Amée (aka: "Diamondmind")

When I finally met Amée, she was out of her mind and I was in my element. I say "finally" because Amée and I had been in touch about this whole Match thing of mine, my crazy project, almost since I had first made contact with her. Almost immediately, she felt like a sister to me, so anything was game: high, low; vulgar & literary; it didn't matter.

Tattooed up and down her arms, pale thin and elegant, she was pouring wine into little plastic glasses with her Elvis Costello-y boyfriend-slash-fiancé for her art opening in New Haven. Maddest of all was that this guy quickly related to me that he'd been diagnosed with an alcohol abuse disorder about two weeks prior and here he was pouring the grape. I could see this trainwreck coming and kept the binoculars in my pocket.

Now, Yale and I have a special connection. My first girlfriend, the one I slept with, went there as an undergrad. She'd ditched me at the beginning of September, like a puppy suburbanites leave on the side of the highway after they're done with summer, and went back to her previous thespian Greek scholar boyfriend she'd broken up with. I've never really felt the pain of that to tell you the truth, though I'm still trying. As it turns out, the girl I married in secret and told nobody about, a Brown/Stanford PhD, now works in special collections at Yale.

And, too, my most recently divorced wife got her Master's in Architecture there. In my initial email to Amée, I told her all this, quite succinctly, in a wry little spot of verse, and she commented on my rather poor track record with Yale girls. I countered: Was she kidding me? My record, I said, was perfect.

At her MFA opening, all night long Amée basically kept saying over and over, "I am so fucking tweaked," and basically vulgarizing everybody she came in contact with. When, however, there was this medical school chick I was hitting on, Amée cleaned up her act lickety-splickety just like a girl who can get all the pot smoke out of her bedroom right before Mom is knocking and turning the doorknob, and make it look like she's been studying stuff like mitochondria and ATP for some AP Bio exam she's taking tomorrow. Amée wanted to help me. I loved her. Amée  was all class and presentation, as glamorous and naturally so as they come.

Picture me in the art building on Chapel Street with a camera shouting at some girl, another painter, a classmate of Amée's, in front of her gigantic pink picture, shouting at her among tons of people just to get one good shot. I like doing shit like that. Nobody likes being shouted at, and people like even less if in a picture what will be captured is the look of them being shouted at. I know this. The results of these bizarre tactics are stupendous.

And the beauty is that I don't even belong there. Only through the pass-key of Amée, wild out of her mind with garbage and thinking and shit that I could go on about for a coupla nights easily nonstop with her, was I legit there. That was all it took. One artist, one guest. All it ever does.

Her boyfriend, well, he confessed that he had some rage issues. Now that Amée had finished her degree, he was going to do his in writing at Columbia. They were going to get married; it seemed to work, and they'd get housing, an issue since because now that Amée's stint in the big leagues was complete, where was there to go except back to Florida or being a barista? Marriage and housing was the answer. Jack, her beau, with whom I also hung, said to me, "I have a very strong voice." And, I wanted to say to this lad, "Can you write your own will, too?" Unless he was hiding in his underpants some insane package I couldn't see, Amée was going eat and destroy this little sonovbitch before Whitsunday, was all I could say to myself.

I was never in any way attracted romantically to Amée. She was beautiful, smart as a whip, a fucking raging artist, independent, fearless, and totally cracked me up. You'd give her twenty bucks if she needed it just because she'd asked for it. She smoked & drank, and I do not. Who cares? I don't know, I think in the end, I was looking for someone actually softer and gentler, someone toward whom I felt being soft and gentle to to be with. Amée was a whole bunch of pieces to my rock-apple pie, and even though I never heard from her again after I drove off at around eleven p.m. dead tired back home to New York, I think the world of her. She was a really cool chick.