I like themes and, inadvertantly, this week seems to have developed into ‘Moronic Debauchery of Yore Week’, subtitled ‘Great Figures in Twentieth Century American Literature’. Who am I to buck a theme. Thinking about that gun and poor decision making under the influence of mind altering substances, I’ve got another one for you.

Let’s head back to mid 90’s northeast Georgia again. Your protagonist is working two jobs to pay tuition at the finest university in the South. At this point living in a one bedroom apartment carved out of the top floor of a genteel old four-square just outside of downtown. Restless, irritable and discontent due – in large part – to a lack of companionship from the fairer sex.

To assuage my frustration I was doing a lot of reading and during a particularly steaming Georgia summer, I went on an F. Scott Fitzgerald binge. I fell in love with his heroines – racy, beautiful, irreverent, unstable and utterly captivating. I learned that most of his female characters was based on his wife Zelda. So, in essence I fell in love with Zelda Fitzgerald and I wanted, more than just about anything, one of my own.

If I can deliver the predictable cliche – be careful what you wish for…

My personal Zelda quite literally walked through my door one July morning. That kind of Southern morning that wakes up hot and crushes your soul before noon. Living in another apartment lacking air-conditioning, I had all the doors and windows open to maximize a largely imaginary breeze. I was laying limp on my unmade bed praying for a cold front when I heard a gentle tap on my door frame. Weakly, I raised my head and was instantly smitten by a tall, busty brunette with the crisp Anglo-Saxon facial features that I associated, from my high school years, with the cruelty of indifference.

Dripping honey and gravel – that accent endemic to a swath of Georgia from Brunswick to Albany, “Pardon me, sugar, do you have a screwdriver by any chance?”

What else could one say? “Phillips or flathead?” (Actually, if one were a bit more suave, one could say ‘Phillips, flathead or Smirfnoff?” But I’m only that suave in hindsight.

And it started there. She was moving in across the hall from me. One of the, many, idiosyncracies of this place was that the two top floor apartments shared a bathroom. With my previous housemate, a sweaty musician, this had been a burden. But I began to see the advantages of a shared powder room as I helped Zelda put her old iron framed bed together. In fact, I was completely in her thrall from the outset. She had that quality of a particular type of Southern woman – Blanche DuBois, Annie Savoy, Scarlett O’Hara – you know the type. I don’t know if it’s pheromones, or what, but I had been living among these women for a year or so at the time and could never get the time of day from one of them and now I’d be sharing the most intimate of spaces with one. Well not the most intimate, but you know.

I needn’t have worried; we were sharing that space fairly soon as well.

Zelda had dropped out of Tech under dubious circumstances and was trying to get on track at a local tech school so she could get into Georgia. She didn’t seem to work or to go to school much for that matter. I kept odd hours and no matter the time of day, she was there. The smell of White Diamonds and cigarette smoke wafted up under the door along with muffled dance music that she listened to incessantly. Everytime I came up the stairs, she would slink out from behind her door and invite me in for a ‘toddy’, regardless of time of day. I never declined. She told me stories, but never of herself. She told me stories of nights out in gay bars in Atlanta. She would tell me of shopping extravaganzas and vacations on Hilton Head and Pawley’s Island. And we would drink. Bourbon. When she was out she drank Manhattans, but at home she drank bourbon. Bourbon on the rocks. Any of you who have spent an evening with a person you’re attracted to talking and drinking bourbon on the rocks will know the inevitable outcome.

Now, I know that you know how this is likely to end. But in my defense, even as a randy 24 year old I wasn’t a complete idiot. We had some fun. We ‘went out’ for the rest of that summer. By going out, we spent most of our time in the top floor of that four square. But when I got paid, we’d hit the bars. Long drunken nights of drinking, dancing and necking. And fighting. God did we fight. Zelda was a flirt, one of the things that attracted me to her. I was plagued with the vicious jealousy of an insecure man. Virtually every night we went out we ended up roaring at each other outside of a bar over some perceived indiscretion on her part. Usually this was followed by a walk home on separate sides of the street hurling epithets at one another and a pair of slammed doors. But inevitably, one of us would creep through that shared bathroom with a bottle of Jim Beam and all would quickly be forgotten.

That’s the way that summer went. I was irrevocably enchanted and, to my credit, she seemed to be as well. She never paid for a drink, but then a gentleman wouldn’t let a lady pay for a drink. The petty jealousy was always assuaged by the fact that she was always there and always waiting when she heard me creaking up the stairs.

One day, shortly after the fall term started, I had classes all morning and then had to pull a double shift at the coffee shop. I went out for a drink with a couple of friends that I hadn’t seen since I met Zelda and didn’t get home until well after three in the morning. And her door didn’t open and her bathroom door was locked. I didn’t think much of it, but the next day I was home early from school. I made as much noise coming up the stairs as humanly possible, but still her door didn’t open. No smell of White Diamonds, no house music. Late that afternoon, I took to the roof, clambering over to her side of the house. It nearly  ended badly for me as I saw within an empty apartment. She, and every trapping of her, was gone. Even the cigarette smoke and perfume fumes seemed to have faded overnight.

I didn’t have a clue how to find her. The landlord was as clueless as me. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous. I’d never met any of her friends. I knew she was from Albany, Georgia but that town seemed to be populated entirely by people with the same surname. I asked around. I haunted the bars in which I knew she felt at home. I wandered around northeast Georgia discovering not even a hint of her existence outside my own mind and a couple of snapshots.

Then one night in late November – as insolently as she vanished – I found her smoking on my front porch with a half empty fifth of Maker’s Mark and a battered vanity case.

“Do you want a drink sugar?”

What else could one say?

Now, I hate to be all “The Bold and the Beautiful” on you, but this post seems to have grown legs of its own. Nothing’s worse than reading a 10,000 word blog post. Instead, I’m going to employ that coldest of writerly tricks – ‘to be continued’. UPDATE: Continued here.

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Image credits:

Zelda Fitzgerald’s ‘A Mad Tea Party’

My photo of the infamous four square.

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