Glass Slippers

She was the girl with the 64 crayons in the Crayola crayon box with the sharpener who sat directly beside me in first grade because fate once favored me. Her hair was blonde and wavy and I am sure her eyes were green, some sort of olive-colored green, but I can't say for certain. I lose them sometimes when I think of her. Maybe they were hazel. I never looked into them long enough to tell because it was as though they could burn holes in me. 

She was kind to me when others were not. I had hardly anything as a kid. I wore the same two or three shirts and two pairs of corduroy pants — one gray, one tan — and my shoes were a dirty cracked pair of plastic penny loafers my mom bought at a yard sale for 25 cents. I tried to hide the fact that I was on reduced lunches by hiding my yellow lunch card, but she didn't mind. I tried my best to stay clean and to be as attractive as possible. I combed my hair and cut it myself when mom said we didn't have the money for a barber. I stayed away from mom's smoking so I didn't smell like cigarettes. I brushed my teeth with baking soda and my finger when I didn't have a toothbrush or toothpaste. I bathed every day religiously. And I always smiled at Amy Thorn because it was quite evident to me at the susceptible age of six or seven, that I was in love with her.

She was the most beautiful girl in my class. And the best part was that she was fond of me as well. At least, when she noticed I had 8 broken crayons, she shared her 64 with me so that we both had 32 — split them evenly. She didn't just give me the browns and oranges, either. It was whatever colors her hands randomly chose. Maybe she was just a little communist, but she was lovely at it. It was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. Everyone else teased me, but Amy would defend me and gave me the comfort of a smile or kind words like salve on my wounds, which she seemed to know that I needed. She played board games with me on inside recess and ate lunch with me. Our favorite game was the water one with the rings. We timed each other to see who got them all on the hooks the fastest. We sat with each other on the bus and I often walked her home. We shared our fears with each other and our hopes and dreams. Everything, I confided in her. She seemed to love me, too, just as I loved her, and I was under the impression that it was the sort of thing that would last forever.

We stayed close until junior high. Fate seemed no longer to favor me for I no longer had a seat next to her or any classes with her. And halfway through the semester of our 7th grade year, she moved to Chicago with her mother, who had married a doctor of some sort. She found me to say goodbye and I was stunned and seemed not able to process it, nor to have any words to offer her that would adequately express my heartache or dismay, so I simply stood there and listened. 

She promised to write, but I never got a letter. I was vigilant about checking that mailbox for a year or more, forcing my arm all the way inside just in case the mailman pushed it back by accident. But it never came. I didn't have an address to write to her and I thought it was the end of it. What else could I do? Fate favored me that one time, but now my turn was over and it was somewhere favoring someone else — whoever it was that had the affection of Amy Thorn.

I went to college and got a degree in sociology and became a professor at the local university. I wasn't married and didn't have any prospects outside of the flirtatious student now and then who had a daddy issue, or some demented sort of professor-thing that I couldn't understand. I went on dates here and there, but nothing stuck. I seemed incapable of having feelings for anybody. I was 33 and it seemed that I was at a dead end in life and I found myself wandering home from class and watching Jeopardy, eating TV dinners, and making absurd observations of ordinary things or coming up with better terms for them. For instance, I called TV dinners "alien food" because they were wrapped in tinfoil. I called my TV the "boob tube," and I referred to Jeopardy as "The What Game" because every answer was prefaced with "what." I made up a story about an neighbor who incessantly walked his dog, Gloria, even when it rained (they had matching raincoats). I imagined him making love to that dog and I was afraid that in a matter of years, if I wasn't careful, I would become him. 

I was frankly bored of life and I wanted out, but I'd never commit suicide. I would classify myself as, if the term wasn't already taken, "living dead." I wanted to sit in a lawn chair on the front lawn until aliens zapped me up. My only prospect for fun was sending in an entry form to be on Jeopardy, or a trip to Las Vegas that I had considered buying and for which I had saved a considerable amount of money towards in a savings account I never bothered. A travel agent told me I wouldn't regret it — Sin City, she hissed in such a way that made me question her morality. 

No more than a month later I was invited to Chicago, of all places, to be tested with a bunch of brainiacs. While I was there, all I could think of was my long-lost friend, Amy. I had no idea where in Chicago she moved to, or if she even lived there still, but knowing I was in the city where she was made me happy and hopeful again. I thought I might run into her by chance in a restaurant or in a café. Or maybe on one of those busy streets. Like it happens in the movies all the time. But all those faces passed and my weekend concluded without me seeing her, and before I knew it, I was driving home, having done nothing besides taking the test, and seeing a few tourist sites, which weren't that impressive at all.

I was on Jeopardy a few months later and was introduced in the usual way that people are. Please welcome Ken Rose, a sociology professor from Kenosha, Wisconsin. During my introductory I said I wasn't married and had no kids and that I love Revolutionary War history and baseball. The funny story I shared had nothing to do with Amy, which I immediately regretted. It was my one chance with a national audience to profess my love for my long-lost friend, but instead I told a story about how I fell asleep in class once and the students just let me sleep until the class was over. The audience laughed. I suppose a sign flashed to tell them to do so. 

