SoMa Literary Review - I Didn't Know Anything About Philadelphia (or: Kristy, Lance and I)

I Didn't Know Anything About Philadelphia
(or: Kristy, Lance and I)

By Gabriel Kuhn

sent to: jeeadam@tao.com

adam, hey, i’m here in portland . it’s cool. sorry, got little time. i’ll catch you later. be good! lance.

ps: i fucked kristy. you don’t mind, right?

Kristy was the only girl I ever loved.

I met her at Golden Gate Park where I mostly hung out after my parents had died and I had moved into the city, mainly living off sketchy day jobs, panhandling and minor hustling.

Kristy had a home in Pacific Heights. Her parents were rich and she had everything she wanted. I guess she was bored and liked us semi-street-kids as company.

We first kissed one night on the grass near the tennis courts and soon spent every day together. We played music, chased each other around the trees, scored free food on Haight Street and made love in the bushes. Life was beautiful.

The only thing that wasn’t all that beautiful were the drugs. I only know this now of course. At the time, we thought it was all just fun. Even when Kristy was trying to get off them more and more desperately, we were playing it down like it wasn’t a big deal.

In any case, we always pretended that things between us were great. That’s a foolish thing to do in any relationship. What can I say? We didn’t know any better.

Lance was my best friend since I was eight years old.

We met in primary, ended up living on the same block, had both nice moms but fucked up dads, liked the A’s, and that was that. Lance was there when I stole my first CD, scored my first homerun, and smoked my first spliff. In fact, Lance was always there. When I moved into the city, he did too. Closer than any brother could ever be ñ all that stuff. The memory was nice. But what it translated to now was sickening.

He called the next day. He was all excited and told me how cool Portland was. I said yes and aha and oh, really? Then he told me to be good again and hung up. No word about Kristy. Probably they were fucking again. And I didn’t mind. Ya, right.

I went drinking.

I hit Tony’s at 6.30. Tony’s had been my bar for a good year now. Mainly just 'cause it was the neighborhood bar. There’s just a lot to be said for a drinking hole three doors down. Both serious alcoholics and pathetic losers seeking escape, like myself, were hanging over double shots of whiskey. It wasn’t a pretty scene. But if you’re pathetic you can’t ask for much, I suppose. I ordered my own double shot.

I thought of Kristy. How she would laugh at little kids trying to catch pigeons in the park, roll down the mounds, eat cotton candy, or play some kind of Irish whistle at the drum circle. And how she would hold my hand while we ran up Strawberry Hill and then hug and kiss me and tell me how much she loved me.

Tony walked over to talk to a woman who was sobbing without end. I couldn’t hear what he said but he poured her another drink and got a smile out of her within twenty seconds. Tony was a good man. Or had he ever fucked the woman his best friend was hung up on too? I didn’t even wanna think about that. You gotta keep your faith in mankind. Even when your best friend just all but destroyed it.

The problems with Kristy started when I tried to get off drugs. I don’t wanna give you a moral spiel about how she was just an addict not being able to watch her boyfriend go clean, but it is true that it bothered her. Especially since I managed to do it within just a couple of weeks when she had tried so long in vain. Something was just off after those weeks. Okay, this sounds like I’m blaming her for things falling apart. Well, maybe I do. I don’t know.

All I do know is that things simply didn’t work out anymore. There was no more affection, we became short-tempered around each other, and so forth – I’m sure you know it all too well. However, I thought that this was just a phase that maybe all couples had to go through at one point. I never doubted for a second that things would be different again.

And then Kristy disappeared from one day to the next, leaving a letter that said that our relationship had run its course, that she felt suffocated, and that she would move to Portland.

Portland? We had always made fun of the new place for the hip and cool who would soon move to whatever town would gain that status next. I still figured Kristy would be back soon. The notion that she could have actually left me for real took a long time to sink in. Even after she had repeatedly told me on the phone that things were indeed over for good, I didn’t believe her.

At least not until I ran into Jimmy, an old friend from the park, who said he had been to Portland recently and seen Kristy at a show with a guy she had introduced as her new boyfriend. That’s about when I started to crumble. And when I found out just a few days later that Lance had known about this all along, I fell apart.

It took a long time to recover. In the end I believed Lance’s version that he had thought it best for me not to know ‘cause he had figured I had to realize things on my own and sort my own shit out, and maybe he had been wrong by not telling me (in which case he’d be sorry), but generally he had really acted out of consideration for what I was going through. I mean, if your best friend said that, you would believe it too, right?

