He made it with her in the bathtub because she was bleeding. That animal. That gyrating, groaning animal. It was that negative breeding. She pulled him in, he slapped against her. They breathed, they kissed, they tangled. When they were done, they stayed in and showered. The water felt like rain against them, tasted of the sewer city dry desert beat town. His name was Francis, and she was Chloe. They beat each other senseless with their reckless hearts. He loved too much, she too little. They met naked in the middle.

The bedroom was a blue bejeweled blue, dazzling in its dimness, the floor wooden, how the bed posts glided across when they ground into each other like an overworked oil drilling rig. Francis was a butcher; Chloe was an aid to the elderly. She enjoyed making friends with her distant future. He liked to cut things up with sharp instruments. Francis had wanted to be a doctor but never made it. Chloe just wanted to be loved by anyone, and so she made it with more men than Francis. She didn’t think he knew it, but he knew it. Chloe was an over-shaken bottle of seltzer in the social circles. His heart bent toward a distant sun, a far horizon, to the day when she would be nothing but a memory and perhaps, he would be her greatest regret, the lost escape.

He recalls the Fish lyric: Read some Kerouac and it put me on the track to burn a little brighter now…

It was at the Variety Lounge on the west end of town where he got a full taste of her flirtations. It was the mad tolling noise and the whiskey smoke, and her playing ho hen as she jumped about like a Roman candle all ablaze from seat to seat to see whatever handsome ho Mr. Kool was getting on about in drunken hazy wisdom of the dream. She smoked fat Camels and laughed and touched while Francis brooded at the end of the bar, head hung low in a shot glass, hot amass, alabaster crass, swirling slurring words of talk with a stranger arrow, the desert yarrow, the place on high near those decrepit dams in the dryness beds.

Francis was 14 years her elder, but Chloe only thought it was something like 10 because that’s what people told her, and he never admitted to her the truth even on the day of his birth and the candles on the cake ablaze in a veil of misleading. But then poor Francis never thought it would matter for her to know anyways… What good would it do; nothing would change, nothing would stay the same. She had her plot all laid out in front of her nice and neat. She knew she would be going; she knew she was to leave him behind in the desert dirt, to ditch him to the hot earth to ache and mope and question his own heart and ability to love. Love? Chloe didn’t know what that really was yet. But there would come a day when perhaps she would, and she would look back and wonder where Francis burned out at. Wonder where he crash-landed and vaporized. Whatever happened to poor Francis? Oh, how I broke his heart. She laughs so hard all the windows in California shatter.

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