I had amassed a huge lead on the show and going into final Jeopardy I was up $12,400 with a total of $23,600, nearly double the second place guy, a computer programmer from Hackensack named Ned Kowalski. Then Alex posed the Final Jeopardy topic — which was Civil War History — and all I had to do was get it right and bet a few thousand dollars and Ned couldn't touch me. I bet it all because I was that confident that there wasn't a Civil War question I wouldn't know. 

And sure enough, when the question was posed, I knew it right away. "Who is General Winfield Scott?" Also known as Old Fuss and Feathers. But instead of writing the answer, it suddenly occured to me that I had the golden opportunity to proclaim my love for Amy Thorn to the world, and that there was a good chance that it would get back to her if I did.

Ned got the question right, drawing himself to within a thousand bucks. But he looked like a walrus that the zookeeper had forgotten to feed in an argyle sweater because he was sure I had got it right as well. Then they came to me and Alex read my answer with a slight chuckle, just as I had written it. "What is ... I love you, Amy Thorn. Please call or text me 740-974-0173. I miss you." 

Ned was suddenly fat with fish. A pig in mud. And some people in the audience awed and others laughed and some applauded and some gasped and others did nothing at all besides say, maybe, "What an idiot." And so the voice of Alex Trebek permeated the airwaves all across the world, professing my love for my long-lost classmate. I should have gone on Sally Jesse Raphael or Oprah.

"I don't think you should have given your phone number out," Alex said to me after the show ended. "There are a lot of weirdos out there." I smiled and he shook my hand with a chuckle and that was that. That was the first swing I took in finding her. I had given up forty some thousand dollars. But taxes, you know. There is no tax on love. 

Months passed and I hadn't received a call, so it seemed my effort was in vain. In all that time, every time the phone rang or buzzed, I felt a rush of excitement. I felt a thrill of joy and a shot of hopeful adrenaline that maybe, this one was her. Maybe she watched Jeopardy or knew someone who had and the message got back to her finally, after some understandable delay. But after nearly a year, I had given up on that phone as I had the mailbox, and so I went on. 

It was the spring of a few years later when I was reading a newspaper and got the news that Amy Thorn had been arrested in a prostitution sting. It couldn't be her, I assured myself. It couldn't be her only because it tarnished my image of her. She had moved back home? I had imagined her becoming something great. A lawyer, a teacher, a social worker, or a model, maybe. I couldn't imagine her becoming a hooker. But there her name was in black-and-white newsprint suddenly and boldly right in front of me. Plain as the nose on my face, as my mom often would say. I couldn't believe there were possibly two people with that same name, but it was possible. 

I called the jail about bailing her out, but they said she had already been sprung. I asked if I could her mugshot, but they said they don't release those. I don't know if I would have even recognized her or not after all these years. Time can be kind or it can be very unkind. And if she had gone down the path of prostitution and all that, it was more than likely that she had gone down a path of drugs and other vices, which might have led to her being haggard and older than her natural years would normally portray. I wasn't sure that I wanted to see her that way. Maybe it was better to remember her as she was, but I could hardly say I loved her if her misfortune affected my fondness of her so dreadfully. 

Perhaps the memory I had of her from elementary school ought to suffice. That ought to be the one I hold on to because it was beautiful for what it was and what it still is. Maybe love is meant to be had in small portions. In little things and just isn't everlasting. I keep it in that little face no bigger than a thumbprint in the photograph from our first grade class picture that I have framed and placed on my office desk. Those Valentine's Day cards she gave to me, all of which I kept and framed. That memory of the girl burned in my mind who split her 64 crayon box with me — even offering me the sharpener, which I politely declined. 

Every holiday I went all out giving her the very best card, and when our financial situation changed, when mom married a man who had his own construction business and provided for me that which I previously had not, I was given a decent allowance, most of which I saved and gave to her in some form or another. Mostly, anonymously. I would buy her flowers and drop them off at her house with a note to her. A terrible poem now and then comparing her hair to flax and her skin to wax and her eyes to glowing embers. I would give her pencils and erasers shaped like animals like penguins or ducks. I would buy her the deluxe book of stickers at the Scholastic book fair, or a book she favored, and leave them in her desk when she was outside for recess. I always wondered if she knew it was me, and if she thanked me with the smiles I always seemed to get whenever she saw me, which I eagerly collected, and which were the perfect repayment of a debt never owed. 

Years more passed. Neither hide nor hair, as they say. But in those years I trolled the local hooker websites relentlessly, like a mother of a runaway girl, hoping I would see her again. Maybe she would advertise when things cooled down. When she needed the money. A friend told me he heard she became a model, but then got hooked on drugs shortly thereafter. He even showed me an advertisment for some perfume, but it was only a black-and-white picture of her from behind on a beach. You couldn't see her face at all. He said he knew it was her because he dated her cousin who told him it was. He gave me the picture which was plucked from some magazine and still smelled faintly of perfume. 

