Blazed (31 page)

“Oh yeah,” she says. “It ain't much farther. We're so close, and you're gonna thank me for the rest of your life for bringing you here. Trust me.”

Dominique and me, we're climbing this hill and it's pretty cold right now and I just told her about how I saw Brandon kissing that gay dude.

“I kinda thought that about him,” she says.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some of his mannerisms, how clean and shaped his fingernails were, the eyes he was making at you at Dolores Park.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you didn't notice that,” she says.

“No,” I say.

“Yes, he was,” she says back, laughing. “It was clear to me and Eddie.”

I've got her guitar in one hand and that bottle of wine in the other, and I was able to smoke half a blue in the backstage bathroom before we took off from Slim's
and jumped on the BART and got off in what's known as Bernal Heights.

“I'm pretty sure tomorrow when you wake up, Vicious Lips is gonna be the biggest thing in San Francisco.”

“No way,” she goes.

“Yes way,” I say back. “That crowd ate everything y'all cooked and plated for them.”

She laughs.

“Then all those suits backstage who wouldn't shut up.”

“So annoying,” she says.

“I really do mean it, Dominique. Your band is absolutely going to the next level soon and then another level after that.”

“I hope so,” she says. “I want it to happen so bad. We all do. That's why we work so hard all the time. Nobody works harder than my band, Jaime. We say we're gonna get something done and then we go get it done.”

“That's the way it should be.”

“We're young, but we've played a lot of shows in this city with a lot of older people who've been doing this here for years and they're not doing shit. Just treading water and still opening at the same bars on the same shitty weekday nights. A lot of them are just assholes who roll their eyes at us until they see us play and how we own the house every time. But seriously, some of those shows, all I hear backstage is a bunch of fucking coked-out hipsters who don't think they're hipsters talking and talking and talking and never doing. No
way it should take you four months to put out an EP and book a handful of shows. No fucking way. You should put out two EPs in four months. And a lot of them don't even tour. Like, how the fuck are you gonna make a living off your music if you don't tour? Like, that's the next step for us. I'm graduating a year early from school and we're hitting the road right away for the whole summer. Starting in August, each of us is putting fifty bucks a week into a band bank account so we can be on the road for three months straight. If you really want this, you have to go places with it, literally. We ain't ever gonna be the coked-out band talking about the rad shit we wanna do till sunrise, we're gonna be the band who talks about the shows we just did on the West Coast and East Coast and about the two albums we put out last year.”

“I think you are already that band.”

“Not yet,” she says. “But we're getting there.”

“Are we?” I ask. “Are we getting there?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “Just another minute or two, baby.”

As we near the top of the hill, Dominique wanders over to me and hooks her arm through mine.

“You ready?” she says.

“Absolutely,” I tell her.

“Okay then,” she goes. “Close your eyes and take my hand and wait till I tell you to open them.”

“Sure.”

I've never felt more comfortable in my life. More excited and comfortable and cared for too.

There's no one else I'd ever trust to do this with. Not even my mother. And this is the thing about Dominique, I trust her. That's why I love her now. I finally began to believe the things she told me. I finally realized she meant everything. When I saw her actually doing all the things she told me she was going to do, that was when I believed she meant everything she was telling me.

That's so beautiful too. This is how you know if someone really likes you or loves you. Once I got that, she got my heart.

And now she has all of it.

We stop walking. Wherever we are, there's a strong calm and quiet about it.

“Okay,” she says. “Open them.”

“Holy shit,” I say, covering my mouth and even staggering a couple steps backward. “It's so beautiful, Dominique.”

She starts clapping, and I grab her and throw my arms around her and kiss her.

What I just looked at is the city of San Francisco lit up and sprawled out in front of me. We're at the very top of Bernal Heights and from here, you can see past the city and into the ocean.

It's the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen besides her face.

“Oh shit,” I say, kissing her again. “I will definitely be thanking you for the rest of my life.”

“But that's not it,” she says. “We've gotta walk about fifteen more feet to see the cherry on top, Jaime.”

