of practicality must truly be more than a little crazy.

                                                         

My favorite songs were leaving songs.  Both the sad ones and the ones that sounded happy to be free.  I listened to them even when I was staying and I dreamed of leaving again, eventually.  And when I was gone, sometimes I listened to them and dreamed of leaving where I had gone, only to return to where I had been.   But still my love was the leaving.  I liked the sound of movement.  I liked the way the sound feels.

I went to Blois, a French chateau town in the Loire Valley, by myself for a weekend in March.  I lost myself in movement and song.  But really I was finding myself.  But really I was transported.  I walked through the chateau, experiencing the place that had played home to some of my favorite moments and characters from history.  And I walked through the town, experiencing the place that was still playing home to my ideas of romance and beauty and hope and adventure and France.  And I walked with songs playing in my headphones and I was in the moment and the songs were with me and it was enough.  And I knew that they would hold the feeling for me long after I had boarded the train and left Blois – left, but not moved on.

I could feel hot, fresh sweat soaking the back of my friend’s shirt as I held him against me, held him up as he swayed and dipped drunkenly into me.  Maybe he was a little bit crazy and maybe I liked it.  We were dancing on the kitchen floor -- him and me and my brother and a couple others that I had missed all the while I had been in France. It was summer and it was my first and only night back in Chicago since I had returned from France.  His hands were in my my hair, on the skin that the back of my dress left bare, on my hips that the dress was only trying to hide.  He was mumbling to me about how good artists need to have their hearts broken once, twice, several times. He was telling me that it was a good idea to travel while I was young because then when I was old I could go back to those same places and remember who I had been.  And I was happy enough with the way we were moving and the songs that were playing, happy enough where I was.

My brothers looked at me like I was crazy and they looked like they understood it.  I was dancing in the dining room, wearing the same dress I had been wearing all week, shaking my hair in an insistent frenzy of fun.  I was shouting at them to play the song again – the way I had done every night of the week. And they were obliging because they knew it wasn’t the song I wanted, it was the place it took me back to.  It was the people I had loved and left behind.  It was the possibilities I had once perceived.  As long as that song was playing I could be transported.  It could all be possible once more.  It might have been a gin night or a wine night or it might have been both.  And an outsider might have thought I was spiraling out of control but I was just spiraling, just moving in place – afraid of my life’s momentum and afraid of losing it. 

I liked flirting with disaster because it could never let me down.  I was most comfortable around other car crash prodigies – the desperately reckless types who made art and music and anything out of being broken and being called crazy and being alone and being aware of it all the damn time.  They were the ones who would dance with me in a bar or in my bedroom or on the kitchen floor.  They were the ones who understood what it was to need the music and the movement. When I was with them I wasn’t transported.  I was just there.  And that was the important part.

We know god is dead, they told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.

He was old and when I kissed him he tasted even older.  And I was an old soul with a timeless, restless heart that beat like shoes running on pavement.  My favorite thing about him was that I didn’t have to sleep alone.  He slept clinging onto my body, his tiny hands grasping at any part of me he could reach, as if he thought I was too good to be true, as if he was afraid that I wasn’t – true, that is.  And I wasn’t. 

Somewhere beyond his bedroom window the sun was rising and I was rising with it.  I lifted his thin, sweaty arm off me and slid my body away from his.  I willed myself to be quiet and graceful as my feet touched the floor and I made my way through his apartment.  I took a couple blank pieces of paper from his printer and pulled a pen from my purse before returning to sit on the floor at the foot of his bed.  The carpet scratched against my bare skin and I could see snow falling outside the window and hear the faint rattle of the “L” as it went to and from the Loop.   

Naked on his bedroom floor, on that snowy Sunday morning, on what would turn out to be my last winter in Chicago, I wrote about brightness.  I wrote that I was afraid that I would never feel clean or light or fresh or bright again.  I wrote about how the night before it had been too warm to snow so it has rained instead and the streetlights had made the raindrops glitter silver and gold upon the black city streets and he and I had run together down the sidewalks of Lincoln Park.  I had held a rose in my hand but I wouldn’t hold his.  And it may have been a beautiful night but it wasn’t.  It wasn’t beautiful.  And I could tell that he loved me but I didn’t. 