I learned that she hadn't showed up for her court hearing and was in the wind. But then, nearly when I had given up hope, an ad on one of those hooker sites showed a woman who looked something like I would imagine her to look. There was a small scar on her left cheek and her face was the same, but twenty-five years progressed. She called herself "Scarlett." No prostitute goes by their actual name, I read in a book about hooker etiquette, figuring it was wise to familiarize myself with that taboo and seditious culture before delving into it. I was sure it was her. Then I managed to get a copy of the mugshot and confirmed it. I bribed someone in the court whose daughter was a struggling student of mine. It was definitely her.

My heart sunk. She was in a high-end hotel in Milwaukee and I made the trip, nervous as hell. I got my haircut and bought a good cologne. I bought a boquet of flowers and tried to write a poem, but wasn't sure it was any good. Probably no better than those I had written when I was nine. It was terrible, actually. I called her and she confirmed our appointment for 7pm that Friday evening and I puked in the parking lot then had to go buy some mouthwash to get rid of the taste. I tried to breathe in a paperbag, but it smelled like my tuna fish lunch days ago and I took one deep last breath and headed into the hotel, oblivious to all my good sense.

The lady at the front desk smiled at me, obviously unaware that I was there to see a hooker. Or maybe she was very aware. Maybe this sort of thing happened all the time and she played a game of trying to decide who was there to see a hooker and who wasn't. I white knuckled that boquet of flowers crinkling the plastic wrap, smiled back, and wondered if I should have went with the roses rather than the spring blend — reassuring myself that the spring blend was the wise choice for the variety of color and for the fact that I remember purple was her favorite color. Grape, she once called it because the crayon said so. 

I thought of her in Cinderella when we were in 4th grade. I didn't get to play the prince as I wanted to. I was one of the mice who turned into a horse that pulled her carriage that became out of a pumpkin. I remember her telling me after it was over that she thought I was a handsome mouse and how she wished I had played the prince. Then she rubbed noses with me as we had the year before after "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and she giggled when my mouse whiskers tickled her. I keep that giggle somewhere deep in my heart and the purity of it. The memory comforted me. I wondered if she remembered, too, or if those memories had been washed from her by time and drugs.  

I exhaled before I stepped into the gilded elevator. It chimed with a bizarre resonance, almost ominously, like I was in the belly of a grousing grandfather clock. But I was determined and could not be deterred. She was an elevator trip and about a few dozen steps away and I wasn't going back now. I had tucked a Gideon's Bible in my back pocket to give to her if the moment arose. So many scenarios played out in my mind about what might happen. She might break down and bawl in my arms when I reminded her about how in third grade I was Rudolph and she was Clarice in the school play and she didn't think my nose was bad at all. She thought it was "distinguished." I wanted to rub noses with her again as we had when that play ended like when Cinderella ended. When the teachers released the confetti snow over us which we had been cutting up since Columbus Day. And though they were not our noses, they may as well have been our noses. They were costume noses and that bulb of mine burned as bright as my heart did for her. A bleeding red desperate signal that ached for her and that has never ceased, despite all the time it has burned and that blizzard of other memories and moments that have filled our separate lives since being misfortunately displaced. 

I once begged to grow up and to be with her. I prayed to God for her. To marry her and to live a good life wherever the road might lead us together. She is the only thing I ever really wanted and if that is not love, I simply don't know what love is.  

I was so close. The hotel hallway smelled of new carpet and paraffin for some reason. Freshly painted walls and the vapors of whatever couple had passed before me and wherever they came from trailing after them. A slight hint of steak sauce and the vanilla of a vape and the cherry bubblegum of a reluctant teenage girl who was tagging along with her dad on another boring business trip. Hotels are universes of possibilities and ant farms of people. Those little eyeballs in the corner of the hallways are always looking. My God, I realized, I was committing a crime. My toes were on the precipice of a solicitation charge. Though I was coming to see an old friend, how likely would that hold up if the police busted in. And if not the police, would there be some pimp to rob me at gunpoint? It was worth the risk, though. 

I looked down for reassurance in the zigzag carpet that reminded me of an alien design from a museum in Roswell I went to as a kid with the step-dad who saved my life and funded my existence from age eight onward. Who got me interested in little green men and Area 51 and all that sort of thing. I could see his face in the carpet design for he is still part of me. 

The room number she gave me through text message was "404." And there I stood in front of it trying not to hyperventilate. What an embarassment it would have been had I passed out. I was both smiling and grimacing all at once. Like I was at the dentist. In complete happiness and dread, looking over those brass numbers with my palm gently on the door. I wondered if her eyeball was in the peephole. Floating there. 

