A BRIEF AFFAIR

He reminded me of James Dean in “East Of Eden”

or more accurately,  James Dean in “East Of Eden”

… if he’d been dumb, crazy and reckless,and spent half of his life wired

 on cheap Hell’s Angel’s crank and bad wine

working in a booth on the midway of a low-rent traveling carnival

He was sinister and baby-faced, white trash in a black leather jacket

He was from Florida and had eyelashes as long as his criminal record

Dirty blonde hair hanging in his face, he drove a poison green metal flake

’56 Pontiac Fire Chief with a six-pack stashed under the passenger seat

Any sane person would’ve stayed the hell away…but he was the ex of one of my

girlfriends and she was on the East Coast with an ex of mine

So when he burst in on me in the backstage bathroom of the Whisky a-Go-Go

while I applied my lipstick

and told me he’d always though I was cute, I figured everything would be ok

In one swift movement he kicked the door shut and turned off the light

and had me pressed up against the sink

It wasn’t ‘til later that night kissing feverishly in the laundry room at a party in Silverlake

when my current boyfriend (whom I’d accidentally left at the Whisky)

kicked the door down with a cry of triumph, and I realized

 that I might have made a slight judgmental error

The next day I woke up with puffy, tearful eyes

and clothes crusted over with a mixture of Budweiser and ALL Detergent

I didn’t see too much of him after that…or my boyfriend, for that matter

The couple of times I saw my boyfriend he ignored me

The couple of times I saw him he was either brawling or incoherent

Last year, I heard he’d done time for robbing a bank

Oh, well… it was fun while it lasted

# 

This piece  took place in the early 1980’s, and was published in my book

Senorita Sin (1994, Incommunicado Press)