You know someone’s a good guy when he offers to help you move. Whatever other litmus tests you may have to judge the content of someone’s character, an offer to help move is like a Catholic Indulgence that pushes you right to the front of the line at the pearly gates where you’ll get a hearty high-five from St. Peter and free curbside parking. It’s hard enough to get your closest friends to tear themselves away from, well, anything other than hauling boxes and furniture when you’re moving, even with the standard promise of free pizza and beer; but for someone who’s practically a perfect stranger—a friend of a friend—to offer up a Saturday afternoon to help unload a truck without even being asked is nearly unheard of. That guy’s a goddamn peach, and that was Shawn in the summer of 2002. And in a way, his act of pure, unsolicited generosity would be the undoing of my relationship with Aimee.
I had been living like a caged animal in Moses Lake, Washington for over two years and I was going batshit crazy trying to get out. I’d tried, unsuccessfully, half a dozen times to quit my job as an Area Manager in a department store to move back to the city with no plan or job prospects, but my boss found increasingly clever ways to keep me around, the last of which was hiring a girl that she had a hunch I would like. Not only did I like Gina, I fell hopelessly in love with her and her little daughter, and spent a year and a half suffering from an exquisite, unrequited love within a friendship replete with all the trappings of marriage and family, but without a hint of physical affection. So, you know, just like marriage. It was the first time I realized I wanted to be a husband and a father. Specifically, I wanted to be Gina’s husband and her daughter’s father, but in too many ways to count, I didn’t measure up to what she was smart enough to know she needed in a life partner.
Just as I let go and accepted the devastating defeat, two remarkable things happened. First, I met Aimee. Second, I was given a promotion that included relocation to Seattle.
I was battered and bruised from the self-flagellation of my recent devotion. “Horseshit” became my favorite correlative of “love.” I was so committed to picking at the scabs of my own heartbreak that I swore off relationships forever, like Buttercup in The Princess Bride, who after learning her dashing farm boy Wesley is dead declares “I will never love again.”
“I’m not interested in love and all that horseshit,” I told Aimee one night in a bar.
“I’m not either,” she said. Perfect.
Despite an embarrassingly rocky start, Aimee and I showed all the signs of being interested in each other. We didn’t go on any dates, but we’d run into each other at my favorite local bar, ignore each other for a while except for the furtive, sidelong glances, and then casually end up in the same booth where we’d make enough small talk to evaluate each other. When I found out my promotion had been finalized and that I’d be moving back to Seattle, she told me that she’d soon be moving to Renton (a suburb of Seattle) to start schooling in massage therapy. There was no reason not to pursue something with Aimee other than all the red flags.
The week before I moved was a whirlwind of work, goodbyes and booze. One of my old roommates, Diane, went AWOL from Army boot camp in Monterey, California and called me from a Greyhound bus station in Seattle. I picked her up and took her back to Moses Lake, and in return for harboring a fugitive, she spent her days and nights meticulously packing up my apartment and eating what little food I had in the fridge while I emptied my already anemic bank account in local bars bidding farewell to everybody I’d ever met in that town. It was a perfect arrangement.
Moving day came—a hot August Saturday. My promotion had come with a relocation package which included the rental of a U-Haul moving truck, a storage unit and temporary housing, the last of which I declined, because I had a place to stay that wouldn’t cost the company any money and would give me time to find the perfect apartment. Diane helped me load the boxes, and I recruited my buddy Josh to help load the furniture. Then, the plan was that Diane would follow me to Seattle, driving my car, and Shawn would help me unload the truck into storage.
I barely knew Shawn. He was a longtime friend of my buddy Curtis’s, and I’d hung out with him maybe a dozen times since we were kids. But, when he heard I was moving, he called me up, unprompted, to volunteer his help unloading the truck. To this day, I think his act of generosity is a pretty big deal, because moving sucks, the day was sweltering, and he could have been doing literally anything more fun than helping a casual acquaintance lift heavy furniture. I was grateful.
