Ashleigh

Ashleigh

                As Kerouac says about his mother in Desolation Angels, now we are getting to the best person in the story. 

                Remember from earlier, when I quoted from my journal, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be in love again.  I wish I could know so I could decide for real if I should kill myself.”?  Well, just a couple months after writing that, my wish would be granted.

                There is no more satisfying feeling than being in love.  It has happened to me several times.  It has never quite worked out to its ideal conception—a serious relationship—but it has always moved me to the depths of my soul.  The first girl was between second grade and eighth grade, and may still continue to this day yet.  The second girl was between ninth grade and twelfth grade, and vaguely continues to this day, in a way.  The third girl was between freshman year and senior year of college, and is in a different category altogether.  The fourth girl was between November 2007 and June 2008, and is arguably more foolish than any of those other crushes. 

                In the “Dermatology” chapter, before I went into that particular appointment, while waiting in the waiting room, I heard one of the nurses, or medical assistants, or whatever, say something and then follow it up with, “Then I go home and cut myself.  Just kidding.” 

                Of course I have already mentioned that I was writing a novel called “Self-Mutilation” at the time.  It is coincidences like that which always take me out of my body and into a zone of bliss and expectation.

                While Dr. Goldring had taken care of me herself the first appointment or two, I started to come in every two weeks to completely erase my acne and to do as much to remove the scars as possible, and Ashleigh became my primary care physician.  She was immediately garrulous on our first meeting.  I told her about my job at Jefferies, and not long after got onto the subject of my writing.  She had made a couple of vague comments about her own life, as she performed a chemical peel on me—she lived like an old woman, all she did was read dense books and go running.  She was very beautiful.  She had brown hair, perfect skin (perhaps owed in part to her profession), brown eyes which were perhaps indecipherable due to their frequently narrowed and focused quality, and a general air of elegance which few in the 21^st century are able to exude—it involves a cynical and refined outlook that eludes the masses when they turn away from literature and towards the television.

                Don’t get me wrong—I watch way more TV than I probably should—but that is just the easiest way for me to put it.  Ashleigh had an intelligence which I had never encountered before, and I feel I had met a few girls that could justifiably be labeled “geniuses.” 

                After a session or two with her, we fell into a routine.  I would receive a chemical peel every two weeks, whether it was excessive treatment or not.  It meant an extra ten to twenty minutes with Ashleigh and those minutes were invaluable.

                She asked me to bring her a copy of my first novel the next time I came in.  I e-mailed it to myself and printed it out at the printer in our station at work.  Then I made a copy of it in the copy machine.  Then I asked Tommy if he could show me how to use the binding machine, which would put a curlicue spiral on the side of the pages to hold it together, and give it the appearance of a professional report, rather than just the basic unstapled collection of 150 messy stacked pages.  Regardless of the hodgepodge nature of my first novel, in that new presentable form, I was very proud to bring it into Ashleigh that next Wednesday. 

                She asked me to sign the inside cover and said that one day she would sell it on eBay and finance her burgeoning medical career with the profits.  I don’t know if seeing Ashleigh was more helpful for my skin, or for my confidence, or for my mental health.  Some of those sessions would often take on the guise of talk therapy, and she would repeatedly tell me that my skin looked really good, and I began to look forward to them for the quality of honest, medical advice, whether it be for skin or for healthy living.  I also couldn’t wait to hear what she thought of it.  I would have to wait two weeks.

                When I returned, there was always something of an awkward routine in the waiting room.  I would wait for a few minutes, reading my latest book (Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World pretty much precipitated these discussions), and she would open the door and say hi to me with a big smile, notably more friendly than when she would happen to call someone else in before me.  For everyone that saw the way she treated me, I felt proud and privileged.  Once, there was a woman in the waiting room who I think was flirting with me a little bit as I left, which I may attribute to my friend Mike’s theory that other girls like you on the basis of whether or not they see other girls liking you.

                But she called me in and I sat on the medical examining cushion and she told me that she really liked it.  I was surprised to hear a positive opinion after hearing her talk about Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goethe, Milan Kundera, and Nabokov.  She said no, she really meant it.  She had burnt her back because she was leaning up against a radiator while reading, and she had read it from beginning to end without stopping.  She hadn’t even realized the burning was happening.  This was the second person, after my friend Mike, that reported reading it from beginning to end, and made me feel very happy again.  She said she knew good writers from lesser ones.  She said it was original, describing it as “sci-fi beat,” which also made me very proud.  Then we talked about other things as she performed the chemical peel.  My job.  How I was getting into something that I didn’t expect my life to revolve around—accounts payable.  Her medical ambitions.  How hard it was to get into med school, because even after taking the MCATs, completing the applications, and having excellent transcripts, there was still a round of interviews to pass in person before you could be admitted.  I remember her saying Georgetown in particular was an impossible one to get into.  And I had thought MFA programs were hard. 

                She told me to bring in more stuff and during the next two weeks, I created a short story collection specifically for her.  It included everything I thought might be publishable, including a couple of works that probably were of a lesser quality, but that I wanted to include for personal reasons.  The first was a totally autobiographical account of one day in my life as a college student in New York, and I thought it would serve as a nice way of introducing her to my personality as I really saw it myself.  The second was an homage to The Sorrows of Young Werther, which we had talked about before and which I included simply because I thought she might find it interesting, since she had read the book.  There were ten stories in all.  I collated this book the same as my first novel, and I included an introduction/preface in which I discussed the genesis and context of each story.  I gave it to her during the next session and she had me sign the page of the introduction.

