Lost in a Desert

by Lindsay James

If this is the story of my relationship with Lamar, or of my senior year of high school, or of what I did between high school and college, or of why my freshmen year was so strange, or why I often feel much too old, then it starts here, with my friend Alexis. Alexis is a Swiss boy, not a girl from Connecticut (his joke, not mine). He is a Swiss boy in the way that he is from Switzerland, not that he is full of holes (also his joke, though it’s not one I ever try to claim responsibility for), and he has been in love with me for a year and a half. I have found out about this only recently, as of the summer after my junior year in high school, and it has cast a pallor on our relationship, not just because he has been in love with me for a year and a half but also because he isn’t any longer.

This story also rests on the existence of my friend Hannah, who is a legitimately bad influence on me, and everyone knows it: our parents, all our friends, and the two of us. Hannah is the sort of friend who says “Lindsay! What are the chances the cops are going to walk by right now?” and “What do you mean you’ve had enough?! You’re still standing!”

More specifically, Hannah once said to me, sagely, “What you need is to get incredibly drunk and have sex with some guy you don’t know yet. C’mon.” But I get ahead of myself.

This story really starts on the hill next to my Driver’s Ed school, where Alexis and I spent the first several weeks of that summer. He had the habit of meeting me after my class with a significant amount of booze on hand, several packs of cigarettes, and farfetched stories about his day. Alexis was unemployed, absurdly wealthy, and aimless. He spent his days waiting for me to get out of class and generally finding as much fun as there was to be found in a small college town on summer break.

Once he claimed to have wandered into what he thought was a protest. He joined right in, sitting in the middle of the street, stopping traffic, chanting basic protest slogans. He found out later that the hippies in the street were protesting the cops not wanting them to be hippies in the street; i.e., they’d been asked to move their chat to the sidewalk, and had become upset. And angry hippies protest, so they did.

Another time he added soap to the fountain in front of his apartment building and then sat back to let the bubbles envelop him while pedestrians shrieked and jumped out of the way.

I was, in short, the highlight of Alexis’s day, and given that I spent my days watching videos of mangled victims of high-speed car wrecks, he was the highlight of mine.

A very basic element of my personality ought to be clarified here. I’m wildly susceptible to quick swings of mood, to large bursts of emotion, and to immediate commitment. Hannah once said to me, “You fall in love like other people sneeze. It’s unexpected, it’s quick, and it’s completely involuntary.” Hannah’s very bright, and in this case, very perceptive.

Needless to say, under the influence of warm summer evenings, a large amount of alcohol, and the fact that he wasn’t in love with me anymore, I became wildly infatuated with Alexis over the course of maybe a week.

My timing, it might also be noted, is notoriously awful. I always start and end things at precisely the least convenient time, and this little debacle is no exception. I tried to begin a relationship with my best friend several weeks after he finally stopped pining for me, just two weeks before I left town for the summer, and about a day into his new relationship with some Smith girl who’d stayed in town for the summer and who he met on one of his long days waiting for me.

In confessing my adoration for him, I was proud of myself; I was direct, clear in my intentions, honest and thorough. I was then acutely heartbroken when he gently explained to me that my timing could not possibly have been worse.

This marks Hannah’s great re-entry to the story, although she’s never far behind the scenes. I took the next day off from Driver’s Ed so I wouldn’t be there when Alexis didn’t come to pick me up (a paranoid thought, at the time, but it turns out he actually didn’t show up, so sometimes paranoia is the way to go) and went to see Hannah at work in a fancy-things store for the wealthy. I sat around miserable on her expensive stools, toying with her expensive trinkets, until her boss said she could go as long as she took me with her.

Hannah led me out onto the glaringly bright sidewalk by the hand, letting me shuffle along like a pouty child, I think mostly for her boss’s benefit. When we got outside she pulled two pairs of sunglasses she’d stolen from work out of her pocket and put one on me and one on her. She took two cigarettes out of a pack and lit one for me and one for herself. She then squared herself to me, took in my pitiful countenance, and took off our sunglasses to look me in the eye.

“Lindsay,” she said, “We have here an opportunity. We have choices. We have an entire day off, and we can spend it sulking in my room, talking about Alexis and how sad you are.”

At this she shook her head slowly to indicate, no, we would not be wasting a beautiful day this way.

“Or, we could recognize this for what it is. It is the summertime. We are single young people with a penchant for trouble, and neither of us has to be anywhere until tomorrow afternoon.” She looked at me expectantly.

I waited. Hannah wanted me to fill in the blank, but I couldn’t think of how, beyond describing to her in detail exactly how bad my hangover would be tomorrow if her speech meant what I thought it meant.
She got bored and clarified, “If you are going to pout all day and think about Alexis then I’d like to be drinking for it. But that doesn’t have to be the case! There are ways around it! What you need,” and here she paused, to make sure I understood the weight of the statement, “is to get incredibly drunk and have sex with some guy you don’t know yet. C’mon.”

