in socks and sandals in the Colosseum is that the former use more filters on their photographs and the latter have audio guides. Not a bad idea, actually. He could do that – write audio tours. The problem, he reckons, is not the obsession with ruin porn, it’s that everyone is trying to figure out what it all means. It’s the human condition, obsessively reading too much into things.
Like the fact that she is forty-six minutes late. And that’s thirty-one minutes longer than you should be expected to wait for any girl, unless she’s a certified supermodel or the producer on the biopic of your awesome life, according to ‘10 Rules For The New Gentleman’s Guide To Dating’ he churned out for some shitty men’s site last year. It’s all chum to pull in the likes. But eyeballs are more fickle than sharks, and the economy is still in the gutter, and he should be writing a post-post-modern Moby-Dick, not trying to come up with smarmy listicles faster than everyone else. But try getting paid for that.
Oh, he’s been published in obscure literary magazines with a subscriber base of eight, not including the publisher’s mother, or the complimentary contributor copies. All the wannabe writers desperately reading each other’s stories, as if they could generate enough energy in a magnetic feedback loop that it would draw some of those damn eyeballs over here. But it’s all shit. Even his stuff. It’s only because he has realized that she’s not coming that he can even consider this. Because this is such a disaster, it mitigates his Total Failure As A Writer.
She’s not coming.
The despair cuts through the caffeine poisoning. He’s already had three cups of coffee, at first because he felt smug, sitting in the window bar, waiting for the hot DJ girl. That was before the Great Wake-Up Call, and then he lost his place when he went back for the third flat white, and now he is wedged in the back, near the bathroom, perched at a little round table that seems specifically designed to be emasculating.
But she was beaming. At you. Apparently.
Fuck the beaming. Fuck this depressing ghost town of a city. Fuck his career. He should write a melt-down memoir. An anthem for his generation. Bret Easton Ellis with more man-child ennui. Then she walks in the door, and he swears to fucking God that all the atoms in the room recompose themselves around her. She’s wearing jeans and snow boots and a puffy jacket in an electric turquoise that matches her eye-shadow, with jangly earrings and her braids tied up in an elaborate croissant twist.
‘Hi,’ she says, slinging her bag down onto the table, recklessly enough that he has to grab for his cup. ‘Sorry.’
‘You say that a lot.’ He’s grinning. He can’t help it.
‘Yes, well,’ she shrugs. ‘What, you didn’t get me one?’
‘Half an hour ago!’
‘You want another?’ She indicates his cup, still three-quarters full and he finds himself nodding, even though a fourth will probably tip him into heart-attack territory, like that kid who died from chugging energy drinks. But coffee is natural.
So is herpes.
‘But to go, okay?’
‘What about breakfast?’
‘We’ll get pastries. I want you to show me round town. Show me your Detroit.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Whatever you want it to. Personal perspectives on the city.’
‘All right,’ she says, with the same tolerantly amused look she had when he walked in on her with her hand between her legs. Definitely love, he thinks.
Inside her jazzy little blue Hyundai, she clips in the radio face and heavy techno blasts out, a whining buzzsaw with a frenetic beat. He winces. It sounds like the grinding teeth of machines on methamphetamines. Good name for a prog rock band. Machines on Meth.
She notices and laughs at him through a bite of almond croissant. ‘You were dancing to it on Saturday night.’
‘I was drunk!’
‘Want me to turn it down?’
‘Please.’
‘You’re a funny guy, Jimmy.’ But she flicks the volume knob.
‘Jonno,’ he corrects.
‘I know. I’m messing with you. So, where do you want to go?’
‘Back to your place?’
‘Not possible.’
‘Then mine.’ Although the thought of his grubby rental apartment gives him a fresh twist of resentment. And panic. His scattered underwear, the empty pizza boxes, the soggy towels balled up on the floor. He would need an hour, no three, to make it presentable. Actually, probably easier to burn it down.
‘Not yet,’ she says.
‘Then somewhere you like.’
‘It’ll be cold.’
‘I can take it.’
‘You going to write about it?’
‘Maybe. If it’s good.’
‘Isn’t journalism dead?’
‘That’s what they tell me.’
‘You should start your own video channel. Get advertising.’
‘That’s what they tell me too. It all keeps changing. I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to keep up. It’s like learning to salsa in the middle of an earthquake.’ That’s not bad. He should write that down. It would be a good essay. Scratch that, an easy essay. More chum. Maybe she’ll open him up to something. He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.
‘You’re old is the problem,’ she says, flicking the turn indicator. She’s wearing black-and-yellow striped fingerless gloves. Her nail polish is chipped.
‘Thanks for that.’
‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I’m teasing.’
They drive past the yacht club and she points out the old zoo, all shuttered up, the animals long gone. Maybe they joined in the white flight to the suburbs.
They pass the long stretch of the main beach. Dishwater waves with white caps are worrying the gray sand. He remembers being a teenager in Rhode Island, lying on his stomach to hide his semi, watching the girls rub coconut oil into their skin, or run shrieking into the waves. Such an assortment of girls. It seemed then that they were all available to him, that he could work his way through all of them, the same way he was going to be able to travel to all the different countries, try his hand at different jobs, all the branching possibilities. Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn’t tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one.
It’s baking in the car. He struggles out of his jacket and pushes up the sleeves of his sweater. Do men get hot flashes?
‘You’re going to have to put it on again,’ she warns him, pulling over into a small parking lot opening onto the grass.
‘What, here?’
‘You asked me to take you somewhere special to me. Belle Isle is happy childhood memories. What?’ she challenges. ‘You wanted to go urban exploring? Check out the ruins of the American Dream? Maybe you wanted to whack golf balls off the roof of the Packard Plant. Oh wait, I know. You wanted to harvest corn with your own hands from an urban farm in the middle of a dirt-poor neighborhood?’
‘Could be fun,’ he says defensively. But she’s right. He’s read all that shit. It’s all been done. The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold. Or, more appropriately, Detroit diamonds, which is what locals call the blue glass on the street from broken car windows. He feels anxiety slamming into him like the gray waves on the river.
‘You been to Secret beach?’