Rumpus author Ruth Fowles has a new feature out on Guernica in which she remembers her days spent in Venice Beach.
If this was fiction, I would make sure that each of my characters were rewarded with love or sex or heartbreak—something to spur on the requisite growth, maturity, and change we all expect of people who appear in celluloid or print. But to my knowledge, neither Billy nor Lori have broken their abstinence of the saddest and loneliest kind, and yet they are neither sad nor lonely. Sometimes I think it is I who am all of these things, and that I am somehow inured to the intimacy they both fear, with a string of past lovers and acrobatic sex acts, and even now with a husband, and with a sometimes painful history of leaking hearts and loneliness that I wore on my face until it was erased by visits to the same plastic surgeon Lori works for.
