jeff buckley’s girlfriend

I met Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend in New York that summer. She said she had been Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend. And I believed her. And even if she hadn’t been, she had. You know, the racked intensity of that summer where every oily brown river appalled. There was still that tortured American soul with all the raw nerves exposed, the fictions torn right back and the red flesh betrayed. A dentist drilling or yanking a tooth. The patient gagging and crying some. Knee on the chest. Jesus. 

So there she sat at the bar because it was New York and everyone knew Jeff Buckley — everyone at the bar. Not Diane Keaton waiting for Mr Goodbar. Not a cliché. Not that. Not even Lauren Bacall mouthing foul shit at Dustin Hoffman through the plate glass. Just a real and intense fiction. 

She had the immediate credentials because she was the only one alone in that crowded place. She carried the oxymoron with intense and honest pain. So farouche, her cigarette remained unlit between the lips. Her elbows hung on the counter. Her shoulders hung. And the pain of being Jeff Buckley’s one time girlfriend hung down to her slim feet nailed to the stool rung below. Naked. Just the nub of her ankle and the glow of her hidden skin ‘neath the New York heat in a cheap bar.

And to be beautiful and alone with it. Like beauty caressed her only. So that even every glass of water appalled. So that life was hydrophobic to the point that the tight sinews in her wrist ached for some sharp point to be made. Something incisive. Even taught wit that might make her smile for once. Like he used to. The moon a plate in the night sky. Cracks in the pavement. All that was so real.