When Diane and I pulled into West Seattle where my storage unit was located, I put my last twenty bucks in the gas tank of the moving truck, and we finally arrived at the U-Haul self-storage building where Shawn was already patiently waiting for me. After handshakes and hellos, I walked up to the desk to sign the necessary paperwork.
“You have a lock?” the woman behind the counter asked me.
“What?”
“You’re going to have to lock up your storage unit. Do you have a lock?”
“No.”
“OK, well, we sell them. They’re only twenty dollars,” she said, pointing at a fixture near the door full of padlocks.
The thing is, knowing that my company had rented the moving truck and storage unit for me, and that I’d have a check waiting for me at my new desk on Monday for the hours I’d worked in my previous position, I’d blown all my money that week on a marathon of goodbye boozing. Standing there in the lobby of the self-storage facility, I didn’t have twenty dollars to my name; I’d put that twenty in the gas tank of my moving truck, and I didn’t have a single credit card that wasn’t already over its credit limit. My stomach attempted a reverse somersault dive, and like Greg Louganis in the 1988 Olympic Summer Games preliminaries, completely fucking botched it.
“Can I just come back with a lock later?” I asked her, trying to calculate the odds that all my worldly possessions would be stolen inside of two days.
“Well, sure, but we can’t actually let you move your stuff into the unit without a lock, because we can’t be liable for any damage or theft.”
Well, I couldn’t keep the truck for a couple more days. How would I explain the extra expense to my company? Hey, thanks for the promotion and for putting your trust in me to run my own store, but I couldn’t budget my own money well enough to have twenty goddamn dollars to buy a fucking padlock on moving day. I walked out to the parking lot and in as self-justifying a way as possible, explained the situation to Shawn and Diane. Diane, having literally crawled away from boot camp in the dark of night, didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Shawn didn’t even bat an eye. He handed me the cash to buy a lock, and got to work unloading the truck. I’m pretty sure I still owe him that twenty dollars.
That’s why, months later, Shawn’s birthday party at Tiki Bob’s would become very, very important to me. More on that later.
For two months, I stayed with Curtis’s parents—Dennis and Page—in Lynnwood (a suburb north of Seattle). On my first night, they’d hung a sign on one of the bedroom doors that said, “Doug’s Room.” That room had once belonged to Curtis’s sister Valerie when we were kids. Later, it had served as a hospice for Page’s mother. Now, it wasn’t just a guest room, it was my room for as long as it took me to find a place of my own.
I poured myself into my work, spending seventy hours a week on average in my new store. I was now a Store Manager. I was now the captain of my own ship, and I took that responsibility really seriously. By all accounts, I was the youngest store manager the company had ever had, and I was out to prove that a twenty-four-year-old with shaggy hair, earrings and a tattoo could do the job at least as well as anyone else. I set out to whip the store into shape and improve the health of the P&L.
After a month, Aimee followed through on her move to Renton where she stayed with her mother, and we started seeing each other. Until now, though we’d flirted and even kissed once, all of our interactions had been in the context of running into each other in bars, surrounded by friends; but now we were making plans, meeting up by ourselves, and getting to know each other one-on-one. I would drive down to Renton to see her after work once or twice a week, where we’d hang out in a little Irish pub called The Giant’s Causeway. I would play Tom Waits on the jukebox, and she would play AC/DC. She introduced me to the Johnny Cash canon, which I loved right away (of course). We’d drink together late into the night, and then I’d drive the hour all the way back to Lynnwood to fall into bed for a handful of hours before hauling myself back to work at 6am. As seriously as I took my new job, I can’t tell you how many mornings I spent with my face flat on my desk until the rest of the staff arrived, opening the door to let them in with puffy eyes and a telltale red impression on my forehead.
