Cool these engines
Calm these jets
I ask you how hot can it get
And as you wipe off beads of sweat
Slowly you say "I'm not there yet."
This is the fourth night in a row that I've woken up freezing despite the pile of blankets on the bed and the heater turned up at full blast. These things stopped worrying me two years ago, and now I just accept them as part of a normal routine. I know in a few days the chills will go away and I will start to get tired. I know after that I won't feel like eating and pretty soon I will look like a skeleton of my former self. These things are the realities of living with this disease I carry and the only thing I can do is tumble through the episodes as best I can. Within a few weeks they will be gone and I will be myself again. The sun isn't going to rise for another three hours, and sleep has proved elusive. This disease of mine, it is both a blessing and a curse. It leaves a person a lot of waking hours to think about their life and sometimes, those thoughts aren't ones you necessarily want to entertain. Me, I remember back to a time when I kept my thoughts in paper journals. When I was young and full of romantic ideals. I've started transferring my old journals onto this computer, and the nostalgia is something that comes bittersweet. I turn on Davis and listen to the sounds of good Jazz fill the hotel room I've come to call home. On mornings like these where I wait for the sun to rise and get lost to thoughts of the past, I find that they always come back around to one person. I don't know if you could call Joseph Abrams a person so much as a force of nature. His initials, JMA, I would have carved into my skin and never lamented the ugly scar it left behind. I have an entire journal devoted to Joseph and the three months that we tumbled through something like love, obsession, and education all rolled into one. I will always love Joseph Michael Abrams and the way he looked playing Armstrong and Davis. Not to say I haven't loved those before and after him, in my own way, but he was the first. That one experience that lingers with you always, and on mornings like these, I swear I can see his smile in the curve of my glass or the taste of his cloves on my lips. I changed Joseph Abrams in as many ways as I was changed by him. He was electric, and I think part of me will always miss that spark. He was the first of my lost boys.
I was twenty-one years old when I met Joseph in Chicago. He was angry and I was grieving, and we seemed to have some kind of animalistic attraction to each other. He was a force of nature, and I was captivated. Enchanted by his sharp green eyes and scoundrel smile. I fell in love instantly with the way his hair rested across his forehead and always got in his eyes. He was working as a busboy at The Green Mill, taking a break from studying music at North Park University and had just lost his father to a stroke. It happened suddenly one day on a job site and Joseph and his mother hadn't been notified until Joe senior was already dead. I think he felt guilty that he hadn't been there. Hadn't told his dad often enough that he loved him or thanked him enough for working so hard to put him through music school. The way we met was like something out of a movie. Our eyes connected across the dimly lit room, and I knew then. I knew that this was it. That I would leave knowing Joseph Abrams fundamentally changed. He didn't speak much. Not at first, anyway. Nothing more than a few words as he scrawled his phone number on a napkin and slipped it under my third vodka martini. I never got the chance to call it, because I went home with him that night. Maybe I didn't really realize what I was getting myself into; it was impulsive and probably dangerous, but I didn't care. I didn't care, or I just didn't realize it. I don't think we exchanged names or details that first night. It was anonymous and passionate in ways I can't even put to paper. The man was like an addiction, and I couldn't (and didn't want to) stop. I knew without him telling me that he was a musician, because he played me that night. He made me sing in ways I never could have imagined possible. He had beautiful hands, and I loved to watch them when he played the upright bass and the trumpet. I loved to watch them when he played me, making my body sing for him sometimes like a steady Jazz rhythm and others like a Beethoven concerto. I didn't care that I didn't know this man. I didn't care that he could have killed me in my sleep that night, because he made me feel alive. He made me feel alive and electric when I had spent the last six months of my life being told by surgeons and specialists that I was dead.
I didn't seem him for nearly two weeks after that first night. It was the longest twelve days of my life; itching for my fix and remembering so vividly what it was like to feel him against me. What it felt like to have him inside and around me. To be touched and respond in a way that was nothing short of poetic. It sounds silly and romantic, but he made me feel beautiful. He made me feel like I deserved to be coveted. I don't know why I waited so long to see him after that first night. Maybe because I was ashamed of how easily I had tumbled into his bed. Maybe I was afraid of what would come of spending hours of my day tangled in his bed sheets. Afraid of what he would say when he found out. How he would look at me differently; treat me like I was made of spun glass. It was a Friday when I finally found my way back to The Green Mill. It was an open mic night, and I could hear the sounds of poorly played Jazz spilling out into the street. I almost didn't go inside, but someone seemed to know I was coming, and the music changed. One performer stepped down and another stepped up as I shook the Chicago rain from my clothes and took a seat near the edge of the bar. I was prepared to run if I caught sight of him, or if the music turned sour. It didn't turn sour that Friday night, and the minute the first note hit the air, I was captivated. He played Flamenco Sketches, and I was caught on the gentle flow of his music. I was spun into another world where everything was beautiful and perfect. After he played, he pulled me into the coat room and murmured sweet vulgarities against my neck as he pushed my skirt up around my hips and made me sing sweet songs I didn't know I had in me. He told me his name that night, and I fell in love with the sound of it on my tongue. I fell in love with the way he looked at me, and how each time we were together from then on, he devoured me whole. I came to see him at the club every night for three months. Some nights we would talk about our lives and the things we had seen and done; the things we wanted to see and do. Some nights we wouldn't talk at all, and I would trail his shadow home and fall into a symphony of bed sheets and muted words. We never did talk about anything of consequence, those nights in the club and in the post-coital first lights of dawn. I never did tell him that I was sick and he never did talk about his father. Our relationship was both profound and minimalist. We never staked claims or exchanged rings or promises, but I loved him with every fiber of my soul. I loved him for making me feel human again, and for showing me that there was something beautiful to this life after all. I met him in January, and it was a day in late March when the weather had turned from winter to spring almost overnight that I stopped coming to the club. We never said goodbye, and he never tried to find me. We both knew better than to ruin something that had been so unspokenly perfect in the ways that it was complicated without being complicated.
I wouldn't see Joseph Abrams until two years later, when I was in New York for the first time. I'd had many lovers since then. Many lost boys, but none like him. None that captivated me from across a room and held me under their spell for so long. None that could make me sing the way he did. To this day, Joseph Abrams is still the most amazing sex I have ever had; because it wasn't about sex, it was about music. It was about Jazz. When I saw him again, he was playing at the Blue Note Club. He still had that look about him. The wild and unkempt look, though time had aged his face and I could see the lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes in the way the light shone just right. His hair still fell enchanting across his forehead, and maybe it was for old time's sake, or because I never could refuse him anything that I went home with him that night. We didn't sleep, and when morning came earl grey against the twists and tangles of his sheets and me as I got dressed to go back to my hotel, I asked him one question. Something simple and built hazy with nostalgia.
"Joseph," I started, still warm and slurred from what we had shared. "Do you still play?" He sat silent for a long time, and I got the feeling that my question had struck him somewhere deep.
"No one like you, Margo." He gave me this charming, boyish smile and I kissed him one last time before I walked out and never looked back. I have never regretted the time I spent with Joseph Abrams, rather rejoice in the memories of a man who made me feel alive when I was sure that I was dead.
It's nearly seven am, now, and the sun is starting to peek over the horizon. The glass of brandy that I poured myself hours ago is gone, and the sounds of Miles Davis have faded into the first morning light. My memories have all left me, and when I crawl into bed it is with a smile and an observation I can't help but make. My sheets make silhouettes of a girl much younger, tangled in the arms of a man who made her sing. I will dream of Joseph tonight, and when I wake it will be with a clove smoke smile and the taste of Flamenco Sketches on my tongue.
Bookmarks