Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following text, “Yes. No. Maybe” by Kate Savage was published in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (2005), City Works Press’s inaugural anthology.
by Kate Savage
San Diego is burning down and I am really fucking stoned. I mean Really. Goddamn. High. I didn’t mean to get this way, rocking back and forth on the couch in the livingroom staring at the water spot on the ceiling that looks like a goat with an ice cream cone because that’s all I can do. I only meant to smoke a little, to take the edge off this hangover, but I ended up inhaling deeply as I watched the plastic news people telling me that the whole damn town is on fire. I try to breathe normally, to slow down my heart that is freaking out along with my mind: together on a mission for me to find the nearest bridge and jump off of it.
Nothing.
Today the sky is dark brown-red and ash has come to visit us from the hills that are presently being eaten by flames. And holy shit I am so fucking high.
This is the kind of high where I am forced, kicking and screaming, to examine just exactly why my life has become so fantastically tiresome. Revelations come barreling towards me one after another, and I can’t breathe. I realize I really needn’t be so self-conscious. I realize that maybe endless self-improvement is just a way to avoid improving your mind or heart. I realize I need to call my mother more often. I realize one thing after another until, finally, I have to look at the Big Thing in my life that is causing considerable grief and profuse boredom. And That Thing is upstairs in our room, playing video games like it’s going out of style. That Thing is my fiancé and he’s boring the shit out of me.
The destruction of things fascinates me. Whole towns burned up, gone, collapsed in on themselves. Six months with someone that felt like ten years, burned up, gone. Until there’s nothing left but ashes and a few pictures.
The details are mundane – we met, drank, fucked, and then decided to give engagement a whirl three months later, what the hell. Not only are the details mundane, the whole damn relationship was mundane. The poor boy forgot how to have fun, bless his tedious heart. He couldn’t understand just exactly why I didn’t find extreme joy in smoking copious amounts of weed and watching old movies night after night. After night. And at first I did enjoy it, I’ll admit. He was sweet and he was good to me. He cooked and never turned me down when I pressured him for sex.
But god, what a fantastic loser.
He guilted me into staying home on countless Saturday nights. He was jealous of my friends. He told me I really should start going to the gym. He slept eighteen hours a day. He wasted untold amounts of money on bullshit – mostly overpriced DVDs of bad TV shows. I didn’t know he was a computer addict when we first started dating. I thought he was mysterious, because he would disappear at weird hours of the night and stay gone for days at a time. I would jealously speculate – he’s got another girl. He’s got a wife. He’s a CIA agent. I thought of everything but what he was really doing – playing video games at his grandmother’s house.
He’s twenty-seven, by the way.
I am rocking back and forth on the couch. Then I stop. Realizing what needs to be done. As soon as I understand this, I have to cry. So I do. I cry because despite all of this I really did love him. At one point I actually did consider going through with a marriage, no matter how weird it all felt. It was all so grown-up, I had a ring and everything, see? Well. Okay. Um, alright.
I walk up the stairs and into the room.
“Hey,” I say.
He doesn’t look up.
“We need to talk.” I use a menacing tone to get his attention. He looks up and fakes innocence – all wide eyes and virtue.
“About what?” Pure as the bloody driven snow. Like he didn’t know this was coming.
“About us. This isn’t working. I’m not happy and god, you can’t be happy. You haven’t left the house in a week and a half. This has to stop.” I elaborate, I am fucking clear and concise and mature about it to boot.
He laughs a weird laugh. “What are you talking about?” he says, incredulous. Like I’ve started speaking French all of a sudden.
Oh hell.
He does this. Every time. This is, by the way, the third time I’ve tried to break up with him.
“I’m talking about you. Leaving. Now.”
He starts to get mad. He yells at me. He says I tricked him into loving me, and he’s not leaving, and remember how I started shooting up again in the summer and I drink too much and blah blah blah. I wait until he’s done. He cannot fucking touch me. I am just too stoned.
Nothing.
“Please. Get. Out.” I look at him straight in the face. He looks at the ring that I haven’t worn in a month with a blank face. I can feel myself starting to lose my nerve, so I leave the room and go downstairs to watch everything burn. The sorority girl neighbors are freaking out, evacuating. I vaguely entertain thoughts of looting, but then envision their apartment – what the hell could I possibly want of theirs? I imagine myself strolling out of their place with boxes of body glitter and stacks of Vogues, cackling at my own diabolical ways. Then I think about sleeping. I think about reading. I think about doing drugs.
Nothing, so I sit and watch the goat eat his ice cream cone. I imagine the goat has a delightfully stupid name, like Professor Goats-A-Lot or Goatrude McGoatmeister. I can hear him upstairs, moving around. Movement of the upright kind, that’s a nice change of pace, there’s a step in the right direction. He walks down the stairs and says he guesses he’ll be going now. I feel myself start to give, to almost say forget it, let us go watch a movie, but I don’t so he leaves. I sit back down.
(Nothing.)