And because I was tired and sad, and had just lost the only boy I would ever love (this happens relatively frequently, as you might imagine), I said ok.

Briefly! Before we develop too low an opinion of me, what I actually agreed to was heavy drinking in town for the next 24 hours. I had no intention of betraying my beloved with some random guy, and certainly not the very day after he rejected me. It would have lacked nobility. But the drinking, that sounded like a way to kill an evening. So off we went.

Here another small cast of characters must be added to the story, namely a group we can safely just call “The Town Boys” but who bore the names Donny, Nathan, Matt, and Paulie. Hannah and I kept them around as a group of good solid drinkers who could be called upon when a person needed a buddy, someone to spend the night with, a bottle of alcohol, or just to be dragged to parties and bars and alleys to get into trouble of one variety or another. They all sold drugs part time and had money to blow, were friendly and funny and harmless and agreeable. They bore no expectations of us and were generally just pleased to have some girls around to give them credibility with other girls. Good boys, The Town Boys.

Hannah and The Town Boys and I went out. We got into some trouble, most of it fairly routine. The police chased us off the train tracks, we climbed up on the roof of the bookstore, we drank in most of the drinkable spots in town. We finished several bottles of whiskey. Hannah and I jumped in the fountain. We yelled things at Alexis’s window. We lay in the grass and made jokes about the cloud shapes.
And then it got dark, so we went out again. We played pool all over town, got 86ed from all the bars in walking distance. The Town Boys sold some stuff and almost got into a fight, and we had to leave somewhere fast.

Suddenly it was 2am and we were drunk, drunk, drunk, wandering down the center of Main Street, looking for the next trouble. And I spotted a boy sitting in a doorway, head leant back against the locked door, looking dejected and tired and like maybe he could use a little trouble, or maybe be a little trouble. So I went on over to introduce myself.

(Another disclaimer, I’m afraid: I had, in fact, met Lamar before I found him in a doorway on Main Street, but neither of us figured this out until years later. He and I were married in a mass ceremony in the park when I was about fourteen, during my intense hippie days; about twenty kids married all of the other twenty that day, but it’s a boring enough story that neither of us bothered to tell it to each other until he asked me to marry him and I joked that I was already married to avoid giving a straight answer.)

I was right about Lamar from the first. He could, at the moment, both use and be a little trouble. He was having a bad night, on the one hand, and had a bottle of whiskey and no one too drink it with on the other. To boot, he was a good friend of The Town Boys and Hannah, and everyone was glad to have him along. It was getting to be the time of night for sitting, so we joined him in his doorway and cracked the bottle, and I had some time to form first impressions.

The most striking think about Lamar, both then and now, is his height, which is something in the nature of 6’6. The second most striking thing about him is that he’s exceptionally, fantastically, almost ridiculously good looking. On this particular night, I remember vividly, he was wearing broken down, faded camouflage shorts and a wife beater and skate shoes, his dreads were just forming and a few inches long, and he was solid from a few months of working construction. Lamar’s father was Jamaican, if the stories are true, and very, vary black. His mother was a blond, blue-eyed Iowa girl. The product of their union in Lamar is creamy dark skin and shocking golden eyes, the left slightly darker than the right.

I was, I will admit, impressed. I was further impressed when the booze ran out and Hannah wanted to drink more, and more impressed still when The Town Boys plus Lamar said they’d come back to Hannah’s house with us to raid the liquor there.
(Hannah’s parents, older hippies who raised their only daughter in a very hands-off manner, usually kept a bottle of something cheap in the freezer for us, mostly so we wouldn’t go after the better stuff in the cabinet.)

I was very drunk before we got home, and then we drank some more. I remember sitting on the couch next to Lamar, self-consciously stiff the way you are when you feel you’re being watched and you want to make a good impression. We were consciously not touching, keeping that polite inch and half that means you aren’t coming on to someone. We were sneaking looks at each other out of the corners of our eyes. We were laughing uproariously at each other’s jokes. And then someone proposed body shots, and we did some, and then I woke up next to the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen, who smiled at me sheepishly, extended a hand, and said,
“Lamar. And you?”

I was appalled, on the one hand, as a one night stand had not been my intention, and kind of thrilled, on the other, because I’d never had a one night stand before, and I was still in the period of my life when I gathered experiences like trading cards, trying to collect them all.

“Lisa.” I said. “And you’re Jamal?”

He laughed, passing the test and lightening the mood.