                Two weeks later she told me she had really liked all of the short stories—except for one, the one about “Why I am Famous,” simply because she didn’t like stuff about celebrities.  She said she thought I might be more of a short story writer than a novelist.  All of these compliments combined to give me an incredibly good feeling about her, and by this point my feelings for her had gone beyond typical patient-doctor relations.  She was a fan of my work, or so she claimed.  She had been a perfect angel as she did her work on me.  Once she told me about an abusive ex-boyfriend and I said something about a person as good as her never deserving to have to go through something like that.  And she had provided some explanation of the scenario that broke my heart and made me want to seek this person out and beat him mercilessly.  One of the few times I felt justified in my mind by violent impulses. 

                I didn’t know where else to go with her.  I was working on my second novel, and I figured I could give her each of the four sections as I completed it.  I gave her the first section eventually, and she said she found it good, if a little wordy, but it sort of needed to be wordy.

                On Valentine’s Day I gave her a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Heart.  I consider it one of the sweetest things I have ever done.  It was a true offering to her.  The first time I had ever given a valentine with the intention of telling the girl that I liked her.  She hugged me in thanks and few hugs in my life have carried that same tinge of bittersweet happiness. 

                I didn’t know how to progress outside of the office.  But I never had enough time to say everything I wanted to say to her.  It was as if the conversation was limitless, and it was just a matter of picking out of the air what to talk about, and by conversing with Ashleigh, it would reach the level of high art. 

                Everything in my life took a turn for the worse when I moved to Silverlake.  I had a housewarming party on May 23, and I wanted to invite her.  I figured, this was the best way to break the ice outside of the office.  Provide a venue for drinking, comfortable conversation, and all of my other friends in the area to meet.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the idea to send out invitations until after the previous appointment.  Perhaps this was a bit of self-sabotage on my own behalf, and I will admit that I was nervous about the outcome, but I wanted to have the party when my friend Mike was in town.  I had to call the dermatology office to ask if I could send a piece of personal mail to her at that address.  But they would not give out her last name.  They said I could send it to Ashleigh A., and that was also the first time I realized her name was spelled that way and not Ashley. 

                I sent the invitation, and as I said before, no one showed up to the party.  I went to my next appointment and asked her if she had received the invitation, and she said she hadn’t.  I told her about calling the office to get her last name, and she said it was dumb that they wouldn’t give it to me. 

                It was in these final meetings that tensions finally came to a pitch.  I told her that I was a failure, because I had quit my job for dumb reasons, in the hopes of finding a shorter commute (which I eventually did, but not before our sessions would end due to insurmountable bills), and that I would never be published or taken seriously as a writer.  What followed was an impassioned monologue about the nature of everyone else’s stupidity, including a dig about fat middle-aged women watching Nancy Grace and various other topics exuded in a spontaneous, emotional torrent.  She said that calling myself a failure amidst this culture of ignorance was entirely wrong.  I feel more deeply in love than ever at this point.  If I could be with Ashleigh, if I could spend all of my time with her, I would be a success.  It was inevitable.  She was perfect, and if I could be with her, I would become perfect by osmosis. 

                At the end of that session, I asked for her number, and she wrote it down on a small piece of paper for me, and she also asked me for my number.  She said, “Call me anytime.”

                I called her a few times, and she never answered.  It would always go to her voice mail, and I would always leave a message asking her in some vague way if she wanted to hang out, sometimes being so specific as to refer to a concert.  She would never respond.  Sometimes I would send her a text message and a couple times she replied to that.  Once she said she was out of town for the weekend, in Nebraska.  I replied asking if it was Omaha or Lincoln, and heard nothing.

                During the next appointment I asked her if she had gotten my voice mail, and she said she hadn’t.  She was said she was sorry but her phone was a piece of shit and she had dropped it in tea and she should probably get it fixed.  This struck me as a logical explanation, as my friend Jaime had also once told me about dropping her cell phone in tea.

                The next few weeks went by, and I texted her asking what she was up to once, and she said she was at work.  I said I was bored and she wrote, “You could always print out pictures of Kim Jong Il.”  The next time I came, I showed a picture of him with his son wearing Mickey Mouse ears.  It cracked her up. 

                That may have been the last appointment.  I had not known that my health insurance had expired at the end of April (when I turned 25), and so all of my May and June appointments had added up to over $800.  At the front desk they had not allowed me to enter for an appointment when I was that greatly in debt to them.  As I was about to leave, Ashleigh appeared behind the girl at the front desk, and asked what the problem was, and I told her I was delinquent, and I said, “I might as well give you this,” and gave her the second section of my second novel, and I told her, “You have to promise you won’t stop talking to me after reading it.”

                Eventually I settled the bill through a check from my father, and though I had gotten new insurance and could go in for a reasonably-priced appointment again, I felt it had become an unnecessary expense and decided against it.  It was around this point that I realized I would need to leave L.A.  I had also felt that Ashleigh never really cared about me the way I thought she did, the way I hoped she did.  She was just trying to be nice. 

                Once when I was telling her about Chicago, I had made fun of a show I had seen on the Sundance channel about multicultural youths taking a road trip across America, and being told in Chicago that the city was mainly about three things: Food, Sports, and Culture.  Though I enjoy all three to varying degrees, I said this was the reason why I didn’t like living there—some odd feeling of not fitting into the place where I was born.  She told me to take it easy, because one school in Chicago had been the only one to offer her a fellowship for med school, and she might end up moving there.  As I moved back myself, I entertained notions that I could call her, since I still had her number, and that we would be together yet.  I called her once or twice, and the result is the same.  Maybe I should text message her.