I wondered if she was just behind that door and ready to open it as she probably had ten thousand times before. To get it over with. To pay some bill. To buy a drug that keeps her alive and feeling relatively human capable of some artificial emotion somewhat like happiness but not quite happiness. And that much she knows, but she can't help herself because it is at least something. Something rather than nothing. Or maybe it is all to buy some material thing that kept her in an imaginary class and ascribed her some illusory status. Cartier. Michael Kors. Whatever the hell it is. Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. Maybe I didn't know what I assumed I knew as people often don't. 

So I knocked. Wondering if I should have knocked louder. Exhaling again. My body began to tremble and the unnerving feeling that I was about to meet a fate I was prepared not to meet swallowed and regurgitated me. Then the door opened and it wasn't her. Very undramatically what was birthed in that open doorway wasn't even worthy to be called a likeness of her. The rush of disappointment overcame me so overwhelmingly that I was incapable of moving or doing anything at all on my own. She was someone who might look like her if you were horribly nearsighted, but she was definitely not her. There was no slight scar on her cheek and her eyes were some miserbale shade of cornflower blue, betraying my memory that they were of an olive green or hazel hue.  

She invited me inside and I went because I was under the influence of disillusionment. Maybe, it was because of the light, I thought suddenly mad with desperation, and if I had another look at her, she would suddenly appear. It was all, perhaps, an ill-cast shadow. Maybe life hadn't been so kind as to leave any resemblance of my former love, but this stern-face barracuda of a woman was somehow my Amy, beaten up by life. You're not the girl in the pictures, I wanted to say, but saying nothing at all. 

There were bags of clothes on the ground. Heels spilling out of a gym bag. Various adult toys and lotions. Bottles of random liquors on the dresser and several packs of cigarettes like unburied coffins. There were perfume bottles that reminded me of a Lazarus counter when I was a kid, when my mom used to walk through and spray herself everytime we went to the mall as though it were a mandatory ritual. The lady at the counter would scowl at her because she never stopped long enough to hear her sales pitch. Mom would make me smell her and give her my honest opinion. I learned quickly the best thing to say is that "it smells nice," even if I didn't think so. Perhaps it was my mom who ruined me for women, rather than my desperate love for Amy Thorn. Everyone else was just so damn boring. 

But this fraudulent Amy pretended to be inviting and asked me how much time I wanted. I thought too deeply upon the question. Time was a commodity that was bought and sold by hookers and johns since the beginning when men and women realized they had tradeable goods and needs and desires that were negotiable — quid pro quo. I didn't know how to answer. I was still in a haze of disillusionment that held me tightly in its grasp, but something on the TV that droned on like a mindless nuisance caught my attention and woke me up from that disenchantment. It was an advertisment for Jeopardy, or "The What Game."

"None. I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else." 

But the hooker was determined and like she was some used car salesman working me for a commission, she gave her best sales pitch — offering free package deals, bogo specials, warranties, and a test drive in the sheets, conditioned only upon me saying that I was a serious buyer. But once more, I declined. I was looking for a very specific car, after all. One that was not on the lot of this particular dealership. 

When I got to the parking lot, I felt a sense of relief, though I was sorely disappointed it hadn't worked out and it wasn't her. Maybe Amy got out of the business but someone was using her pictures. But as I put the car in reverse, a swarm of cops surrounded me and their lights flashed painting the scene red and blue. They drew their guns and told me to get out of the (expletive) car. You would have thought I had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. 

I spent the night in jail for soliciting. Things weren't going so well for me, I realized that night at dinner in the pod full of malodorous men with bad dental hygiene and even worse tattoos. Some told sad stories, but most were frequent fliers who felt quite at home in the austere loveless setting of jail. In fact, they needed it. They enjoyed the game of cat and mouse and I felt, after brief observation, that they psychologically depended upon it. They were in-and-outers. They would piss dirty and get locked up. Or they didn't pay child support or they violated some protection order to see some woman who was never worth seeing to begin with. Some dumb thing because, for the most part, they were dumb people and they didn't really know how to act appropriately or how to become smarter. They had no interest in it. 

I was told that I would be given bail in the morning, but no one could promise me what kind of mood the judge would be in, and if he wanted to, he could deny bail because, as they said, "they are taking that stuff seriously these days." That night I lied in my steel bunk on a plastic mat and thought of Amy. I couldn't sleep. People were up late telling stories of bad decisions. Trading crude jokes. Looking out the barred windows longinly at a rain-soaked highway. Coveting things that people who were not in jail would throw in the trash. Talking about women they were with and women they wished they were with. Feeding other people lies they rolled up into truth like bad sushi. It was all a price to pay to be with her and despite how it was going, despite my lowly predicament, I was undeterred and still hopeful. 

The next morning I was awoken by people walking around in circles. The cattle-like clip-clop of their feet. Tweekers, someone called them. They were waiting for breakfast and had been up all night. There was nearly a fight because the shower shoes they give out at intake are hard plastic and make a loud sound when someone walks in them. Glass slippers, they angrily call them, usually accompanied by an expletive. I wrote that down. It occured to me that I was trying to fit an imaginary glass slipper on the foot of a woman I hadn't seen since we were children. She was my Cinderella, but we were hardly a Disney movie. 