A couple months later, in France, I wrote about brightness again.  I wrote about it every day.  In France everything felt clean and light and fresh and bright and possible.  And in Cannes the sea air was easy to breathe and anything bad that had ever been was made beautiful under streetlights and stars as waves broke against sand and cement.  Even the breaking was beautiful. 

But I don’t live in France.  And so I love like I live – entirely in the moment.  I used to have a couple theories about love and happiness – and I even had some on that snowy Sunday morning – but they all relied on a belief in the brightness and the only thing I believe in now is that brightness fades.  And it is always possible to awaken in the dark beside a sleeping body and think and write and be someone that they don’t realize they don’t know.  All we can have of one another is an idea – some are just better than others.

And so I look for a moment with a man who can listen to a song with me and know it by heart the way I know it by heart even if we can’t know each other as well as we think we do.  And if the song that saved me from a bad day and a worse feeling can save him too and we can be momentarily saved together, then maybe we can share an idea of angels and god and brightness.  

***The title of this post is taken from "An Almost Made Up Poem" by Charles Bukowski

New York was his town, and it always would be.

Dear Readers,

These days I have a growing collection of emails and Facebook messages and texts, all yet unanswered and all asking me the same thing: how is life in New York?  And then the question is usually followed by something akin to, “I’ve been reading your blog.  When are you going to post more about New York?”  I leave these messages unanswered, not because I don’t care about the people who send them but because I don’t know what to say.  That’s the trouble with being a writer, I always want to say just the right thing and if I can’t be sure what that is then I don’t write.  I experience writer’s block even when it comes to Facebook messages. 

So I want you to know that I am writing this for you, my dear readers.  I am writing this for you, my friends and my family, who send me birthday cards and kind words from around the world and who are always there with me – on the phone or just online – whenever something goes wrong for me. I am writing this for the people I care about and the people who care enough to read this blog – and for a new reader that I happen to care a lot about. I am writing this to tell you how my life in New York so far.

In the past five weeks I have often found myself imagining what I would write as possible responses to those unanswered emails and messages and texts as I go about my day, as I walk down the street or as I eat bad food that I would never have pretended to like in Chicago or Cannes or Canterbury or Platteville.  And then today I found myself wanting to text everyone who’s messages I had left unanswered with just the simple statement that I am wonderfully, happy.  Yes, wonderfully, happy.  But I didn’t do that because that isn’t always how New York is for me.  At least four days out of the week I am usually terribly lonely and frustrated and disappointed.  So far I haven’t made many friends and my M.F.A. program is a let-down and I still prefer the atmosphere of Chicago to that of New York.  And I haven’t found many little things that I love yet.  I don’t have a favorite café or restaurant or take-out place or street.  And I often worry that I will never have these things, while I constantly idealize my favorite little things about Chicago – my favorite walks to take, my places to eat, my favorite café to sit and have a conversation – all of which I loved because they became part of my routine to the point that when I think of Chicago, I am thinking of walking down Fullerton Avenue and seeing brownstone urban splendor and I am thinking of eating Mexican food so hot I could scarcely breathe as I sit on the edge of Lake Michigan, watching the pink evening sky’s rippling reflection languish on the water’s surface as night flows in. 

And so, you see, I never return any messages because I feel like I don’t have the right stories to tell you.  But tonight, as I walked home from class the refrain from my memoir-in-progress struck me once again as relevant: we become each other’s stories.  And I realized that I do have a story about my life thus far in New York.  I have a boyfriend.  Surely, many of you know me as the ever-hopeful romantic but this time is different.  This time is what I was hoping for.

I met him on my fourth night in the city.  I remember thinking he sounded like a real New Yorker when he first told me his name.  As it turned out, he was from Boston.  I was just so new to New York when I met him that I didn’t really know what a New Yorker sounded like.  