Someone had been kind enough to give us the bed in the attic, so we had our privacy and enough time to collect ourselves before seeing the others. I clutched my knees to my chest and looked askew at him, trying to figure out how you were supposed to play the morning after something like this. My inclination was to run, very quickly, as far away from the house as possible. That didn’t seem terribly sensitive, however, so we spent the morning lying in bed instead, getting to know each other.

As first dates go, and especially given that we were already undressed, it went very well. Lamar lived with his adopted father and brother in a shitty apartment somewhere outside of town; I told him I’d give him a ride home. He came from Iowa, by way of Colorado and a series of very bad living situations. He also came from jail, where he spent a lot of his time, paying off a seven year suspended sentence for dozens of counts of grand theft auto, among other things. In theory he shouldn’t had to go in at all, but he had a knack for violating probation. I said I understood; I had a knack for getting caught out of my dorm after hours at my fancy boarding school. Lamar thought this was very funny.

He said, “Yeah, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for years. I always thought you were way out of my league,” laughing, then looked immediately embarrassed, because he’d just made it sound like we were going to have a relationship of some kind. I started looking at him a little bit differently.

We spent the next night together, drinking beer slowly to get rid of the hangover on Hannah’s parents’ porch, with Hannah again and some of The Town Boys, but we were alone, really. They talked around us and we talked to each other. Hannah had told me earlier that we looked so comfortable, coming downstairs in the morning, that she briefly imagined us dating, and realized it made a lot of sense. With this in the back of my mind, and Alexis suddenly forgotten, every word Lamar said was, in fact, more in line with everything I’d ever thought than anything anyone had ever said before.

He’d been abused as a child, but he wasn’t angry; no one who’d been entrusted with his care had been ready to perform as a parent. He knew he had to get his life together, and was trying, but times were tough and he needed money, and money kept coming by illegally. His dad, his adoptive dad, was pretty ok but kicked him out of the house periodically, usually because Lamar had fucked something up. He was honest and straightforward about these things, and everything else. He looked at me seriously when I told him I was leaving in a few weeks, and would be gone for the rest of the summer, and said, “I want to spend every minute I can with you until then.”

And he did. We slept together, often just sleeping, every night. We spent our evenings having serious conversations while other people had parties, played pool, went home together, all around us. We lost time, looking up to find that it had gotten light and I was late for class; it had gotten light and he was late for work. We told each other stories, made each other laugh, occasionally cried together for each other. His first foster father had changed Lamar’s name (from Ezekiel Zeus Ishmael Rahim Abdul Ali to Lamar Mayville), and he hated it. My first love (actual love, not this sarcastic love, that is really infatuation, that I keep referring to) was dreadfully abusive, and I had flashbacks, emotional problems, trust problems, because of it. Lamar wanted to be a computer programmer, was ok at it, lacked the training. I hated high school, didn’t want to go to college, imagined living on a farm with a lot of dogs and a garden. He wanted that too.

Two weeks went by incredibly fast. On my last night in town we huddled together under an overhang, out of the pouring rain, and he kept pulling me out into it. I got angry with him and he looked at me squarely and said, “I’m crying, Lindsay. Cut me a break. Let me hide it.”

He said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before.”

He said, “I’m going to wait for you.”

I didn’t believe him. I said, “I make no promises.”

He said, “I don’t care.”

I went away to Washington State. I lived in the woods. I cooked food for hikers. I had a close call with a cougar. I slept in an old boy scout tent with a dirt floor. I hauled bleach water; I washed dishes. I cleaned bathrooms, built fires, drank beer with Washington boys in hiking boots. I had an affair along the way. I got letters from Alexis, saying he missed me and couldn’t figure out where I went those last two weeks. I got letters from Alexis saying he was hanging out with Hannah and some felon, who were throwing keggers every night in the field by the airport. I got letters from Alexis saying that the thing with the Smith girl had lasted a month, only, and he missed me. And then it was August and I went home, back to school and real life.

Lamar wasn’t there. The rumor was that he’d gone to Miami Beach with The Town Boys, who had business to do down there. The rumor was that he ran off with some girl to a Rainbow Gathering. The rumor was that he’d gone back to jail, that his dad had called the cops one night when he came home drunk. And that one was actually true.

It was a month before he got out, but we picked right back up where we left off. We talked for hours every night, me on my phone in my dorm room an hour away, him on Hannah’s cell phone, drunk in town, at some party, on his dad’s porch. We spent our weekends together, clinging together in Hannah’s attic. He came up some weekdays, started hitching early to get to me by breakfast so we could eat together. Hannah told me she’d kept an eye on him, that he’d actually waited for me, had fought off girls all summer.