They called it Operation Badfoot — the sting I was busted in. I have no idea what that means, but the operation was orchestrated by "a joint task force" and they said it was designed "to end human trafficking." I didn't regret it. I did what I thought I could do to see Amy. I regretted how they characterized. How it was advertised and all over the morning news and my name was among a dozen others strewn along with our occupations as though we were child molesters. As though we ought to bear some scarlet letter. I hadn't even paid, and the woman advertised said she was 33. 

There was no asterisk to my arrest. It was intentionally left ambiguous so to make people wonder. So to create the illusion that it was far more nefarious than it was and that there are law enforcement officials doing something to combat a problem that does exist, but not to the extreme that they want you to believe that it does. Not as it does in the movies or Eastern Europe. Fear has long been a great instrument in altering the perception of someone's or something's worth. And since law enforcement was struggling in other areas of public relations recently, this illusionary softball of combating the scourge of "human trafficking," otherwise known as two consenting adults, was, therefore, mendacious propaganda designed to restore their tarnished image.

I was released on bail and all I took from my time in jail was the sound of those glass slippers and an effusive showering of expletives that can be applied to any emotion or situation, as it turns out. I plead not guilty and the charge was dismissed, yet I had to pay a fine. I asked the prosecutor about Amy's picture and he laughed then reluctantly told me they pulled it from a previous arrest. I asked him if he knew what happened to her because we were friends from elementary school and he told me that she was in treatment in Cincinnati for drug abuse and gave me the name of the place, which I thought was a joke. He remembered because he had been the prosecutor on the case and he felt sorry for her. She was a mule in a drug trafficking case and turned on a dealer who got 37 years.

I thanked him for the information. I wasn't sure why he gave it to me, but he did. It was almost as though he were brainwashed and involuntarily speaking. Perhaps it was simply his stoic demeanor, but it was nonetheless curious. His lips were moving and the words came out, but he couldn't hear himself, nor stop himself from saying them, nor did he express any visible emotion as he did. He was young. He looked like someone fresh out of law school. Someone who had recently done a few keg stands and joined a frat. The stink of stale beer hadn't yet worn off him. 

I lost my job at the university because of the controversy of my arrest and the nature of my charge. I didn't bother to argue or explain, though I had a good argument and the charge was dismissed. I packed my things in my car and headed to Cincinnati and found the rehab center, which was a nice facility in a posh suburb called Blue Ash. It was, in fact, called what the prosecutor told me it was called — Hotel California by the Sea. It made no sense to me, but I liked things that made no sense. I am a weirdo. 

I went inside, but the overly-friendly receptionist, a tall dark-skinned lady with a shaved yellow head who looked as much like a giraffe as any human could, told me that they don't allow visitors, nor outside letters or communication of any kind. She said so in such a way that made me feel good about it, even though it was detrimental to my quest of reuniting with Amy. They wouldn't give me any information about her. So, I did all I could think of doing. I called and tried to enroll myself in treatment, but they said I'd needed a dirty urine screen to be admitted. So I bought some dope off a dealer named Vincent in a seedy campus bar in Cincinnati and injected a small amount of heroin in the bathroom. Not an amount that would kill me. It was black tar, Vincent boasted. He showed me how to do it for an extra fifty bucks and we sat in the barhroom on the sink and got high. He didn't ask why I wanted to do it, but I dont think I would have told him. Not sober, anyway. 

The light in the bathroom was flickering and the mirror was broken. The sink was leaking. The tiles were cracked. The toilet hissed and the walls were cold wet cement covered with decades of witty and not-so-witty grafitti. There were things written on the wall about people's mothers and girlfriends. Haikus. Pertient sexual reviews. Riddles about wives. Phone numbers. It was a filthy place. Vincent said he dropped out of college and got into pharmacology. I wasn't sure if he was serious, but he seemed to know what he was doing and was absurdly confident about it like David Koresh probably was at taking wives. His leather jacket groaned as he moved and when we were high, it was as though it was talking to me. He was a geek about drugs and philosophy. He insisted that he exists on a different plateau than everyone else and soon I would, too. He said that dope is the yellow brick road and he talked a great deal about The Wizard of Oz, I realized. But I wasn't interested in Oz. 

As the dope made its way through our veins, he finally asked what I was doing and why I was doing it. And so when I told him, he laughed. He laughed hard. He thought I was putting him on. Then he thought I was making it all up because of the dope. But then he stopped me and said and he chortled, "Hey, ain't you that dude from Jeopardy, man? That dude that said he loved that chick?"

"Yes," I admitted with the rubber strap still wrapped around my arm wagging like a dog's tail and my head spinning like carousel. "I am."

"And this that same chick?"

"She is, Vincent."

"Hell, nah! Man, you got it bad for this momma! She must be one hell of a sexy woman."

