All The Things You Think You Need But Really Don’t

I met this girl at Egan’s Bar one night, and she was wearing a sundress and had bloody knees joining her skinny calves to her skinny thighs. Her dress was short enough so the blood didn’t stain it, and when I squeezed in next to her at the bar, I looked down and saw bruises on her papery skin. Some fresh and purple like a plum, some green and gray with age like mold. I’d seen girls like her before, party girls. They were the only ones who came to Egan’s besides the regular drunks, and they always ended up wasted, too. This girl with the bloody knees was well on her way by the time I ordered my first round.

“Bud and half-shot Jack,” I said to the bartender. He popped the top, poured the shot and nodded as he took my card and started my tab.

I drank the whiskey and chased it with cold beer. Motown music was pumping through the P.A., so I thought I’d lean in and introduce myself to the girl with the bloody knees before something louder started playing. But before I could, she stood up and walked to the bathroom. I watched her weave though the regulars who came to watch ‘Jeopardy’ and the others who came to throw darts, all of them working on a mid- afternoon buzz. Then the Dexateens started coming through the speakers and I figured I’d missed my chance, since they were so loud and so loved for being hometown boys. The bartenders might play every last song they had recorded, full blast.

So I ordered another half-shot Jack and took it in the corner, behind the faded and frayed pool table. Nobody was playing pool so I didn’t get in the way sitting back there and drinking my cold beer. I watched people come in and leave, and I watched the girlwith the bloody knees return to her spot, alone, on the red vinyl barstool. The smoke got thicker – that was one hazard of being in a place like Egan’s – and people I knew kept coming in and offering to buy me more beer and more half-shot Jacks, and I don’t cull much in the way of alcohol.

So I drank until the smoke didn’t bother me much, and I drank until the girl with the bloody knees looked like an angel on the barstool. Her auburn hair spilled down her head, right down to her back, which was splashed with so many freckles. I thought about talking to her, and how I could lean in real close to her, and she wouldn’t think it was weird since the music was so loud. Maybe I could even put my hand where her shoulder curved into her neck while I asked her where she was from, what she did, what she wanted being in a place like this on a Tuesday night.

She needed somebody to do that. Nobody except the bartender had spoken a word to her as long as I’d been there. She needed somebody to tell her why she was so special, why she wasn’t just another party girl with bloody knees. That’s why girls like her come to places like this in the first place, to be told things like I wanted to tell her.

I couldn’t resist doing it, never.

One time, I told a 36-year-old woman, one who had two kids with two different men, that she wasn’t just a momma who needed to be home with her babies instead of out drinking at some downtown bar with a bunch of college kids. I told her she could move on the dance floor better than girls ten, fifteen years younger than she was. Told her that her hips felt like holding heaven, and later that night I let her ride me until she came and fell over exhausted from it all.

Another time, I told this underage freshman that she fucked like a grown woman and that I loved her, because that’s what she wanted to hear and it allowed me to keep fucking her for a couple months longer than I should have. She was into prescription painkillers, and I bought her and her friends beer. She said she’d never been happier and called me her older boyfriend. Said she told her friends all about the way we fucked like animals. Even though we don’t talk now I think that had to count for something, right?

Not long back, I told this one girl, she was a graduate student who studied some thing or another I don’t remember, that the black eye she got from running her bicycle off the curb while she was riding it home drunk made her even prettier than she already was, made her beautiful even. She stopped trying to cover it with makeup after that. When she smiled, the swelling around her eye made it look like she was winking or had an eyelash. There weren’t any tears though. She had a mole underneath her arm, too, one about the size of a dime. Maybe it was just a birthmark. I never mentioned that it bothered me, and the longer I didn’t mention it, the more often she threw back her arms against the headboard while we fucked on her hand-me-down mattress in that apartment down by the Black Warrior River.

I did it for me as much as them, telling them those things they needed to hear and wanted to hear on lonely nights. I won’t lie about it. Telling them was like a drug. In some ways, I might would’ve been better off with the real thing. It finally destroyed them and me, in part, or at least anything we had together, but I couldn’t help from going back to it, again and again.

That’s where I was on a Tuesday night drinking Buds and half-shot Jacks in Egan’s Bar while the girl with the bloody knees sat just across the room.

So I walked up to the barstool angel and asked, “What happened to those pretty little knees?”

She’d been wanting somebody to notice, and she took my concern – it was genuine, honestly – to mean this: Let me take you home and pour some peroxide on those bloody knees and dab at them with some gauze, and baby, let me rub Neosporin on those wounds and bandage them, and I swear it’ll all be alright in the morning.

I’ll tell you that.

She didn’t have anybody to tell her that or do it for her besides me. Or else, she wouldn’t be at Egan’s. I knew it by the way she smiled without showing her tongue, and by the way she pushed loose curls behind her ear while she did it. I can tell those things, and she was glad. She was glad that I could tell because that was all she’d been wanting and needing the whole night and longer even than that.

I had myself convinced. Her too.

She turned toward me on the barstool. I put my hands on her bruised thighs. I didn’t squeeze or move my hands toward the hem of her dress, just let them rest there on her papery legs.

We stayed there with the drunks moving around us, the music washing over us, for a while. I don’t know how long it was exactly. Finally, she put her hands on my hands, which were still resting on her bruised thighs, and she asked me to come home with her. I said, yes, and didn’t mention the dirt or dried blood I saw underneath her chewed fingernails. We left together, my tab unpaid and debit card behind the bar, because I had gas in my car and wouldn’t wake up until the bar opened again anyway.

We stumbled back to her place. She lived just a couple blocks away on the second floor of one of those plain apartment buildings where most college students live. I’d lived at the same kind of place once. Rent is high there, but the location’s great. That’s how they get you. Might as well say, “Within walking distance to the bars, and all the things you think you need but really don’t!”

We’re barely inside the door, and we’re stumbling past the small kitchen with the dead cockroach on the linoleum floor. Half-drunk bottle of vodka in the freezer. She keeps yanking at my belt with one hand and shoving the other hand down my pants, trying to get a grip on me. The flat-screen TV is turned off. We bump into a picture frame in the hallway. It doesn’t fall. She grabs the doorframe in the bathroom, bites my bottom lip as she pulls away, and she pushes me toward her bedroom before she shuts the bathroom door, and I’m alone in this place.

I know she’ll come out of the bathroom wearing only a pair of panties, still with those bloody knees. Probably a black pair, and I hope not thongs. She’ll come to where I lay on top of her goose feather bedspread. She’ll climb up on me, and she’ll take me inside her without much work. I’ll grab her waist and turn her over before we really get going, get on top of her so her knees won’t bleed on the sheets and ruin them. Then she’ll press on the small of my back, taking me as deep as I can get. She might cry out. I’ll tell her that she’s not just a girl with bloody knees. I’ll tear loose the neon wristbands and rinse off the stamps she’s collected from so many bars and so many nights like this one. I’ll clean her wounds, the ones on her knees and the others, and I’ll kiss them before I dress them clean as I know how.