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The pathway in my brain that was allowing new information in has abruptly snapped shut and I find myself unable to absorb anything. I've been sitting here like a plant watching court tv with a thin stream of drool escaping my half-closed lips. This, instead of studying. The books, the study guides, the assignment manuals, the highlighters, lie abandoned on the kitchen table.
*
When I met Carla she was passionately in love with Bootsauce - and with Jesse. I listened to the music in her car, and I listened to her boyfriend talk, and I was envious. Not of those things she had and loved, but specifically of the love she had for them. Not because I wanted to be loved by her - because I wanted to be able to love like her. I wanted to feel that there was someone, a band, a lover, an experience, something, that I would be willing to chase across the country like she was at all costs. And there wasn't. She was passionate in a way that I had never been about anyone or anything, in a way that held no room for doubts or reality or common sense to intrude, and I felt that she was lucky to be so caught up in a way I never could be. Love, for me, had always been firmly entrenched in mundane things like practicality and applicability, and I couldn't imagine dodging traffic to chase Jesse across McLeod Trail so I could slap him across the face and tell him to go fuck himself, so that he would pick me up and carry me safely to the other side. I liked Bootsauce too but their album was too expensive. In light of that, following their tour across the continent wasn't in the realm of possibility. Carla was someone I studied almost clinically, wondering how I could capture the type of passion she possessed and replace my pedantic approach with hers.
When Carla and Jesse broke up she immediately became involved with S.W., a legend among nineteen year old barflies; he ran a flophouse and was regularly arrested. To me, the fact he'd been abandoned by his parents and left alone to raise his siblings in their house seemed like a gift rather than a tragedy. I wished my parents would do that. And Carla's passion shifted. Only the dynamic between them was different than it was with Jesse. S.W. wasn't interested in being chased or in passionate fights or in any of the other things Carla was accustomed to. He was a "popular" guy used to being pursued by many girls at once and blithely moving from one to the next. He expected girls to move on as effortlessly as he did. And when Carla attempted to apply her fiery passion to him it slid right off and left her sitting in a puddle of it cooling around her. Passion no longer seemed applicable. I lost touch with Carla but I didn't stop thinking about her. Particularly when Bootsauce played on the radio.
And Jesse. He became mine. Not my boyfriend, not my partner, but my ally. I began to understand why Carla felt inclined to slap him sometimes, although I always managed to stop short. One night I leaped out of bed and began scrubbing dishes at 4:00am so I wouldn't grab him by the throat. He probed at me relentlessly while I washed. He invoked passionate anger. I occasionally slept with Jesse over the years but we never fell in love. I worried about his safety because he took heroine and frequently disappeared for days, or weeks, at a time. He frightened me. And sometimes he protected me. While drawing me in to his circle of friends, he wouldn't let them touch me, wouldn't let me get close enough to become one of them. We ran away together. We went to funerals together - and that, if nothing else - was what cemented our friendship. I've never been to so many funerals the rest of my life as I did those years I was with Jesse. Never drank so many cups of gas station coffee either.
Jesse lived. I'd expected him to die a Dallas Winston-style death, crumpling under a streetlight in the night, bullet hole in his heart. Or perhaps he would overdose like Paul, dying while the party blurred on around him. As far as I know, he's still alive now. Maybe he's married. Maybe he has children. You never know. I hope he's happy. I don't imagine Carla married though, for some reason. I picture her at the Warehouse, still, smoking and talking to herself out loud, and sometimes the nineteen year olds buy her a beer and listen to her stories. They probably marvel at her passion. I hope she's happy too.
But there's something about that kind of passion that doesn't seem to lead to happiness. Because passion must be met with equal and reciprocal fire. And passion, which leaves no space for boring things like compatibility and reality seems to consume itself until it burns out and goes cold.
When I describe the great passions in my life, I don't mean passion in the way that Carla or Jesse meant passion. My experiences with passion are slow burning, but they usually last. I haven't always (or often) been sensible about love, but the loves that have endured have been based on something deeper than passion. It's kind of boring, really, but it works.
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