"She was a model once. Did an underwear ad. It was on a beach. You couldn't see her face, just her body. It was blurry in a bikini. One of those artistic sort of things." I didn't have it on me to show him, but thought I described it fairly well. That ad didn't matter at all to me, but I thought it might to him. I couldn't care less if she had been a model or if she gained 200 pounds or how she had changed. Then I told him how I hadn't seen her since elementary school, other than in a mugshot and that ad, and he laughed even harder before he started to cry because he thought it was "romantic shit, man! Oh, damn! That hits deep, bro. I hope you find her!"

I exhaled and handed him back the needle, thanked him, and then left. 

I passed out in my car with a parade of wild thoughts waltzing through my mind. A circus of wild bizarre animals. All my other senses were bemused townsfolk with bags of popcorn and cotton candy on sticks in their hands sitting on hay bales. It was like I died and was reborn and the world was completely different. I felt no fear or panic. No worry or shame. No guilt or anger. Every good feeling was augmented tenfold and I was suddenly the most capable and hopeful person in the universe. I was perfectly amused and nothing at all mattered.

I called the number back and said I'd like to enter the program and they told me there was a wait list. They were a month out. They recommended me to another facility, but I quickly said I'd wait. They said they'd call me if anything came open sooner. 

I slept in my car and bought dope from Vincent at least twice a week or so. I shot up every few days. Each time was a different experience. Each time was something new. Something euphoric and painless. The only consistent thing was Amy and she was different each time. She was like Waldo in those books. I was dancing with angels. I felt immortal and above everything. I thought for a while I was a vampire and I didn't shower for a few weeks. I lost twenty pounds I didn't have to lose. I left my car somehwere and forgot where I parked it and I was running low on cash on hand. I had money in my savings account, but I didn't have access to it unless I went back to Kenosha to the credit union to withdraw it. I became a junkie. I sung karaoke in a campus bar and made terrible friends. I somehow ended up with a guitar which I hadn't played in years, but I picked right up. After 22 days, they finally called me. It was like being beamed up in an alien spaceship.

My mind was a soup of many different things at the time. There seemed to exist no chronological barriers and logic and reason were foreign concepts to me, as foreign as some advanced mathematical field I'd not studied. Yet the one consistency that remained, was my desire to see her. Even when I thought I was going to die. It was so intense and real that I believe had I overdosed and died, the desire would remain in my corpse absent everything else as my meat rotted and insects feasted upon me, and perhaps my desire for her would be passed on to them, and they would carry it on like love pollinators. Maybe that is how it works.

"You've done the right thing," they all told me the first few days. The counselors and doctors. It was verbal reassurance. It was in their training and positive support was an element of that. Most of the social workers were obese, I noticed, just as a matter-of-fact. It was an obvious side-effect of their line of work. They eat to comfort themselves from the daily trauma. I quickly learned that Hotel California by the Sea, was not segregated — male and female residents intermingled as they would in everyday life — though the dorms were separate and residential advisors monitored everyone's comings and goings. They didn't allow sleepovers and sex was prohibited. 

I watched for her like a hawk. Like a hawk on a electric wire over a culvert along the road I remember once swooping down and taking a young rabbit whose life was thus misfortunately shortlived. And in my malaise, the scene played over and over, though it was a distant memory from my childhood when my mother stopped along the way to some lake to let our car cool down because it was overheating. My mother tried to make the most of everything and was rarely visibly discouraged. She rolled the windows down and we ate egg salad sandwiches and she listened to the radio when I spotted that hawk. I was that rabbit. Life had me in its talons. There was nothing I could do to save that rabbit.

It was good to shave, shower and to eat again. The withdraws were excruciating for a while. It felt as though a World War raged inside me with no hope for peace. My brain was gassed and strewn with barbedwire which was slowly being pulled away by the fat fingers of time, every tick and tock that beat like a machete on a brass gong. 

Then I saw her. She was in the library reading a book. She was beautiful and I was nervous. I fixed my hair. I swallowed a few times as though my nervousness was in my throat like a bug and I could rid myself of it, cast it to the acidic hell of my stomach like a sodomite. I knew I might never have this chance again. Maybe tomorrow she would check out. But there she was after all this time. Right in front of me. And like Gatsby I felt I was looking at that distant green light of East Egg, only it was not so distant. Her face was that light. And there was an aura about her as there was before, long ago, when I knew her as a kid. 

I took a book from a shelf, a random book, and walked in front of her as nonchalantly as possible. As though it were a part of my path. She didn't realize that it wasn't. But the long road to her winded down to a single aisle in a co-ed drug rehabilitation center library. A place I could have never expected to be. I didn't have a plan, I just went for it. I just dove into her space the way Clark Griswald dove into that motel pool with Christie Brinkley waiting for him, only to scream and give himself away. 

I was no actor. I couldn't pretend not to know her. I couldn't pretend to suddenly recognize her, or pretend that I didn't at all. So I stopped in front of her and smiled, much the way I smiled as a kid. She looked up at me by way of the track marks on my arms and smiled sympathetically and said hello. And in her hazel eyes, that I realized at last were hazel, the faint spark of recognition burned there until it became a conflagration of memory. 

