Soundtrack of Our Lives: Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen

That relationship, the one with Ross, was made up of the worst parts of him and me. And it's no exaggeration to say that he broke me. I nearly lost my mind. I definitely lost all sense of what it meant to be loved. It wasn't my friendship with Scorpio and that I'd just broken a major rule in the Girl Code that fucked me up. It wasn't the bullshit from his family about how I stole him away from Scorpio (they'd been apart for a while), or that they thought I was a basehead (that was a good one), or that they told him I was beneath him (please, the boy was from North C____, not the OC, for fuck's sake). It wasn't that what should have been a rebound relationship for us both turned into a real one. What fucked me up the most was the sex.

Near the end of my relationship with Victor, we'd stopped having sex almost altogether. If he was high, he couldn't come. If he wasn't high, he wasn't interested. After that was my short-lived legitimate relationship with Matthew, where the physical part was difficult for a whole other set of reasons that I'll explain another time. And I knew things weren't going so well in that department for Ross and Scorpio, too. I knew because Scorpio was a good friend of mine and after Ross moved out of their apartment, I'd spent many an hour consoling her, being the shoulder while she divulged deeply personal, intimate details to the girl who would soon use that information as kindling. When Ross and I first started seeing each other, we shared stories of our damaged sex lives, talked about what we wanted. And what started out as commiseration, quickly became copulation.

Over time, while the relationship part—the human, loving, real part—of our relationship failed, the physical part only deepened. And that was so fucking confusing because the more our physical relationship grew, the more I wanted the relationship part, and the more he resisted it. It was subtle; I mean, he never cheated on me, he never fought with me, he never asked anything of me. He was nice to pets and my friends. But he was so completely absent emotionally, so completely unable to express his feelings. And I began to hate him for it. I began to hate that the only time I felt close to him was while we were having sex. And he wanted to have sex more and more and more.

He was getting ready to move to C_____. I was angry, but not surprised. It was totally his style: One afternoon, we'd talked about moving in together, and the next afternoon, he told me he was taking a job transfer. I sat around his apartment on the floor surrounded by a moat of CDs, while he packed. We played this game that we always played: He'd play a song for me, and I'd have to guess who it was and what album it was from.
"Okay, here's a good one." He pushed "play":
What should I tell her?
She's going to ask
If I ignore it, it gets uncomfortable
She'll want to argue about the past
Still I think she believes me
Every word I say...

My throat got tight. "I know this song," I choked out.
"Yeah," he said. "It's such a great song, isn't it?" And from the speakers, this:
And it don't bleed, and it don't breathe
It's locked its jaws & now it's swallowing
It's in our heart, it's in our heads
It's in our love, baby, it's in our bed

And the tears stared coming.

*****
We'd been talking about our favorite albums and he'd said that one of his was the Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen. He'd been playing it a lot around that time. I liked the sound, so I got myself a copy. When I got home, I sat on the floor with a beer, and played it, only this time, I also listened to the words. It was kind of shocking, how brutal they were. And the above lyrics, from "If I Were Going," are down right pleasant compared with this from "Be Sweet":
Ladies, let me tell you about myself
I got a dick for a brain
And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you
Now I'm OK, but in time I'll find I'm stuck
'Cause she wants love, and I still want to fuck

I listened up to "When We Two Parted" (I should have seen this shit coming down the hall/ Every night I spent in that bed with you facing the wall) when I had to turn it off. I felt kind of sick.
*****

He kept shuffling around his apartment, packing all evidence of our time together in generic cardboard boxes, singing along to the CD every so often. I walked outside to the porch to smoke. Spring was on the way and the air smelled a little like mud. Across the street at the high school, two couples were walking, holding hands, laughing. I watched them walking down the sidewalk until they became spots. Exhaling a cloud of gray smoke, I turned around and looked inside. Ross, standing in the doorway, was staring back at me.

Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen
Purchased late winter 1999
Used Kids Records, Columbus, Ohio

Thanks to this site for the lyrics.