...Chasing Amy?

"You ever wonder what it would be like to be dead?"

I was sitting in a small, cramped apartment in downtown Chicago, near Boystown, the city’s famous rainbow flag-lined gay district. It was her apartment, the stoned girl lying languidly on a cat hair and cocaine dust-coated black futon, a wisp of marijuana smoke forming a perverse joke of a halo around her head.

The acrid smell from the multi-colored glass pipe she took a hit from every few minutes tickled the back of my throat and burned my eyes. I was blinking constantly and had to remove my glasses to rub my red-tinged eyes more than once.

As I sat in the dim single-bulb light watching my friend get wasted, a solitary thought continuously ran through my mind, like a hamster spinning his wheel in a futile effort to escape his cold, metal prison: I drove five-hundred miles for this?


We met in high school, Amy and I, through our intertwined circles of friends, toward the beginning of my senior year. She was a sophomore, but most of her friends were older, so she was never hassled by school security for being on the wrong side of the building. They simply assumed she belonged there.

I don't remember the first time we spoke, or what we talked about. Trivial high school nothings, I’m sure. Our first date was a concert at a local club, a real shithole of a dive, one of Omaha’s finest, a smoke-filled bar-slash-bowling alley filled with horny chain-smoking teenagers wearing flannel shirts or black goth fetish gear in a painful attempt to look cool.

We had been eying each other for a couple weeks, flirting in the usual way that was common to our group, an innocent ass grab or poke of a boob, when I found myself with an extra ticket to the show. With a feigned casualness that I hoped masked my sweaty palms and racing heart, I asked her if she wanted to go.

I don't think she cared what bands were going to be performing. The important thing was that it gave us our first opportunity to be alone together. We stayed for the first band that played, and maybe the second, exchanging meaningful glances throughout (as meaningful as they can be at that age, anyway), the whole time the bass pounding through our bodies like constant waves crashing against the shore. Neither of us cared to hear the headlining band.

I don't know how long we made out in my car, parked in her parents' driveway. At the time, it seemed like hours, to which to fog that clung to the inside of the car's windows could attest. All I know for sure is that by the time I left, after one last furtive kiss, I had a new girlfriend.


"Wanna go shopping?"

I glanced up from Amy's battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, which I had found on her bookshelf. She was sitting up on the futon now, taking one last hit from her oft-used pipe. Her dark brown hair, once long and soft, cool to the touch, was now a short, stringy mess. The hazel eyes that used to look at me with warmth and affection were dull and lifeless, streaked with crimson. She was looking at me, but she might as well have been looking through me.

"Uh, sure," I said, thinking the fresh air might do her some good. "What do you wanna buy?"

"Movies," she replied, stretching her thin arms over her head, which caused her rumpled shirt to rise up slightly, revealing an unfamiliar gaunt belly.

"Okay," I said, replacing Holden Caulfield's struggle toward adulthood on the bookshelf. "And maybe we can grab a bite to eat while we’re out?" When I got to Amy's apartment earlier that afternoon, I did a cursory examination of the kitchen, the cupboards and refrigerator, and found nothing but empty cereal boxes and bottles of wine cooler.

Amy stood up and sort of sashayed toward the bathroom, swaying back and forth, as she walked. I wanted to jump up and steady her, but I knew she’d bat me away with a swipe of her arm. I just sat on the floor beside the bookshelf and watched.

"I’m just gonna hop in the shower real quick," she said.

"Don't forget to brush your teeth," I mumbled under my breath, frightened by what I might smell on hers.

She whirled around and caught hold of the doorframe.

"What?"

I shrugged and shook my head.

Amy glared at me for almost a minute before backing into the bathroom and closing the door. "Out in a minute," she called. I heard the squeak and rattle of the building's old water pipes before a steady, if weak, stream started flowing from the showerhead.

I sighed and leaned my head back against the bookshelf. I closed my eyes and waited for the water to stop.

The door opened some time later, twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Amy walked out in a rush of steam, wrapped in a threadbare green towel, her wet hair hanging down over her eyes. She looked better, was moving more steadily. Across from the futon, which also doubled as her bed, I would later learn, was a stocky wooden dresser. I can’t deny feeling a twitch in my jeans when she bent down to open the drawer that contained her bras and panties, the thin towel riding up her backside, revealing a still-curvy bottom.

She glanced over her shoulder and caught me watching. "Like the show?" she laughed.

I shifted uncomfortably against the bookshelf, self-consciously resting my hands in my lap. "It’s not like it isn't anything I haven't seen before," I replied.

"True," she said as she let the towel fall around her ankles.

I sat there and watched her get dressed. Then we went shopping.


Amy only cheated on me once while we dated. At least, once that I know of. I was sitting in the commons between classes and heard some friends talking about her. At the sound of her name, I piped up, asked what they were talking about. A friend of a friend had seen Amy kissing this other kid whose clique circumnavigated our own. I was crushed, heartbroken, but strangely not mad. I felt peaceful, like I had been expecting this to happen, the other shoe to drop.

I confronted this other kid that night, at a park near school where kids from my school would hang out, smoke and drink. He was a big fella, at least half a foot taller than my five-foot-ten, if not more. When I got to the park, he was standing in a circle of kids, holding court over this or that. I walked up to him and asked if I could talk to him for a minute.

"I thought you were gonna try and pick a fight that night," he’d later tell me. Fighting, however, was the furthest thing from my mind; for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he could wipe the floor with me.

"This is her choice," I told him. "Not mine. Not yours, either. Whoever she wants to be with, who am I to stop her? Take care of her."

He said he would. He was surprised, I think, by my tone, my...civility. We shook hands and I walked back to my car, content in the delusion that Amy was gone from my life, that she was someone else’s problem now.


We rode the 'L' train in silence, Amy listening to her iPod, I covertly watching the other passengers, silently wondering what their stories were, bizarrely proud with the certainty that their histories couldn’t come close to that of the girl sitting beside me.

The train slowed at our stop and we disembarked. We walked along the graffiti-decorated platform and out into the cool night air. There was a Best Buy a couple blocks from the station. When it was in sight, Amy pointed at the big yellow sign and said, "Mmooovies."

She wandered aimlessly, it seemed, through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up a DVD and glance at its packaging. She was still high, of course. I lagged behind her slightly, watching her, and wondered if anyone could tell.

"Tombstone!" she squealed. She ran up to me holding a DVD in front of her face. "I have two guns," she drawled, quoting Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday from the movie, "one for each of you."

She giggled and clutched the movie to her chest. "I love this movie," she said in a singsong voice. "We're going to watch this movie."

"Okay," I said. I couldn't help but laugh. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even if her preferred method of attaining it was not.

When we got back to the apartment, she handed me the DVD and told me to unwrap it. She went to the dresser and pulled something out, hiding it from view. "I’ll be out in a sec," she said, heading toward the bathroom.

I cut the plastic wrapping off the movie and placed the DVD in the player that sat atop the television. I grabbed the remote and settled onto the futon, wondering what was taking Amy so long.

She finally emerged from the bathroom, a smile planted squarely on her face. She walked with a looseness I couldn’t place, as if all the muscles in her body had gone slack. She was holding a hand to where her arm where it bends at the elbow as she plopped down beside me. She was so relaxed she practically oozed against me, melting into me, with her head resting on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pressed PLAY on the remote.

"This is nice," she said dreamily, her voice heavy with sleep. Soon she was snoring gently, lost in her drug-fueled dreams.

"Yeah," I said, pulling a blanket around us. "Real nice."