"Kenny Penny?!" 

It is what she always called me. No one else called me that. I was Kenneth or Ken Rose to everyone else. Or Rosey. Rosey Palm in my teenage years, unfortunately. 

She sprung up from her seat and hugged me, accidentally knocking the seat over and making a ruckus that fortunately no one was there to hear or witness. But who cares if they had been? I hoped that I was, appearance-wise, not a terrible disappointment. I guess I hadn't considered it before now. I stayed relatively fit and other than my excursion into the world of heroin, I led a healthy lifestyle. She was absolutely gorgeous. She was healthy and flawless. 

"Kenny! I never thought I'd see you again! And if I did, well, definitely not in a place like this. Wow! What — what happened?"

I knew enough about life to try to avoid being a tourist, even when you are a tourist. And often, the less you say, the better. In fact, the less you say, the more you say. The more you invite someone else to use their imagination about you, which is most often favorable to you. So I smiled and said the only thing I could think of.

"Life."

She chuckled with sympathy. "I know all about that. It's so good to see you! Sit! Sit down! Talk to me for a bit. How long have you been here? What have you done in life?!"

I sat down next to her and we talked. It was like it was all those years ago when it rained and we had inside recess and we were thumbing those buttons to ring those water rings. I suppose it was raining again, on both of us, and this was the reprieve. This, Hotel California by the Sea, was the reprieve. The X on a map we couldn't see. She admitted to me everything that had happened since she moved to Chicago. Some of which, I will take to my grave. She told me about the crowd she fell into in high school and the first drugs she ever used. About the first concert she saw — which was The Grateful Dead at Soldier's Field. The first boyfriend who broke her heart. How she got into prostution and her life as a homeless drug addict after once being a promising model. She said there was more than just the perfume ad of her on the beach when I mentioned seeing it. "The blurry butt ad," she playfully called it. 

She told me about the world of pain she lived in that began with that terrible betrayal she had already confessed. The world is a cruel and ugly place, she finished off. The drugs made me believe that it wasn't so bad. On heroin, it was all sunshine and roses. Then I became addicted and then I had to pay for that addiction. 

"Don't we all." 

What about you? Why did you first use?"

I struggled to answer. Love wouldn't be suitable. Or believable. "Boredom, I suppose. My life was pretty boring, you can say. I guess, I was chasing something I couldn't catch."

She nodded her head. "Hmmm. We are all chasing something."

"Or someone," I interjected. 

"True. I've got two weeks left. I'm not sure I can make it outside of here, though. It's fine in here. It's controlled. It's safe. The bad thoughts come, but there is a therapist and therapy dogs and a pool and a library and people. And now there's you. But out there, there's none of that. There's nothing. Is there?"

I gave her a hug and her head nestled into my shoulder. Nothing had ever felt more natural. And suddenly, everything was worth it. It could have ended there. In that moment. She could have got up and left and been released and I would have been grateful for that happy ending. But fate favored me once more. Maybe it was my patience or persistence, it admired. Or maybe fate is just random. Like a roulette wheel. The more she leaned into me, the more I wanted her to. The more she spoke to me, the more I wanted to listen. I became hungry for her words. She exhaled and I breathed. If she had bathed, I would have bathed after her. I would have drank the water. 

We decided to meet that night after curfew which was 9pm. Marcus, the therapy cat, patrolled the halls. The therapy dogs were much lazier and slept in their beds by the RA desk. As the RA, Natasha, slept at her desk, Amy took off her slippers and scurried down the hall and into my room. We made love that night in my bed and I had never felt a greater sense of euphoria. Not from a drug or from a dream or from a perfect Christmas or birthday gift. She was everything in one person and to be with her, in that natural way, was my most beautiful experience as a living thing. I never realized I was alive before then, or how colorful living truly is.

The next day I met her again in the library. "People will talk," she warned. "People will say things."

"Let them," I countered. "You can come back to Kenosha. I have a nice house on a lake and savings. I can get my job back, or another job like it. We can live together. Be together. We can go to Vegas."

"I don't think I can ever be that normal again," she admitted. Her voice suddenly sunk and it was as though she were someone else entirely. I had inadvertently snapped her out of the pleasure of our affiar by mentioning domestication. "I don't think I can ever stop using if using is an option. But I can't live my life in rehabs, Kenny. I don't know what I'll do. I don't know what's left for me."

I wanted to tell her about me. Why I was there. What happened on Jeopardy. Why I went to jail. Why I first used dope. How I got into Hotel California by the Sea. I wanted to tell her everything as though it would make her feel better. Like it would make a difference. Maybe it would have. But I thought in the moment that it would turn her off and if I expressed such a desire to be with her, that I went through all those obstacles, she would be desireless because of it. The more you care for someone, or the more you show it, the less they care for you. I learned that, rather, that was an innate lesson branded upon my psyche from my childhood. No one loved my father more than my mother, but no one was less loved by one loved so much. So I said nothing at all. I just simply took what she was willing to give me. 