I liked Aimee, because she was everything I wasn’t. Though I’d immersed myself in books by beat writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg about living lives for the sole purpose of experience, Aimee seemed to have lived that life and had those experiences. She had seized and savored the spontaneity and debauchery that I’d always watched from the sidelines. She’d lived a say-yes kind of life, while I’d lived a say-maybe-sometime kind of life. While I made a habit of pouring two fingers of whiskey when I’d get home from work everyday, she had stories of taking bottles of gin into the shower with her in the morning. While I had stories of road trips, she had stories of hitchhiking. While I could recount the first and only time I’d tried marijuana before then (yeah, how dangerous of me), she had stories full of drugs, sex and rock-‘n’-roll. While I’d been busy reading, she’d been busy living, and because of her experiences, she could intuitively understand Allen Ginsberg’s Howl better than I ever could. While I appeared to be the dark horse in the professional world of my career, I was a fucking Dudley Do-Right compared to Aimee.
After having just come out the clear loser in an attempt at something pure and beautiful, I was ready to plunge into something without commitment or consequence. I wanted something dangerous. I wanted something Bukowski. I wanted to just jump without concern for where I’d land, experience something for its own sake, not worry about whether or not something was good and right and beautiful, and run headlong into true-to-life living. If trying was futile, then disregard would be bliss.
Aimee had a way of challenging my inhibitions. One night, she convinced me to take “one for the road,” where I drank a tall-boy of Coors Lite in my car while driving around the neighborhoods of Renton, looking over my shoulder for the popo like a fucking fugitive from justice. On another night, because neither of us yet had a place of our own, she told me to pull into the driveway of some random house where she tried to teach me the mechanics of having sex in the back seat of a car—our first sexual encounter. Her devil-may-care approach to life scared the shit out of me, and I liked it.
After a few months, I finally found the perfect apartment (the one in which I live to this day), and Aimee helped me move in. She took charge, told me exactly where all of my stuff should go, and made herself at home. I liked that, too.
There are some moments, ostensibly insignificant at the time, that get burned into our memories forever. Like cairns, they’re unobtrusive, discrete little collections of bric-a-brac that serve as trail markers as you stumble your way through the chaos. One of these moments, these cairns, marked the moment I began to feel conflicted about Aimee.
I had plans to meet Aimee for dinner at Charlie’s on Broadway a few blocks from my apartment. I went directly to the restaurant after work, arriving just a few minutes before she did. I put our names on the list with the host, and stepped out onto the sidewalk for a smoke while I waited. And then I had that moment—that fleeting, ephemeral point in time that jogged me. I looked up and saw Aimee walking up the sidewalk toward me. Instead of the sexy little badass I’d come to know, I saw someone completely different. She had her hair pulled into barrettes, a new pair of jeans, a white shirt and a black pea coat. She smiled sweetly at me as she walked up to me and gave me a hug.
“What…is…this?”
“I clean up really nice, huh?” she said with a smile.
That pea coat. That black, fitted pea coat. It wasn’t just a coat on a chilly night in October. In my mind, it was a signal, a goddamn beacon shining in the night over a choppy sea, offering safe harbor from the fucking squall. I’d spent so much time thinking about how I fit into her world—about the adventure of it—that it had never occurred to me that she might somehow fit into mine. I’d never considered that she was more than a tornado, whipping through my life and tearing shit up so that it could all be reassembled in a new form once the storm was over. But, there stood Aimee in a pea coat. She looked beautiful.
And, in retrospect, it scared the shit out of me.
A few days later, Shawn invited me to his birthday party. I hadn’t talked to him since August when he helped me unload my furniture (what an ingrate!), so I jumped at the chance to help him celebrate. The plan was for everyone to get together for a raucous night at Tiki Bob’s, a bar-cum-weekend dance club in Pioneer Square. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
I invited Aimee to come to the party with me, and she came to my apartment a little while before we needed to go. We cracked open some beers, turned on some music, and hung out in my living room. Aimee was feeling frisky, but I was preoccupied with Shawn’s birthday party. I was already working through the logistics of traffic, finding parking in Pioneer Square, and getting to the party on time. Shawn had done me such a solid, I wanted to be there for him on his big day. So, I kept turning down Aimee’s advances.
“I want to take a bath,” she told me.
