On Why I love Country Music

Likes and buts and with and without you. With you doing facial exercises like an actress….trying to make every muscle awake and ready so that the only block is the fact that I couldn’t be brave enough. Remember when we really got into it and then you told me you couldn’t even see me. I had been winking and batting my eyelashes and smiling – totally unknowingly. Thinking you could see my suggestions, see my girliness. Maybe even that that is what kept you talking. Then after a joke you finally told me that all you could see was my bangs, my eyebrows, and my computer screen – with the occasional exaggerated hand gesture extending beyond the silver box and up toward the ceiling. I remember when I saw you on the street that day. How you got so nervous. How you asked me if I wanted to hang out with you. You were wearing a t-shirt. It was summer. I remember you then. I remember you again in the fall. It was the same thing. I saw you and you must have just gotten a haircut. You looked so good. And you were so kind. I liked you so much. I wanted to just have you next to me. 

I had my nails painted at the salon today, and talked to the young girls. They had airbrushed nails, and in my mind, I had fake nails too. My boyfriend also picked me up - and it was my mother who might get mad at me for deciding on black. Later, my varnish choice seemed to go over well with the girls in the elevator. The one in the yellow asked me how my night was and the other told me she liked my color. I’ve heard that’s where girls talk about nails. Suspended time where you may be lucky enough to end up riding with some blonde Gossip Girl, and they may tell you that they like your grey tips. 

I do love summer. I do. I even miss the summer I worked in the bathing suit shop — next to 7-Eleven — the dressing rooms had florescent lighting and my twenty-one-year-old boss was pregnant. She threw up once. I asked her if she could still have sex. I was nineteen. We sent Santa Monica wives on their Hawaiian vacations and competed to win a personalized terry-cloth hoodie. I won. I was the tannest of the bunch. This summer’s been different. Everyone seems to agree. New York rained and I lost every umbrella. It’s hot now. The hottest. I tried to charm the Polish furniture salesman into giving me a mattress for eighty dollars today. Instead I found myself in a dressing room trying on a wool mini skirt and leather shorts that I couldn’t live without. 

       I finally made it to Woodstock, New York. I say finally, but I mean eventually. Carrying suitcases packed full of designer clothes, thinking more about advertisers and my grandmothers 80th birthday than nakedness and love, I packed and unpacked cars. I dressed and undressed models. I talked to a cross-eyed man who was 16 years old when Jimi Hendrix played 70 miles down the road in the rain. His father kept him busy.       In the grass we laid our model down. We brushed her hair and we painted her body, covered it in black leather, beige make-up. She told me of how she had grown up in France, northern France, with her brother and he loved fashion more.       The tree came down so low it touched her shoulder and we all stared down. The glare of the sun became shade, then shadows, and then the same flesh that we were all hoping could prove our point, pay our bills. 

     Laughing and listening to country on my unmade bed, on youtube, wearing a bolo tie he played on stage then, he played again.      This time I was there with my dad, we drank scotch, I drove home. The Whiskey on Sunset. I listened to the same stories, and wanted to hear them again.