It was only a-month-and-a-half ago that I told Lance how glad I was that I had him, how lucky I felt that he was always there for me, and how grateful I was that he had helped me to get through all this with Kristy. He looked all like he was about to cry and he gave me a big hug and said that this was what friends were for, and then he did this little thing with his fingers that we had invented in junior high as a childish bonding ritual. Only a month and a half ago. Fuck.

Tony was still talking to that woman. She almost looked happy now. Tony was pouring her drink after drink. Alcohol does wonders that way. Especially in combination with Tony.

Lance told me he was gonna go to Portland about two weeks ago. I thought that was kinda weird, since, for one, Lance never really went anywhere, and, for two, when he did, it was usually a big thing and he announced it like three months in advance. But I bought the story about one of his high school buddies trying to get together his best friends for some kind of a reunion since he had just landed a pretty big job at NASA’s Oregon office. (I have no idea what they do there. But I’m sure it’s scary.) What a fool I was. And what a prick he.

The woman that Tony had transformed from emotional wreck to happy drunk was getting ready to leave. When she got her wallet out, Tony just waved it off, but she sternly shook her head, said something in mock irritation and put some bills on the counter. Tony shrugged his shoulders and smiled and probably said thank you, and it looked like the woman said something like no, thank you, and she blew him a kiss and walked off smiling the smile of, well, a happy drunk.

Tony came over.

“What was this all about?” I asked.

“Man, you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “This broad breaks up with her man like three months ago, then she has an affair with his best friend, then her old man finds out, gets his pistol, and shoots his best friend. Dead.”

“No shit,” I said.

“Yes,” Tony confirmed. “Ain’t that wild?”

“You can say that again.” I imagined putting a dozen holes in Lance’s torso. The thought was rather exciting. In reality, though, I was not gonna kill Lance. I didn’t wanna go to prison. I wasn’t that tough. “You’re a good man, Tony,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?” he retorted.

“Nothing,” I pretended, not caring a bit that Tony knew I was lying. He got the message and left me alone. He was a man of social skills.

Before I left I thought for a moment if I should ask him if he had ever fucked the woman that his best friend was hung up on after all, but then I thought I’d really rather not. Certain things are better left alone. Like I said, we gotta keep our faith in mankind. Unearthing everything might not be the best way to go about this.

I didn’t wanna go home yet, so I staggered through the neighborhoods till I ended up in front of Lance’s house. I hadn’t planned to, but it happened. I know it’s some thing that can be explained pretty easily psychoanalytically, but my mom, whose family had fled some town in western Austria when the Nazis marched in, told me very early on never to trust a man from Vienna, even if he was Jewish. So I never gave psychoanalysis much thought. Besides, what does it really matter why I ended up in front of Lance’s house? I just did.

His shitty old Chrysler was sitting there. It was worth just about nothing at this point, but he was very attached to it. He had had it for eight years. I killed it. (Which can also be very easily explained psychoanalytically, but I just told you what my take on this is.) I took out the lights, windows, keyed the body, yanked out every single lever, bar or handle I could find, cut open the seats, even produced some sugar from a nearby 24-hour diner to pour in the tank – I told the guy, some Arab dude, why I was killing the car, and he said hamdidullah and passed me a whole bag. When I heard the sirens, I ran. They never caught me. The neighborhood was full of tiny alleys you couldn’t take a car into and I knew these alleys well.

I felt good when I was home. It was 4.30 am.

I saw the phone book on the table and suddenly everything was crystal clear.

I called Greyhound and booked a ticket for an eight o’clock bus. Then I grabbed the two bags I had and threw my most important belongings in. I put some bills together and scribbled down a note for the landlady saying that I was gone and that she could do whatever she wanted with the stuff I was leaving behind. I put the keys in the lock, left the door open, and caught a cab to the station.

At 8.05 I was rolling westwards, headed all the way for Philadelphia. I didn’t know anything about Philadelphia, but it seemed like a good enough place to make a new start.

Kristy and Lance? Fuck ‘em both. If there is one permanent chance we get in life it’s the one to reinvent it. I was down.

I threw my Iron & Wine tape in and fell asleep for a long, long time.

Gabriel Kuhn was born in Austria but grew up in a number of countries, amongst them the US. For a few years he called the East Bay’s Albany home. He writes in both German and English, fiction as well as essays on hockey, pirates or radical politics. Some of his work is published under the nom de plume Teoman Gee.