“We don’t have time for that! We’ve gotta go soon!”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get there. I’m going to take a bath first,” she insisted.
She ran the bathwater in my claw foot tub, grabbed a fresh beer from a new six-pack and climbed in the tub with it.
“Come in here.”
I grabbed the rest of the sixer and took it into the bathroom with me. I sat down on the lid of the toilet, and opened a beer, watching her luxuriate in the bath.
“Want to get in with me?” she asked.
“No, we don’t have time!”
“Come on, just hop in.”
“No, seriously, we gotta go. We’re supposed to be there by seven o’clock. I know what’ll happen if I get in there with you, and we don’t have time!”
Aimee was in no hurry. She relaxed in the tub while I sat in the bathroom with her. Before I knew it, we’d killed the six-pack, and the party had already started without us, but I’d held my ground on principle. I poured us a little whiskey, and returned to my perch on the toilet.
The bathwater went cold, and Aimee gave up on getting me in the tub with her, so she finally climbed out. She grabbed a towel, but instead of drying off, she took me by the hand and stood me up, pressing herself against me, getting my shirt and jeans wet.
“You should get out of those wet clothes,” she said in a sultry voice, and pulled me by the hand toward the bedroom.
“No! It’ll dry. Just get dressed and let’s go!”
“We’re already late. We can be just a little bit later.” She tugged on my hand a little harder.
“Aimee, we were supposed to be there an hour ago. Just get dressed and let’s go.”
Disappointed, she finally gave in. She put some clothes on, we got in the car, and walked in the door at Tiki Bob’s two hours after the party had started.
The place was packed and the music was loud. The crowd at the bar was twelve deep, and we stood there trying to inch our way forward to get drinks. I wanted to get some booze before finding Shawn so that I wouldn’t have to excuse myself right away after wishing him a happy birthday, and I wasn’t making much progress.
“I’ll be right back,” Aimee told me, and walked away.
I pushed, I shuffled and I finally found myself at the bar where I ordered whiskey for Aimee and myself. As I turned away from the bar, Aimee was standing there holding two whiskeys herself. She’d leveraged her femininity to get faster service at the other end of the bar getting us drinks, but she decided not to stop me from my own quest for booze, because hey, the more the better.
We found Shawn and his group of friends. Birthday wishes were made, apologies for being late were offered, booze was consumed, and everyone was having a good time. Eventually, most of the group decided they wanted to dance. I’m what you’d technically call “not a dancer,” so while everyone moved out into the crowd, I stayed seated at the table with a couple of girls I didn’t know making small talk. Shawn, fueled by liquor and adrenaline, kept climbing up on the bar to dance, and the staff kept dragging him back down. He was having the time of his life.
Eventually, I had to use the men’s room. I found it in a short hallway that connected Tiki Bob’s to the bar next door. I pissed, washed my hands, and began to make my way back into the bar when I was stopped by a bouncer.
“Stamp.”
“Pardon?”
“Let me see your stamp.”
Like at most clubs, we’d been given a stamp on our wrists when we paid the cover to get in. I showed him mine.
“That’s the wrong stamp.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s the stamp for the place next door.”
“This is the stamp I got when I came in.”
“Well, that’s not our stamp. You’ll have to go pay the cover for our bar at the door, and get a new stamp.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue. It seemed a perfectly ordinary mistake, and I was more than willing to eat the cost.
“No problem. But, my wallet is in my coat at that table right over there where I’ve been sitting for a couple of hours. I just need to get my wallet, and then I’ll gladly go pay another cover.”
He looked me over suspiciously. I continued to point at my jacket helpfully. This guy wasn’t about to let anyone pull one over on him, so with a weird accusatory tone, he looked at me and said, “I’ll walk you.”
We made our way toward the table when he had a change of heart.
“You know what? I think you’ve had too much to drink.”
“Pardon?”
“I think you’ve had too much to drink, and you need to go outside and sober up for a while.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not drunk, and I’ve just been sitting at this table for my friend’s birthday party.”
