THE DEEP END

He would say

i fell in love with you because of moments in that living room

Nothing makes a sad, anxious, angry man fall harder

He said

Than a girl who can make him laugh

someday we'll be so far from this city

someday we'll be in a place where no one heaves over the balcony

someday he'll have so much space around him

the grip around his heart will loosen and he'll

ride and ride

someday his mind will let his mind be free
I'll make tea and feed the cats

pad around in bare feet

he'll run his hand under my skirt

and a breeze from nowhere will pass through

in september when you were going off the rails again

i wrote Ceci a letter

I told her that she is safe with me

no matter what happens

i got you baby girl 

I know that my lovely wife will call me at 11:11 today and no matter how idiotic I am she will still believe I am worth it. She of course will be wrong. This I also know.

i just wanted to call and make sure you sleep super tight and know that i love you.

I don't want to feel like this.

I can't control it and when I try to it gets worse. 

Bunny finds Jack. He is sitting on a curb only hundreds of yards from where he exited the hospital, between two bushes and angry. He has in front of him a small pile of stones, from the pile, pulling them one at a time to stack on top of one another just to the left. He is speaking to the tiny tower in a low hum, each time it collapses again to be built. Bunny in her search has walked at least as many miles as Jack has in his escape. She has not slept in six days and did not abandon him, though he believes she did. She is at the end. She forces him from the streets into the Nineteen eighty nine Volvo with the packing tape that feebly attempts to hold the glove box shut. Bunny acts like she understands. She does not. Why was Jack wandering the streets naked and singing, as described by the hospital staff who claimed to have been watching him the entire time? She knows what the doctors had to say, but how could she really understand, how could anyone. She, as anyone would, is having a hard time reconciling the look on his face and the blackness of his eyes. The look of no-look at all. “Is it happening now?” She is thinking. She is crying. And Jack is not. He is traveling, fading in and out. He is barely even Jack at this point. Lub-dub .Lub-dub. Lub-dub. He manages one more thing.

For Bunny as well as Jack, like all things that fall apart, the drink eventually takes hold and this is really when the beginning of Bunnys Los Angeles dream, eight years long and worth so much more than the price of admission, begins. Jack is along for the glossy, umber color of the world, ride, while Bunny is finding a hand hold on her new and always dreamt of bohemian existence. A place that is be speckled with musicians, books, movies, picture upon picture of things dreamt and forgotten. Drama and flippancy. A place where the Steinems, not yet friends of hers, bounce in and out of rooms disguised in wigs, using them as umbrellas for laughter. An existence where the mediocre and poorly managed is done so with abandon and then accentuated by the eccentric, like a Jew joke at the Oscars. Unbelievable. A place where everything is so off that it is on. A must see if you can make it out alive. Which she will. Many others will not, at least three including Bunny’s cat Noche, and possibly five from this party alone.