“There's something sweeter than this still?” I say. “Jesus, I'm getting spoiled tonight.”

“Oh you have no idea,” she goes, squeezing my hand as my dick plants into my zipper and my jeans push out a few inches.

She opens her backpack and takes out this huge flashlight and after moving a few feet closer, she turns it on and yeah, fucking yes, it just got a whole lot sweeter.

There's a piano up here. It's just sitting about five feet from the edge of the hill.

I cover my mouth again and go, “No way,” and then I kiss her and run to it.

“Has this always been here?” I go.

Shaking her head, she says, “No. Just since last week. Mark—”

“From your band?”

“Yes,” she says. Then, “Mark and two of his friends found the piano in this old, abandoned church near Hayes Valley. They broke in to tag the place and saw the piano. After they tuned it up, they went back the next day with a truck and loaded it up and brought it up here that afternoon. We got a bunch of people together then and had a picnic and jam session that night. One of the most fun nights of my life, actually. Isn't it so great?”

“It's the best, Dominique. You and your friends are amazing. All of you, you're so sincere and creative and nice. This is probably the coolest thing I'll ever see in my life and
I'm seeing it with you . . . this beautiful girl, this girl that I, ya know . . .”

My voice fades a bit and my throat gets dry. I've never done this before. It's tougher than I ever imagined.

Dominique grabs my hands and goes, “The girl that you what?”

“Ya know . . .”

“What?” she goes, giggling.

“The girl that I love,” I say.

Dominique lets go of my hands and throws them against the side of my face now and we start making out.

When we stop for a second, I go, “I'm sorry if I—”

“Shhhhh,” she says, then kisses me again. “Just don't. Don't say anything else right now, Jaime.”

She kisses me again and then slides her lips down my chin and then down my neck. She sucks on my neck and licks it and then sticks her tongue in my ear.

I'm moaning as she undoes my belt and jeans. She pulls them down past my knees and puts her hand on my dick.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“You happy?”

“I'm the happiest.”

She giggles. “Good.” Then she kisses me again and says, “I love you, too, Jaime.”

When she drops to her knees, she pulls my underwear down too and immediately swallows my dick.

How I always imagined and fantasized how good this
would feel when it happened, times that by a thousand and you're still not close.

Dominique works my dick and I put my hand on the back of her head. She takes all of it to the back of her throat. She sucks and she sucks and sucks it while I stare at all the big, bright, shiny lights of San Francisco, the whole city in front me, laid out like a big map of awesome, and about a minute after she started blowing me, my body jumps and it jolts and her head stops bobbing and I come in her mouth.

This is the closest I'll ever get to being a king.

A fucking god.

When she gets back on her feet, she takes a drink of water from the bottle in her bag.

“They do anything like this back in Joliet?” she goes.

“I see what you're doing.”

“Do they?”

“No.”

“They have anything like this there?”

I shake my head no.

We kiss again and she holds her arms out toward the city and goes, “Just something to think about.”

“Dom,” I say.

And she goes, “You should really know what you're leaving before you actually decide to leave it. And that's the last thing I'm going to say to you about it.”

She grabs my hands again and we turn toward the cityscape together. “This,” she says. “This says more than enough anyway.”

WE STAY UP THERE FOR
two hours. We play the piano together and sometimes I play the guitar while she plays the piano and sometimes it's the other way around. I'm pretty buzzed on the wine and her. She's fucking perfect. And me, I don't deserve any of this, but it's nice to get it.

Images of me and her making music together in a studio, of me and her riding bikes around the city, of us lying on a blanket in Dolores Park laughing and holding hands, the two of us huddled together on the beach watching the sun set for the seventh night in a row, of me opening for her band at some huge venue, her and I moving into our first apartment together, of us driving down the coast in a van singing along to that Shins song “Phantom Limb,” me making dinner for her every night, the two of us reading to each other and getting those words tattooed on us together, of me and her running around a loft in Paris laughing and screaming and fucking and quoting Rimbaud and Burroughs and Bukowski, smash through my head.

At one point, she stops playing and goes, “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I tell her.

“Sure about that?”

“I'm sure, love.”

“All right,” she says, grinning from ear to ear. “Let's play a song we both know together now.”

“Which one?”

“You pick.”

It takes me all of five seconds before I go, “What about that Postal Service song, ‘Such Great Heights'?”

“I can't play it on guitar,” she says. “But I can do the piano.”

“Perfect.”

She hands me the guitar and then she sits down on the bench while I jump on top of the piano.

After I'm done tuning, I take a swig of wine and go, “Ready?”

“Freddy.”

I laugh and then bang my foot against the piano three times and we begin the song.

It's so radical. This song with her, here. Her voice and her fingers on those keys and San Francisco as the backdrop.

Best. Night. Ever. And that's what scares me too. As epic and huge as this night was, what if we just peaked? There's no pressure on either of us when we know it's already gonna end and how it's gonna end. Maybe that's the reason this is working so well and why it's so easy. We've gone fucking deep together, but we did so knowing that the other person
would only have to live with each other's scars and histories and demons for a week.

It's pretty easy to look past something for a week.

Most people spend years together before they finally fucking break and let the scars ruin them.

The way we play this song is slow. It's the same speed as Iron and Wine's version of it. It's such a beautiful song too. And the lyrics. These goddamn gorgeous words.

Dominique finally joins me when we come to the chorus. I look at her and smile and then I look over my shoulder and back at the city as we sing . . .

“But everything looks perfect from far away. ‘Come down now,' but we'll stay . . .”

IN THE MORNING, MY FATHER
calls me into his office and says, “I want you to go somewhere with me.”

“Why?”

“Cos I think it's something you need to see while you're here.”

“I've got plans,” I tell him. “How about a rain check?”

“I'm not really asking you, son. I'm telling you. And we're leaving in five minutes.”

I use those five minutes to smoke half a blue and stress hard about how many I don't have left.

• • •

“About a month after we found out your mother was pregnant, the two of us came to San Francisco for a week.”

“Why?”

“She'd never been before. I already loved it here, and I'd talk about it a lot because I wanted us to move out here someday, so we decided to go before she got really big with you inside her and it became harder for her to travel. It was one of the best weeks she and I had together. I want you to understand that we were very happy once.”

“I know you were.”

“I want you to understand, Jaime. Not just know, and there's a huge difference. She was the love of my life. I adored her. I worshipped the ground she walked on, son.”

I see pain in my father's face while he's saying this. Him saying this also makes me wanna vomit and push him into the water we're standing over.

The two of us are at Fort Point. It's right under the Golden Gate Bridge. We're leaning against this red railing on a lookout point about twenty feet from the water. Even though the sun is shining and there isn't a cloud in the sky, it's freezing and I'm miserable.

“There was a time between us where there was nothing I wouldn't have done for her. Nothing, Jaime.”

“Why are we here?” I finally ask. “What's the point of this?”

“Horrible, devastating things happen in relationships and in marriages sometimes, and no matter how goddamn deeply those two people might love each other, it can be impossible to come back from it. But you try, ya know. You put on your happy face and you try to remember how you fell in love, not why. Remember that, son. Always remember to dream about how it happened. If you try to remember why, it'll get ugly real fast because it won't make any sense. Love doesn't make any sense, and it's not supposed to. But if you try to go back and remember how it happened, it's almost like you can relive it. Certain days the two of you shared, days when it felt like you'd found perfection in an imperfect world, an imperfect life. Days that
tattoo themselves to your goddamn soul and swallow your heart. Days when you firmly believed without a doubt that the life you were living and the person you were living it with were too beautiful for either of you to deface or smear shit on. Because that's what you were telling each other and you meant it and you believed it and you knew the other person did too and that's all you need when it comes to love. Two people who believe that the other one loves this life as much as them, because when someone tells you they do and they tell you they love you and talk about buying a house and starting a family and all the pets they'll have, what other choice do you have than to believe them? If you don't, how do you even believe yourself when you say those things?”