“You need to leave.” He grabbed me by the collar, barely letting me snatch up my coat, and dragged me to the door, giving me a push onto the sidewalk. I was shocked. I’d never been kicked out of a bar before, and couldn’t wrap my mind around why I’d been ejected. While Shawn had had to be physically removed from the bar top, he hadn’t been eighty-sixed; but I, who’d just been minding my own business, got kicked to the curb. Unbelievable.
I tried calling Aimee. I tried calling Shawn. No one answered, because I guessed they couldn’t hear their phones ringing while busting a move on the dance floor. I called and called without success, but I didn’t feel like I could leave, because I couldn’t leave Aimee behind. I found my way into the alley, and sat down on the ground with my back to the wall. I sat there in the cold, fuming about how the night just took such a shitty turn.
“How you doin’?”
I looked up and saw a homeless guy sitting on the ground ten feet further down the alley.
“I’ve had better nights,” I told him.
“Yeah, me too.”
I sat there for an hour, freezing my ass off. Finally my phone rang.
“Where are you?!”
“I’m sitting in the alley like a goddamn hobo!” I glanced over at the homeless man. He gave me a nod.
“What the fuck?”
“I got kicked out of the bar. I’m in the alley.”
“We’re coming out to get you.”
I got up and walked back to the door. The bouncer was right; this wasn’t the entrance I’d used when I arrived. Shawn and Aimee came out, and I filled them in on my situation.
“Well, just come back in,” they both said at once. There was a different bouncer at the door, so I got back into line, putting on my most casual face. But after a minute, the huge bouncer who’d kicked me out came to the door, saw me in line, pointed at me, and shouted, “You! You’ve been kicked out.”
“Pardon?”
“I kicked you out. I’m not letting you back in.”
“You told me I had to go outside and sober up for a while. It’s been over an hour. How long is a while?”
“Why don’t you try again tomorrow,” he said gruffly.
Shawn and Aimee were standing in the doorway, their faces covered in sympathy. “Well, then we’ll all leave,” Shawn decided, “Hang on.”
While I waited on the sidewalk, Shawn and Aimee went back inside, told all his friends that the party was over. They closed their tabs, and joined me again at the curb to say goodbye.
“Look Shawn, I’m really sorry to ruin your party.”
“Fuck that place. What the hell,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. He couldn’t believe what had happened either. “You didn’t ruin anything. I’m just sorry you had to sit in the alley,” he said. Like I said, that guy’s a goddamn peach.
Aimee and I walked to my car, and she held my hand, trying to make me feel better about the whole debacle, but I just felt rotten. After stressing out about getting to his birthday party on time, trying to be as good a friend to Shawn as he’d been to me, I’d still somehow ruined the whole damned thing. With the best of intentions, it seemed that I had a singular talent for fucking things up.
“I know what’ll make you feel better,” Aimee told me as we drove back toward my place. She mischievously unzipped my pants. Apparently, she was feeling as frisky as ever, and there was no point in resisting anymore. She leaned over, and started giving me a blowjob as I drove.
My phone rang, and it was Shawn calling, so I answered.
“Hey, what’s up, Shawn?”
“Hey man, we’re all going to the Vu. You want to come?”
Shawn’s birthday wasn’t over! They were all down to keep things rolling, even though things had gone sideways at Tiki Bob’s. The Déjà Vu is arguably Seattle’s most popular strip club. This was my opportunity to rectify my earlier fuck-up and help make sure that the guy who’d spent a Saturday helping me move and spotting me twenty bucks for a lock had a successful birthday. I was being given a second chance to make good. Aimee had been involved with women before, and she was clearly the adventurous type anyway, so I didn’t think she’d have any objection to heading to a strip joint.
“Just a sec,” I told Shawn. With my phone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, I looked down at Aimee. “You wanna go to the Vu?”
She stopped what she was doing. She looked up at me.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
There was pure anger in her eyes. I just stared at her dumbly, not knowing what was happening here. I can be shockingly obtuse. I just looked at her for a beat while she shot daggers out of her eyes.