He moved in with Paulie, one of The Town Boys, not so far away from me. Hannah and I started spending all our time there, weekends and afternoons and days cutting school. Paulie was quickly becoming a vicious alcoholic, and bringing Lamar with him. The two of them, both on the run from the police at this point, holed up in their little apartment together, drinking the days away. Hannah and I joined in, on the weekends, going back to our private schools during the week. Life in that apartment was another story in and of itself. Someone died, in November. Someone else died in January and was resuscitated. Everyone was a junkie except Lamar and Paulie, who drank themselves to poison anyway. And then in February I got a part in a one-act play and Lamar went to jail again, this time for months and months.

I graduated from high school and moved to Cape Cod, to a big old farmhouse on a beach; Lamar got out of jail and moved in. In September I got on a plane and went to Europe. I came home in November, broke and skinny and exhausted. In December Lamar left, on the run again, to join the traveling circus that is the Rainbow family. In February I went to New Zealand to forget about missing him, and to realize (I hoped) that life wasn’t about alcoholism and loving each other so much you were miserable. Unfortunately I still loved him so much it made me miserable so I came back, in May.

And there he was, right where he’d always been, on a stoop in town, working at a pizza place, but this time a girl was pregnant. It was either his or his friend Nate’s kid, but it didn’t matter, the damage was done. I moved back to Cape Cod, to my safe farmhouse on the beach, and eventually he apologized enough and moved back in.

And that was the summer before I went to college. We spent our days and nights together, and things were good the way they had originally been. I left to go to work, sometimes; he left to sell drugs, sometimes. We went to festivals, we slept in tents, we drove around endlessly in my car. We lived a fresh lifestyle; he cooked good organic dinners and played the guitar on the porch in the evenings. I read books and introduced him to T.S. Eliot out loud. We swam in the ocean and drove the Jeep down the beach and made love in backyard under the clean Cape Cod sky. We stopped drinking, locked out drugs and drug addicts, immersed ourselves in music and sleeping until mid afternoon and warm, happy conversations.

Lying in bed a month or so before I left for school Lamar proposed; I was just going to school to appease my parents; I was quitting when the tuition refund date came up. When it was over we should get married. We should go live on a farm. He placed a hand over my stomach and pushed a strand of hair out of my face. We should have a baby. I made jokes and smiled as much as I could at him and panicked inside, trying to figure out if this was my life. We cried together that night, and again when it was time for me to go; he’d come to Portland, be there when the trial period was over, and we’d go off together to start our lives.

But I didn’t quit school. After years of hanging around with alcoholics and drug addicts and spoiled rich kids, just being around people with minds was exhilarating. I wrote papers and found that I liked writing papers. I made friends with a group of people who drank, sure, but were willing to talk politics while they did it, were angry about the same things I was, didn’t flinch when I used the word feminist. I went to gym, lived an ordered life, I learned for the first time in ages.

And when Lamar came to visit he didn’t fit. He was angry that I didn’t want to leave college; we got into an argument over institutional education and I refused to back down. He was angry that I felt at home at my bourgeois liberal arts college. He was angry that I wouldn’t get wasted with him on Tuesday nights, no matter how often I told him I had class in the morning. He was frustrated that I was putting, the way he saw it, the expectations of society ahead of him. He became repentant and told me he was moving to Portland to be near me; I told him I didn’t think that was a good idea.

I said,

“Baby, I need some time to finish school.”

“Baby, I need some space right now.”

“Baby, I can’t do this with you here.”

So he left. Got on a bus one day and didn’t come back, or call, or email, for nearly eight months. He was traveling, hitchhiking, had no phone, there was no way to reach him. Whether he thought he was giving me space, or staying out of my way, or punishing me for not being the girl he wanted, just didn’t matter. Eight months was too long, after the pregnant girl and the drinking and the worry and the jail time and having to picture him in a ditch somewhere, lost in the woods, wandering in the desert, beaten on the side of the road. It broke us. The longer he was away the less I wanted him to come back.

He called, the following summer, to tell me he was coming to see me. No warning of any kind, was just on his way to Portland. I picked up the phone in my boyfriend’s bed. Had to walk out onto the porch wrapped in a sheet to say no. Had to form words straight out of sleep to say, “We’ll talk about it later, but no. Stay exactly where you are, or go further away, but don’t come any closer.”

And he never called again.

That was it. I ran into him with Hannah- something I think she may have deviously planned- a year and a half later, playing pool in one of the bars we got kicked out of the night I met him. He’d gotten glasses, quit drinking entirely, was dating a cute little girl in a flowing skirt and Birkenstocks who he told threw things around their apartment at night yelling at him. He told me that after I left him (his words, not mine) he actually did get lost in the desert. He learned how to find water underground and how to catch rabbits and took some bad acid and woke up with a job in a greenhouse in Arizona a few months later. He told me he was doing well. He looked happy.

That was the last time I saw him. I hugged him on a snowy street in Massachusetts, freezing cold and red-nosed, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye.