2:54 p.m. PDT - 2001-11-06
tool
i remember freshman year, november, berkeley, all eager to be in school, when i opened my back i smelled the fresh smell of new books and old pee-chees. i was a geek. i loved my mechanical pencil. there was a girl in my math class, pretty with red lips and she wore orange perfume, she twirled her pens like a monkey around her finger and took her notes in pink, i still remember her shampoo, Prell i said out loud, yes i do use Prell shampoo, she said, so i asked her out on a date. my first. we went out a few more times, always no kiss, always me on the curb side of the street, with a boquet of flowers for her and i picked up the dinner tab. chinese. egyptian. the ingmar bergman films. my floormates at the dorm said you're just her tool, michael. she's using you but i wouldn't listen. i didn't think people were like that, that she was different, that she knew i wrote poems about her in my journal and that someday i would show them, poems about trees and pine cones and the romp of wet dogs in a fountain, that berkeley was a bowl of pancake batter and she was my syrup, my strawberries, my everything i could find in a hallmark card that was pink and pastel and yellow and i made my floormates sick with my infinite declarations of oh she will fall for me eventually -- of course, there were the dizzy days after when she stopped calling and i figured out that the following month all i could eat was a box of cheerios with no milk, and that i couldn't afford my books for the next semester and then that's when i puked.
