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I didn’t feel anything about myself.

It was everything to be filled with such nothing.

I first met Devin at the orientation meeting for new graduate students at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was my second year, his first.

I looked around at all the earnest grad student folks at orientation and felt kind of like I had a big red “A” on my chest due to my checkered academic past. Flunked out of undergraduate school in Lubbock. Quit undergraduate school in Eugene. Went back with a pile of D’s and F’s and clawed my way up to the pretty people.

Then I saw a guy who looked equally out of place and very uncomfortable with astonishingly beautiful long black hair and eyelashes. I watched him. He kept looking at the door. And fidgeting like he didn’t fit in the seat. I didn’t hear an orientation thing. After the orientation I sort of sauntered up next to him and without looking at me he said, “I feel like I might get arrested here,” and I replied without looking at him, “Do you think they can tell I’m not wearing underwear,” and we went straight from the orientation meeting to a bar and didn’t stop drinking for 11 years, so you might say I was perfectly primed to cross his path.

This man was gorgeous. I’m mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.

Honestly I remember feeling shocked every time he walked up to my Toyota pickup truck and got in. I always expected him to veer off at the last moment, get into someone else’s vehicle. Or bed. Or house. Or life.

Our love, was liquid. Turned out we both loved drinking more than almost anything else. The anything else turned out to be fucking. Drinking in bathrooms and kitchens and alleys and hallways and bars and cars. Drinking all the way to the coast and all night at a bar and in the morning with eggs and oyster shooters in some crappy run-down motel and all the way back to Eugene. Drinking before, during, and after classes. Drinking in beds and in baths and at the rivers and in the rose garden and in the graveyard next to U of O and on top of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall.

We drank Guinness.

We drank cheap turn your teeth purple wine.

We drank Chivas, because he had a thing about Jim Morrison.

We drank vodka, because of… well, me.

We drank everything his favorite poet drank - Bukowski - and like Bukowski’s women, I matched him drink for drink.

We drank each other blind.

Drinking our minds gone. Drinking our lives away.

In between drinking he said I want to be a painter. I said I want to be a writer. So we drank to that. And painted. And wrote. And celebrated every hour with booze. Dancing with lesbians. Tripping with hippies. Mushrooming with artists. Slitting the tires of Republicans. We drank with bums under overpasses and on the tracks. We drank with friends and enemies and ex-cons and tat artists and once a priest and bikers and once with a famous actress and with his drunk father and my drunk mother and all the people we’d never met. We dreamed in drink.

While we were underwater stories began itching at my fingertips.

While we were drinking he painted paintings of wild faces - abstract faces so you could never say who they were or why.

While we were drinking the chaos of art came out of us. There was nothing we could do to control anything about us.

Always we were making. Making love, making trouble, making art. We made performance art together. He made paintings and I made stories. He made dinner and I made money. It seemed like all that making had a power bigger than