An excerpt from The Summer I Was a Girl

Me and Kubrick, Kubrick and Me

I love going to the movies alone. I think attending the opening night of a huge new movie by yourself is one of the great overlooked simple pleasures in life. Reason? I feel like I'm doing something special. I feel like I'm doing something rare. I feel mysterious and daring and interesting being the only unattached person in a theatre full of couples and groups. Everyone wonders who you are and why you're there by yourself. I get to sit wherever I want. I don't have to watch a chair while someone else runs to the bathroom. I don't have to talk to anyone. My thoughts and my attention towards the movie are completely my own space.

I saw "Eyes Wide Shut" Saturday night by myself. (I saw "Blair Witch Project" with Leah Friday night, but that's another entry.) Got really high in the theatre's bathroom and almost got caught. It was really intense seeing that film by myself while incredibly high. I felt like one of the characters by the time I left. I felt like grabbing a random stranger off the sidewalk and fucking them in a back alley. I felt like being completely naked except for a mask and having sex in front of a roomful of strangers.

So of course what do I do in this frame of mind but go to a party. Greg takes me after the movie to *Jamie's, a South American friend of his who's having a birthday. The place is full of people, all good-looking with nice clothes, none of whom I know. Of course. And apparently like ten people brought pot Ôcause nobody thought there was going to be alcohol.

So I decide to indulge my fantasy. I get so high I'm floating a couple of inches off the ground, and I act like a character from "Eyes Wide Shut," aloof and intense and sexy and aggressive. Ooh, I was just looking for trouble Saturday night. I flit between conversations and listen to everyone with a half-smile cocked on my face, like I have something interesting to say but am just waiting for the right moment. Now granted, I was probably just looking like a stoned dork, but I felt all tough and cool and fuckin' sexy, so that's all that matters.

I'm in the living room and some woman at the next conversation keeps giving me the eye, so when she walks out on the back porch I follow her. She sits down on the tiny steps between floors and I squeeze in next to her, our bodies completely touching on one side. I hand her my pipe.

"Pot," I say.

She nods her head and takes it. She is *Megan. She is a computer engineer, does all that complicated Unix work for big companies. She is aloof and intense and sexy and flirty, tall and pale and beautiful and a math major. I officially decide to have a Kubrick moment tonight.

We are flirting and smoking, smoking and flirting, when a guy comes out. He and she get into a fight over the lack of beer at the party, and she demands that he go out and buy some more, and get her another pack of cigarettes while he's at it. After he leaves I ask who he was. "My boyfriend," she says, sighing as she exhales. "He doesn't like parties. He's an artist." She sneers. Boyfriend, huh? Artist, huh? I'll show her, by God.

Megan and I get into a smoking contest. She keeps taking tokes and I keep taking tokes. We give each other a look each time we pass the pipe, like "Have you had enough yet?" But she keeps taking that fuckin' pipe and I swear to God I'm not going to quit smoking before she does. Four hits apiece. Eight hits apiece. Twelve. Sixteen. Twenty. The bowl keeps emptying out and I keep filling it back up. People have swarmed around us. They keep handing us pot. Megan and I are a two-person whirlpool. We are smushed up against each other on the stairway, occasionally squeezing each other's knee when we're making a point. We get so high we decide to start getting two hits off the pipe for every match lit. We put our faces three or four inches away from each other. Each time she's hitting I stare at her face intensely, and the moment she's inhaled she sticks the still-smoking pipe into my mouth so I can catch a hit, pushing the pipe past my lips and holding the end while I inhale. Megan exhales her smoke at me and I suck it in from two inches away, getting a second contact.

The higher we get the more she talks about her boyfriend (who, by the way, has completely disappeared). "My boyfriend blah. My boyfriend bleh." Finally about the twentieth time I simply reach in the two inches to her face and kiss her, forcing my tongue into her mouth. She starts aggressively kissing me back when I pull away. Through half-closed eyelids I slur to her, "I don't want...you to say...'my boyfriend'...any more tonight." She looks at me, her lips open and still wet with my saliva, a look of pure lust on her face, and says "Okay." Margaret the Kubrick character strikes again!

"You know what you should do?" Megan says. "You should come over to my house Tuesday night. Do you play chess?"

"Yes."

"Come over and we'll play chess and drink beer and get really high again."

Uh-oh. The spirit of Kubrick is suddenly leaving me. "Really?" I say.

"Don't you want to?"

"Yeah..." I'm figuring I can get Megan up to the roof of the building tonight and go down on her or at least make out. I'm not figuring on this. I want to yell, "This persona only lasts for one night, you know. On Tuesday my carriage turns back into a pumpkin and I become the neurotic dork that I usually am." Instead I say, "Okay." And just like a movie, Greg pops in at that exact moment and says, "You ready to go?"

I'm holding Megan's card as I write this. It's a sort of pea green color and very smart-looking. Her address is scribbled across it in sprawling stoned handwriting. Tuesday. Tuesday, Tuesday.

The problem with living real life as a movie character is that the movie never actually ends.

Notes from readers:

damn, what I would not give to have a smoking contest like you had... just once... heh... [siliman]

oh margi I tell ya what????....just watch another movie maybe...something really spicy...and then go get her.. ;) [isobel divine]

Margaret, what you have just described sounds heavenly . . . I must try doing that some time . . . maybe I'll even try it at the next party I attend . . . cool stuff [bastasia ]

For some reason I am wondering if Megan's *ahem* boyfriend is secretly gay. Please forgive my stupid, broken brain. [Moondust ]

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