When I first arrived, New York had felt like just another place but from the very beginning he didn’t feel like just another man.  He was tall and he possessed a caring, carful charm.  He had the kind of eyes that I had only ever read about, had never seen in real life.  Nonetheless, when I opened my eyes in the midst of kissing him on the night of our second date and saw his blue eyes looking back at me I knew that he had what the books told of; he had smiling eyes.  That night, as I lay beside him, staring up at his bedroom ceiling as I waited for sleep to find me, I noticed his smiling eyes watching me and I saw in them the hesitant look that I am sure has been in my own eyes many nights in the past years.  It was the look that said that he would rather stay up late talking to me than do just about anything else.  And so we did.  And so we do.

A week later, as evening lay itself down upon the soft bed of night, he kissed my shoulder while streetlight spilled through his bedroom window, kissing the rest of me with warm September-gold lips and I found myself wishing that I had never said “I love you” to anyone before because already I liked him more than I had ever loved anyone I had ever said those words to.

I realize, of course, that you might wonder why I am writing this here, but I told you – I am writing this for you and for him.  After all, how often do I write happy stories?  So since I now have one to tell I really ought to write it and be damn proud of it.  And so I am.

Those of you who know me well or who have just been reading my writing over the past several years know that I have written about the places I have lived and traveled to, as well as the people I’ve known and the men I’ve been with.  But I haven’t ever really written a happy story.  I’ve written melancholy tales of how love wasn’t what I thought it would be and restless recounts of places I’ve been.  And whether you realized it for not, the subtext was always that I was discontented and dissatisfied.  I was always wondering if there was something – someone – better out there, but always worrying that this – the particular man of the moment – might be as good as it gets.

So now I must tell you that I have a new boyfriend because in my daily life in New York I work on my memoir, which is about how we become each other’s stories and he is a good story – a happy story.

We become each other’s stories.  When I tell you that I have a boyfriend I am telling you the story of how I learned to never settle for anything less than I once dared hope for when I was too young to know all the kinds of disappointing the world can be.  I am telling you the story of how, finally, I have found someone who not just loves what I love but who loves the way I love it.  I am telling you the story of how I learned to have a little faith in people. 

And now let me close with that last story.

I told you that I don’t yet have many little things that I love about New York, but there are some big things that I have loved so far.  I loved my whole birthday weekend and I loved going on dates at The Museum of the City of New York and The Met. And I loved going on a date to see Woody Allen’s Manhattan at a vintage theater in Brooklyn – I may have loved that most.

On our first date my boyfriend told me that he thought Woody Allen was a truly great actor because he ended Manhattan  not with a great last line but with a great smile.  In the final scene of the movie Woody Allen’s character learns that the woman he loves is leaving to spend six months in London.  He tells her that doesn’t want her to go because he is worried that she might lose “that little thing” that he loves about her.  She tells him that he has to learn to have a little faith in people.  His response to this statement is a slow, sweet smile.  I always thought that was his character’s way of agreeing to have a little faith.

The day after we saw Manhattan in Brooklyn my boyfriend suggested that we write each other stories, so we agreed to each write our own version of that date.  Ever the dedicated writer, I finished my story within the week.  He still hasn’t written his so he hasn’t read mine but the point of the story that I wrote for him was that, when I smile at him, I am agreeing to have a little faith.  And I think that is a really nice story.

As always, Dear Readers, thank you for reading.

Yours Truly,

Molly Shea Kruser

***The title for this post is taken from Woody Allen's opening monologue in Manhattan.

Love Like Bukowski

The smell of the room groped at my clothes, my hair, my bare legs and arms, running invisible fingers along my neck and collarbone.  The smell was everywhere and I was inside it – inside last night’s weed and stale sex and dried sweat.  I sat at the head of the bed, hugging my knees to my chest while he lit up at the foot of the bed.  I made a nervous joke about what a wonderful rock’n’roll cliché it was to wake up, still wearing last night’s clothes, to see him smoking a joint while a Strokes song played.   

“It’s not a joint, it’s a one-hitter,” he told me as he took a drag.  “A joint is rolled with paper.”