“What?”
“I’m fucking going down on you, and you ask if I want to go look at other naked women?! Are you fucking serious?!”
“Oh.”
It started to sink in. This was going to get ugly.
“Hey, Shawn,” I returned to the phone, “I wish I could, but Aimee and I are almost home. We’re just going to call it a night. Sorry man.” Aimee was glaring out her window.
“No problem,” Shawn said dismissively. “No biggie. I just thought I’d offer.”
“I really appreciate it. Happy birthday, buddy.”
“Thanks man. Take care.”
I tucked myself back into my pants as we pulled into my building’s garage. Aimee was silent, hurt and angry. When we walked into my apartment, I began my clumsy apologies, feeling even more lousy than I had before. Not only had I fucked up the party, but now I’d fucked up with Aimee too.
“You know what? Stop. Just forget it. Just forget it,” Aimee told me angrily when I tried to apologize. “Let’s just go to bed.” She stormed into my dark bedroom and climbed into my bed without turning the lights on or getting undressed. I turned off the rest of the lights in my apartment, and quietly joined her.
At this point, she was in no mood to talk. But, with streetlights filtering through the blinds, I could see her face. She was staring at me. She looked hurt more than angry. She was injured and helpless. The badass toughie that I’d known was gone, and in her place was a tiny songbird with a broken wing—vulnerable, conflicted and wounded. I should have simply hugged her in that moment. I should have mumbled one more “I’m sorry” and held her. But, like so many times before, I demonstrated my really shitty judgment.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just go to sleep,” she said.
“Seriously, what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Just stop talking.”
As I’ve made really clear before, when someone doesn’t want to tell you what’s on their mind, it’s never a good idea to pursue it. But, true to form, I pursued it.
“You can tell me.”
“Would you just shut up?”
“Listen, how are you feeling about things? You’re not getting emotionally involved here, are you?” Aimee didn’t answer right away, but her face said it all. My question was ill-formed and ill-timed. It was a real dick move, but I wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about me.
“Damnit, Aimee!” I began to shout. “I told you I didn’t want love and shit. I told you that right up front. Jesus!”
She just stared at me silently for a minute. Finally, quietly, she said, “I’d be lying if I said there weren’t any feelings there.”
“Fuck! How could you do this? How could you let this happen! I was honest with you. I told you I didn’t want love. You agreed for Christ’s sake! You said you didn’t want it either! And now you pull this shit? Goddamnit!”
In my mind, I was setting the record straight, and preventing an imminent disaster. I’d been honest with her before, and I was being honest with her now so that we could avoid a bigger shit-show down the road. But the conversation I thought we were having didn’t warrant the ferocity with which I delivered my diatribe.
Aimee didn’t put up a fight. She just laid there and took blow after blow as I worked myself into a fury. I lobbed all of my emotional baggage at her, as if she was was solely responsible for all of my failures in life and in love. I reminded her of our tacit agreement that things would be casual, and I accused her of breaking our contract. Instead of acknowledging my own internal conflict, recalling that crystalline moment with the pea coat, I erred on the side of self-preservation, and buried her in my own anxiety. When I ran out of breath, satisfied that my point had been adequately made, I rolled over in a huff.
“I’m going to sleep,” I said to her over my shoulder. And I did.
I woke the next morning to the sound of Aimee gathering up her things. She was stuffing yesterday’s clothes into her overnight bag.
“Are you leaving?”
“I have to go,” she said quietly.
I got out of bed and put the coffee on.
“Want some coffee before you go?”
“No, I gotta get out of here.” She headed toward the door. I walked her out, and watched her walk down the alley toward the street.
“I’ll call you later,” I shouted at her back. She didn’t stop.
I did call her later that day, and she didn’t answer. I tried calling a bunch of times over the next few weeks, hoping that we could just put that awful night behind us, but I never saw or heard from Aimee again.
And I never stepped foot inside Tiki Bob’s again, because fuck that place.