We made love so often over the next week that I was sore and could hardly bear it, though I was insatiable and could not resist. Marcus was the sole witness of our transgression, but he was agreeably tight-lipped as cats customarily are. My God, how I loved her. 

I played a song for her one night. It wasn't my song. It was Tom Petty's song. But I pretended it was my song. It is called "Walls." 

I Googled the lyrics and sang it as though it were my own, as though I had wrote them myself. I was sure Tom Petty wouldn't mind much. She loved it and we sat in the library and I strummed the guitar and sang it for her over and over. I sang it for her like it had never had been sung before. I didn't realize that I had a fairly decent voice and felt I could be a singer songwriter. One of those hipster guys who play the bars in nearly every city everywhere. 

She melted in my arms. And then she faded. As much as I wished she wouldn't have faded, that is the best way of describing it. I thought to invite her. I thought to ask her to come home with me, but this was home now. This was our new home as we knew it. Life on another planet, but it was life, nonetheless. I worried that nothing else would ever be home. Nothing else would be normal unless we could go back to elementary school and live that life as we once lived that life all those years ago. When we were kids. But that wasn't to be.

A few days later, I went to her door and knocked, but she didn't answer. There was no reply at all and, strangely, the knock felt hollow. I decided to try the door, fearing the worst. It was unlocked. When I opened it, I knew immediately what had happened. She was gone. Rather, she fled. It was not a locked-down facility. People could leave as they please, but once they leave they couldn't ever come back. Not without permission. Her personal things were gone. Drawers were left open and empty. That was the end of it. 

I thought about leaving and chasing after her. I thought about going home and getting my job back. Or a different job like it somewhere else. In some other boring university with the same faces looking at me as I lectured on post modernism for the thousandth time, rattling off names of dead sociologists and philosphers who mean nothing to no one anymore but who once meant everything to a great deal of people. Such is the way that it goes. Flames go out. Things end. People die and become forgotten, which is terribly sad. But I stayed. I decided to finish treatment. Get clean again. Lick my wounds and go home and hope not to become my neighbor who is love with his dog, Gloria, for lack or anything else. I made a good effort, after all. I had reached the summit, and it appeared that I was a peakbagger of sorts. I never knew how I'd really be until I met her. At least, I could say, I got to see her again. 

She left behind a few things. I don't know if intentionally or if by mistake. But she left behind two crayons which lied contendly upon the dresser next to a blank piece of notebook paper that looked as though it's whole purpose was to take a note that it never took. There are no words sometimes. What it said though, without saying anything at all, was voluminous as it was left to my imagination.

In all the sadness and disappointment that swirled through my soul at that very moment, I had nearly forgotten that I signed up for the Hotel California by the Sea talent show which was later that evening. It sounded like more fun than anything else I was doing, or could do, and I wanted to put an end to this, once and for all. I had signed up expecting to sing her song to her, but now I would sing it without her. To the memory of her. I have loved her for 27 years, and at 33, I could say my life was hardly over. I would never forget her, but I didn't have to carry on this way. Chasing her around and hoping she would feel the same as I felt someday. Hoping she would see me as I saw her. It suddenly didn't matter if she did or didn't. It doesn't affect how I love her. 

It was a good show. People laughed and had fun. One girl was a comedian and a few played music and there was a guy who could juggle almost anything. Then I had my chance and I sang her song. My eyes were closed for most of it. I found it easier to play and sing with my eyes closed so I didn't see everyone looking at me. But when I was nearly through with the song and opened them, there she was. She was standing in front of the stage and staring at me. I took a deep breath and finished the song. Then everyone applauded and it all stopped as she kissed me.

"I got to a bar and met Vincent, who I was going to buy some dope off of. But as I did, when I told him where I came from, he told me a story. He told me everything you did to find me. To get to me. About Jeopardy. All that you did for me. So I apologized and told him I couldn't buy any and he said he wouldn't sell me any even if i wanted him to and he drove me back here. You did all that for me?"

I said nothing, but smiled. She cried. "Sue let me in when I told her the story. Thank you, Sue." Sue was one of the counselors. She was standing off to the side crying, as well. 

"Kenny, I got so lost. How did I get so lost? But you — you found me. And if you found me, maybe, well, I think maybe I can find myself. I just don't know how to be loved."

"You've always been loved. You just have to be."

"Is it really that simple?"

"Yes. Come home with me, Amy. Love can replace anything. But nothing can replace love." 

A few days later we checked out and took a bus back to Kenosha, whole again. Her foot slid gently into that glass slipper. I don't know that she loves me as I love her, but she needn't. I need only to give to her that which I have always had to give to her. She sighed contented, nestled into my side, Cinderella in my arms, half-asleep on the porch swing with her legs tucked under her on a warm summer night where I feel, rather than to think, that I am once more favored by fate. We rub noses and she chuckles with her eyes closed, remembering.