I looked at the cigarette-like thing he held between his middle and index fingers.  That was a one-hitter.  I wondered if this was too.

He handed me a book from the table at the end of the bed.  Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Buckowski.  I was familiar with Bukowski’s work and I knew this particular man liked him but there was something about that moment that was throwing me off.  I could not tell if I felt like I had temporarily stumbled into a life meant for some other woman who was very, very different from a woman like me or if – finally – I had happened upon a real-life moment that mirrored my heart of hearts.   

He watched me as I stared at the page he had opened the Bukowski book to.  I was trying to see what he was trying to show me but all I could see was how I had thought of him while I had been in France and how a moment like this was precisely what I had envisioned but now that I had it, I couldn’t tell if it was the beginning or the end.  I think he thought I didn’t like the book because he took it from my hands and instead showed me a poem he had been writing as potential lyrics for a new song.  He asked what I thought.  I couldn’t think.  The moment was far too close to my heart, too far away from any rational, critical thought.

He put on a song and lay back on the bed, motioning for me to lay beside him.  I moved my body towards his and rested my head on his chest.  The song played.  And then another song played.  And then another.   

Months earlier we had lay in bed together one January afternoon for just an hour or two, just talking and sharing the softest of kisses.  He had asked me if he had still had his mustache when I first met him. I had told him that he did and he had commented that he wouldn’t have thought a girl like me would be attracted to a guy with a mustache.  I had said nothing in the moment but I had thought about this comment on several occasions long after the moment had passed.  As I saw it, I was precisely the kind of girl who would be attracted to a musician with a mustache and I was stunned that he couldn’t see that.  Even if I no longer dressed the part, I was still a rebel with too many causes; I was still a black nail polish, blue ink poet.  I had wondered if this was his way of saying something similar to what a classmate had told me when I was seventeen, “Molly, you’re too smart for a boyfriend.”  I suppose there is always something that people have trouble seeing past.

Nonetheless, the night before – the night of which this was now the morning after – I had liked the look of my shirt falling to the floor and the way my purse was holding a Ziploc bag that had formerly contained weed and now contained a mix CD made just for me.  And I had liked the way, the night before that, I had stood in the cavernous, deserted upstairs of a rock’n’roll bar, alone in the very back room with my back to the door.  I had liked the way he had come up behind me and wrapped his arms around me.  I had liked the way my hands had touched the bare skin of his forearm and the way my lips had laid a kiss halfway between his wrist and elbow.  And I had turned my body around into his full-bodied embrace and pressed my head against his chest while his hands lightly cupped the sides of my head.  And after what seemed like a long moment that could never have been long enough I had looked up into his face.  He had looked back at me.  And I had liked the way our lips met in the middle of the shrinking space between our bodies.


In my life I am often impulsive but always in control.  With him I was neither.  I was unthinking, only feeling and moving and experiencing.  I was outside of my head but closer to myself than I was most days or with most people.  I liked that.  And I thought that maybe that was what truly great kisses were like – taking over your body and melting who you are and who you’ve been into who the other person is and who they’ve been.  And if that is what truly good kisses are like, then I love them.

I had told him in a phone-call minutes before my flight to Paris that I thought I could love him and he had said he thought he could love me too – but that he didn’t know.  And we had never spoken about it again.   

After a couple more songs we got up from the bed.  I put on my big, dark sunglasses to hide last night’s smeared eyeliner and he walked me to the train station.  I remember glancing at him as we walked down the street.  I loved his thick, dark curly hair and the way he looked in the skinny jeans he was wearing even though it was one of the hottest days of the summer.  And I felt a new emotion that I had never before experienced when walking beside a man: pride.   

We said goodbye at the train station.  He said would he see me soon.  I peered at him over the rim of my sunglasses and then we were both gone.  That was June and this is September.  That was it.  But I wouldn’t call it a one-hitter.   

In August I sent him a postcard.  I quoted a Bukowski poem from the book he had once showed me: I loved you in the way a man loves a woman he only writes to, never touches.  Then I added, keep in touch.