Automatic 1-Kriston On The Line

Kriston On The Line:
Ringing.
There is a ringing.
There is a ring in my ears. Maybe not a ringing....it's that sound I hear on the television that always makes makes me reach for my cell phone in that Pavlovian way that makes me feel like a a secret idiot as I know that it is obviously the Television and and can't be my cell phone since Buffy in rerunland has flipped open her bit of plastic I still have to check just to be sure......but once again I've been had sadly it's for Buffy not me.
Ah, its a sound that assumes a recognizable form I have come to recognize as a cell phone. It sounds just like a cellphone and it stops.
There is a ringing - this time I am ready, this time I know.
This time I can't be mislead by dreams or television, it defiantly is my cell phone and it is ringing.
The giant ancient reptilian monster air conditioner precariously just barely hanging in my window is pumping out it's familiar high decibel ambient moan that I have come to love - it soothes me, it lulls me, it comforts me with the white noise of rainstorms and oceans. The ringing is cutting through it. The ringing is fucking with my rusty mechanical lover.
It is Arctic in my room in the dense Memphian heat. Wait it's not the heat it's the....ringing. The single sheet I lay under is soaked with sweat, I am simultaneously clammy and chilled to the bone and the phone is ringing and time is standing still.
Time, it feels like I've just gone to sleep minutes ago. Time what is it, that is to say what time is it? Wait this is something I can use my big monkey brain and figure this one out. The first step is opening my eyes. There is a problem, my eyes seem to be glued shut with an insidious glue primarily composed of sweat, eye mucus, nocturnal tear duct emissions and cigarette smoke.
The fucking phone is ringing. It's ringing the fucking phone it must be moments I'm dealing with not hours which makes a good case for not even being awake - but I am awake and the phone is ringing - I get it.
I shake the blood back into the paralyzed limb I've been sleeping on and rub my eyes open enough to see the dull radioactive glow of the digital clock - it's 4:58, Christ are we talking Am or PM here......it's dark out and there is the chattering of an army of predawn bastard birds chanting that I am not crazy (well i am crazy) I have only been asleep minutes about 20 of them and they were hard won minutes and I resent forfeiting them. I will my head to raise sufficiently to to find and grab the phone then gratefully flop back on the damp pillow.
The caller ID is a green pulsing blur. My glasses are somewhere in the vicinity and some blind groping brings them to hand. I hold one lens to the good eye I have left and I see the letters form the name KRISTEN and the number is UNKNOWN meaning she could be in New Orleans, La Vegas or in my driveway. Ringing.
Kristin I haven't seen or heard from her in years. though I instinctively sense where ever she is she hasn't known sleep tonight either. I haven't thought of her more than in passing though when I do it is without regret.
Every so often I have been visited by her shadow lurking behind an unrelated thought. She flash bright like an after image then fade. Perhaps a soft focus ghost movie uninvited appearance. The camera pans back from her large hazel eyes haphazardly painted to a timeless face of a 20's screen icon, soft edges, generous mouth, a ragged dark bob and that crooked smile only southern girls seem to have perfected that breaks my heart. Always.
There is a photograph of her I can see from the bed curled in the velvet naked and melancholy back to to me holding a book. It could be Byron it could be her journal it could be something just to wrap her fingers around. She is crying, me I would be taking a photograph before starting our ritual of drawing her into my arms first resistant then clinging familiar tears wet on my neck then cheek then desperate kisses and we see daylight at the end of the tunnel....but it is a very long tunnel.
Memory accelerates now as it is apt to do. Kristan straddling me a slender phantom hovering over me pale skin, small breasts swaying, strong grip on my wrists hands with chipped and chewed red nails. Locked in a tobacco and whiskey kiss. Hidden from the world by the curtain of her hair.
The phone is ringing.
A thrift store Madonna favoring thin cotton Depression Dresses, nothing underneath. A torn leather flight jacket, rodeo boots and a crooked smile. We held hands wherever we walked and always sat on the same side of the table at CK's.
And there was the sex.
Sex in the car.
Sex under the overpass.
Sex leaning against the door of the toilet of a club accompanied by an angry knocking.
Sex in the shadows off South Main pilgrims passing near on the sidewalk.
Affectionate lazy sex in the pulsing glow of the TV.
Makeup Sex.
The sex was good.
The phone is ringing.
Kirstin though she was pregnant every month. She would cry when she thought she was knocked up and cry when she found out she wasn't. Kristen needing angry evidence of love. Smashing glass, bleeding, screaming punching holes in walls evidence.
Kristen when I was late took every photograph of my history of romance and painted out the faces with white out then scattered them about like rose pedals for me to find when I came home.
Kristen who ruined a perfectly good car because she didn't know you had to put oil in the engine.
Kristen who staggering drunk swung open the door while the car was moving through no mans land and jumped out skinning her knees then scrambled up and danced around the car to the radio. Who screamed and cursed like a cowboy at the headlights till drained. While I
weary and drunk as I was had to clime out of the Oldsmobile and pick her up kicking and clawing over my shoulder and throw her in the back seat where she lay petulant her skirt over her head.
And she was the good one. I was the problem. I was the one who always needed to be forgiven.
The phone is ringing.
Kristen who even after we called it quits was likely to call me at any ungodly hour to pick her up from some desolate juke joint - though she always made it worth my while.
Then she just fell off of the face of the earth.
That was years ago, another life.
The phone is ringing.........I don't know , it's sure to be trouble at the other end of the line.
"Hello Kristin."