I’m a high school lover and you’re my favorite flavor…
His “the perfect playlist” tinkled out of the tinny speakers of his old school I-Pod as I sat on his saggy mattress, the smell of patchouli incense making the air sickly sweet. I watched his burly back sweating through a Hawaiian shirt as he bent over the music hunting for the right songs. At this point I was regretting asking him to put on music to cover up the sound of his roommate clomping around the living room. The waiting was more of a mood killer than idle footsteps from the other room.
Dan, the furry awkward creature, bartender and conscript of the cult of Bukowski would not rest until the soundscape was perfect now that he had been put to the task. My bad, I should have known better. He now had something to prove. If he failed he would never be able to let it go, the lackluster music would be the reason it all went wrong, this night, this relationship, this life. Classic over thinker and music obsessive.
I’d just broken up with a man that was the abusive narcissist version of Dan. As in they would get brought into the same casting call for moody arty sad boy. Same swarthy build, dark hair, dark framed glasses, mopey, really into their mixed tapes. I didn’t want to think about having a type or having pursued Dan to fill the hole in my self esteem that my ex had left behind. If I thought too long I’d need to leave and it was too hot to move, too hot to think.
I didn’t want to think, I wanted a body on top of me so I wouldn’t have to use my brain for a while. A distraction from my endless thoughts and the endless heat. It was the beginning of proper summer when one hasn’t gotten accustomed to the unrelenting humidity and sweat yet. When the sun is still a welcome gift in Portland where it’s usually so grey. When it seems imperative to grab a hold of every lovely summer moment before it gets away and the gloomy ever present rain returns.
Instead of seizing the moment, Dan was wasting time. I hated waiting. I’d waited long enough for Dan already. He had been the bartender at the neighborhood bar I frequented. My ex and I ended up there a couple times a week to play cards, have a pint of cider and enjoy Dan’s playlists and banter. Dan was the same sort of weird outcast we were so we kept coming back. It was no secret I had a crush on him, my ex would gently tease me every time we walked in the door and found Dan on shift.
It wasn’t as if I had learned his schedule, it was simply one of those organic things where the universe keeps putting the same person in your path. Either that or the southeast side of Portland ws a small place when you had similar interests.
Technically I could have courted Dan back then, but non-monogamy still didn’t make it a good idea to flirt with your bartender, I didn’t want to be that person. And the boyfriend at the time would have made having any other relationship near impossible, I’d tried and found the openness of our relationship to be hypothetical at best. His ego and gaslighting took up all the space in our home. I wasn’t fully aware then how much tip toeing around what I wanted and needed I was doing.
So sarcastic wordplay while ordering a drink was as far as I took it with the cute bartender. Until I was single and Dan was no longer working at that bar. When we matched on a dating site I let him make the first move, unsure if the flirtation went both ways. It did. We shared drinks on the patio of a dive bar and laughed at how long we’d been flirting without realizing it could go somewhere. And yet it still wasn’t technically going anywhere. He knew everyone at this bar, some were his former co-workers so they gave us a ribbing for being on what appeared to be a date.
“I knew you had a thing for each other! We were taking bets on when you’d just go out already. Except you were always with that big intense weirdo, weren’t you?”
I felt Dan tense up on the other side of me. What little steam we’d built up had blown over with the mention of my ex. Dan chastely walked me home a few minutes after his friend’s drunken babble. He hugged me goodbye and I wondered if it had been a date at all.
It was weeks before he invited me over for dinner. “I wasn’t sure I should ask you out again. You’re really out of my league.”
“Not sure what that means, but I’m glad to be here.” I said.
It was obvious I would have to make the first and every other move if this was going to go anywhere. So I asked to see his bedroom. Which he took literally. “I made this table out of scraps I stole from the bar. Here let me read you my favorite poem. Look I have some rope, my ex asked me to buy it even though it didn’t work out for us.”
His roommate stumbled in and slammed a door, drunkenly mumbling to himself and saved me from awkwardly having to mention I didn’t want to do rope with Dan. That my fetish, which was no secret, didn’t factor into my attraction to him. We both grimaced with second hand embarrassment at his roomie as the moment stretched on too long.
“Hey, how about some music?” I asked with a little too much gusto, trying to move the moment along.
I should have left. There wasn’t as much chemistry here as I’d hoped. There had been some situational spark when he had control over my next pint and when we had a bar between us, it wasn’t here in this gritty bedroom that felt far too college dorm for a guy in his mid thirties. I could tell his sheets hadn’t been changed in who knows how long and that the sex would be mismatched and unsatisfying.
If I left I would have to go home to the ugly house I shared with a horrible sex phobic house mate that never stopped criticizing me for the people I had over, the dishes I could never clean up fast enough, the fact that I occasionally walked around in shorts which he equated with being basically naked. And I would have to lay in bed alone thinking about the other guy I was dating and how that particular night he was with the horrible other person he was dating. Our relationship would be perfect of course if only she wasn’t in the picture. It was her cruel and bossy jealous self that made our relationship strained. Right? Yeap just that, no other issues to examine.
So I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want all the fights I’d had with my ex about flirting with Dan to have been for nothing. I needed to prove to myself I was over the ex, that I was good at being non-monogamous, and hope somehow my ex would find out I was with Dan now and that somehow he would care. He hadn’t cared about anything but controlling me and creating his childish art but sure he would absolutely take a moment out of his self absorption to be mifted I was fucking a bartender. That would show him!
I knew Dan well enough (even though I barely knew him at all) to understand I couldn’t break him from the loop of musical obsession, to do that would be to make him feel as if he’d done something wrong. And the evening would be over. I knew because I had a bit of that person inside of myself.
So I waited and I sweat, feeling less and less like I should stay and less sexy by the moment. I must stink by now, the bike ride over to start things out and then pasta dinner in his fanless kitchen. I felt ripe. He looked ripe in his damp button up shirt. I was very hot in all the wrong ways
Finally the first notes of the trippy synth pop filled the air and Dan turned to smile at me like a puppy hoping for praise. “This will do.”
I was supposed to comment on the music. It was a test to see if I knew the band and the song’s significance. I didn’t. So I stood and bridged the gap between us to kiss him. That old trick of seduction to make the awkward moment disappear. So we tangled tongues to the floaty sexy saxophone and hypnotic lyrics.
When the same song repeated immediately after the closing drum beat, I was confused. I hoped it was a fluke of the I-Pod’s shuffle algorithm. But sure enough as we moved our make out to the bed, the same song tinkled its way into the room.
Yet my hands are shaking, I feel my body reeling…
Dan’s tentative touches were sweet but not my style, it was obvious he wasn’t doing to be able to provide the sort of confident rough housing I preferred, nor would he enjoy me taking control of him. Periodically I would forget that sex with non kinky people just wasn’t for me. There needed to be some spark of power exchange or I wasn’t truly engaged. And this was my reminder.
I felt bad, it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t my style but once I’d started something, I had no idea how to stop it. There wasn’t anything wrong with what he was doing, his kisses were pleasant, I enjoyed the heft of his body alongside mine, and he was definitely in the moment. What he lacked in deftness he made up for in a willingness to please. I wanted him to take, to read my body language and have some clue what was working. Instead he kept asking, “Is that okay? What do you want?”
So I told him. “Could you pull my hair?”
He looked terrified but game and gave my curls a tug. But it was all wrong, more wrestling with a sibling than sexy. So I rolled on top of him so I could guide the rhythm of things, hopefully taking some of the pressure off of him and ending the questions. As I looked down at him laying there shyly the song spun itself back up for perhaps the 20th time. I kissed him to keep from sighing.
Love is all, all my soul, you’re my playground love…
At just over three minutes, it isn’t a long song. There isn’t much to it, it sticks in the brain and doesn’t let go. Once I knew it was the only song that was going to play it became impossible to ignore. I started to notice we were kissing to the beat of the song which could have been sweet if I wasn’t so baffled by what was going on. One song? On a loop? Ugh!
You’re the piece of gold that flushes all my soul…
The tune was as relentless as his fingers at my crotch, same movement, same beat. Again and again and again. No variety no matter how much I tried to move my body or reposition his hand. So I lay there and hoped I was putting on enough of a show of enjoying it until he moved onto something else.
Themes no matter, I’m on fire, on the playground, love…
I fell into some sort of liminal state once we were fucking. That weird headspace where you aren’t thinking of anything else and bam you remember something you weren’t even trying to place. As the song started again it hit me, this was the song from Virgin Suicides the oh so gorgeous but tragic movie from the early 2000’s. He had picked the theme song from a teen movie about depressed suburbia as the music that would play during our time together in bed.
I groaned into his shoulder.
Extra time on the ground, you’re my playground love…
As we lay in a sweaty pile afterwards, touching but trying not to touch in the heat, the song had made its way so far into the depths of my soul that I could swear my heart was beating to the rhythm of the keyboard. My eye twitched as I wondered how I could get it to stop.
“I can’t believe I spent all that time making a list and then accidentally hit repeat on the first song.” He mumbled into the side of my head where we were curled up. Oh me neither, Dan! And still he didn’t move to turn it off.
“I should get up but I don’t want this moment to end, the spell will be broken.” He said.
Oh Dan, some girl who is sappy and sweet and wants a big adorable bearded romantic to hang on her every word will be so lucky to find you one day. But right now you’re in bed with a black hearted cynic that just wanted to get laid. We are so not a match and for that I am so sorry. I want to like you as much as you obviously like me but I never will. Was what I thought but didn’t say while looking across the bed at him.
I pull myself out from under him and make my way to the bathroom and when I return that song is finally gone. The relief is incredible. And the full playlist is sultry and perfect, a mix of obvious get it on songs and obscure moody music chosen to show he has depth. It's amazing. The entire encounter would have been different if this is what had been filling the room while we were sleeping together.
I wish he had gotten up to fix it. I wish I would have asked him to. I wish that either of us could get what we wanted from one another. But we can’t. And yet we keep trying through the whole summer. I want to like Dan with his poetry and endless amounts of free time he wants to give all to me but I’m caught up on the other guy, the asshole who doesn’t have time for me that strings me along. So I string Dan along. Like an immature co-dependant asshole. And Dan let’s me.
All these years later I can't even remember how or why we finally stopped hanging out but I’m sure I was passive aggressive and pulled away abruptly whenever I decided I’d had enough. And he kept sending me poetry and showing up to places where I was doing book readings but he’d be gone by the time I got off stage. Like a ghost, I could never be sure was there.
He was so much kinder than my ex or that idiot I was obsessed with while also seeing Dan and yet I wasn’t at all kind to him. We didn’t belong together but he deserved better. Sorry, Dan, I hope you found someone to appreciate you.
Anytime, anytime you’re my playground love.