Pulling Off Crazy-Love

"Hey, ya'll just sit down on the couch over there."
She was racing around the apartment wearing a tight red shirt dress. It was extremely short. Her hair was bleached. She had no make-up on. She waved us over to the lumpy brown sofa sectional.
"Nice apartment," Mordred said. It was one of those things he said that I knew he didn't mean. He might claim he meant it, but deep down he was making some backwards joke about how crappy the place was.
"Thanks, man, thanks." TJ sauntered toward us. He was wearing an oversized shirt with a felt jacket and baggy jeans. The K-Swiss shoes underneath reminded me of 7th grade. All the "bad" kids wore K-Swiss shoes back then. But that was ten years ago.
"Yeah, things done changed since we had the baby and all."
"--Oh my god, TJ, I can't find my shoes!" Crystal looked mortified, before turning to us and saying, "I'm sorry, y'all, things are such a mess over here."
"It's okay--"
"--yeah, we're fine!" Mordred and I said. The couch felt like it was about to eat us both.

Mordred had only come to TJ's apartment so he could give TJ a Consumer Guide to Car Buying he'd picked up at the Krogers. I had never met TJ or his girlfriend Crystal, but I knew that the real reason we were there probably involved Mordred picking something up for himself, instead. TJ wanted to be a rap artist. His white girlfriend, Crystal, was living with him in a two bedroom apartment outside Murfreesboro that probably rented for 450 a month. It wasn't a fabulous neighborhood. Mordred and I were on our way to dinner, and were dressed up. We called it our anniversary, when it wasn't really the anniversary of anything at all. Our relationship had been strained from day one.

"Me and Crystal been livin out here for like 4 months, right."
TJ sat and leaned back in the recliner adjacent us. We nodded at him.
"Okay, so we been here 4 months, and had the baby one month before that."
"--He's 5 months old!" Crystal shouted from the kitchen. Why she was looking for her shoes in the kitchen was beyond me.
"What's his name?" I asked, looking at the family photo framed awkwardly on the wall. The kid had to have been weeks old when it was taken.
"Justin," TJ said. An odd choice, I thought.
"Here, look." Crystal ran in the room, no shoes still, and thrust a picture in my face. It was post-birth, but not by much. "He hurt like hell," she added. Then, "I really like that shirt, girl."
"Thanks." I looked down at my dress.
"Yeah, its a pretty big mess up in here. We're doin pretty good though. It just sucks I can't get blown with you guys or anything." Crystal left me holding the gorey photo, and
Mordred laughed. "TJ, you know she's tired of takin care of that little guy. You need to take her out, man!"
"Nah, man, we don't get out that much anymore. Gotta do tha family thing, ya know." He leaned back and held the Car Buying Guide in front of him. "See, that's what I want right there! A Buick Park Avenue."
I stifled a laugh, and put the birth pic on the coffee table. Face down. "My dad used to have a Buick Park Avenue," I said. "We called it Ole Stinky. It drove like a tank."
TJ wasn't listening. "Put those big rims on it. Killer sound system. Thats tight right there. Thats tight!" He was still staring at the paper. "Man, thanks for bringin this over. I'm gonna call this guy tomorrow."
"Yeah, no problem."
Crystal, red flats now firmly on her feet, came and slumped down on the couch next to me like she was my best friend.
"Have you guys been together long? TJ said you guys were having an anniversary."
"Well..." I looked to Mordred, who was walking toward the bedrooms with TJ. He was seriously going to leave me alone with this girl I didn't know? "Mordred and I don't really have an anniversary date. We just sort of eased into our relationship over time, so we're calling this our anniversary dinner, but its really just a nice dinner out."
"I wish TJ would take me out like that," Crystal said. Her bleach blonde hair was a little stringy. "We're so broke with Justin and all, we can't do shit." She picked the picture up off the coffee table and walked it over to a big book with plastic looking pages next to the tv. She picked it up and carted it back to me on the couch. "This is our family photo album," she said, smiling. "I made it myself."
She pushed it over to me so it was sitting across both our laps, and started pointing things out.
"You look so much younger in all these pictures."
"Yeah, like a year ago, though. Can you believe me and TJ were only together like a month and a half before I found out I was pregnant?"
I looked at her, but didn't say anything. Her eyes were glued to the pages, and things were flickering across her face. She flipped a page.
"See that? Thats me and TJ like two weeks before Justin was born."
They had on goofy faces, and were standing in the snow outside the very apartment Mordred and I had stepped into. TJ had a big puffy downfilled jacket on, with his hands in his pockets. Crystal stood in front, pressing into him and the coat. It covered the both of them, except that her stomach stuck out the front. They were laughing with these big genuine smiles, their mouths wide open, grinning. Crystal's hair was a lot darker in the picture. She had braces on.
"You had braces then?" I asked.
"Yeah. Thats like the last thing my mom ever paid for." Crystal laughed this short, humorless laugh.
"You guys look really happy," I said.
"We were. We are." She flipped the page again. "Isn't he just precious?"
A wrinkly baby stared up at me from an enlarged black and white picture. Its eyes were closed like it was concentrating, and it looked pretty uncomfortable.
"He'd, like, just come out right there. They wrapped him up and gave him to me like that. He's so freakin cute." She stroked the picture with her finger before looking up at me. "Don't you just want one? I mean, I didn't, I thought. But here I am. He's our life. You and Mordred would have pretty kids I think."
I laughed, starting to feel uneasy. "Tell that to Mordred."

Crystal continued on, with an odd light in her eyes. Her clingy red shirt came up to high and she was sitting so close to me that her bare leg touched my knee. She kept smoothing the hair behind her ear with one hand, and pointing to pictures with the other with she talked. And I started to feel something strange. This girl seemed so sweet and sad. She had to have been only 20 years old. Still, I felt like she and TJ, despite pretty much being textbook stoners who occasionally got drunk and probably fought a lot out of immaturity, were on another level that I couldn't touch. I felt like they shared something huge. I felt like their relationship was probably all wrong, but all right at the same time. They had a baby. They lived together. They loved each other.
Mordred and I were going to the freakin Macaroni Grill and would probably come home to lay on his disgusting couch and listen to each other gripe about the lives we wished we were living. We'd lay there knowing full well that one day we wouldn't be together any more. One day we'd be somewhere else with someone else doing something completely different.
And thats what it was, for us, really. We were just waiting around for that somewhere, that someone, that something. We weren't doing anything at all. We were wasting our own precious time.
Crystal and TJ, I thought, may not have been doing the right things, but they were in the middle of a somewhere, with a someone, working their asses off for a something that was bigger than they'd ever thought it would be. I admired that about them. Even if TJ was in the back selling things to Mordred, I still admired them for that.

"Okay, lets bounce." Mordred appeared from the hallway. "We've got dinner plans, you know." He grabbed my hand, grinning like a school kid (he might have gotten high, but who knew) and dragged me up from the couch. Crystal had to grab the photo album fast to keep it from slipping off my lap.
"Well, it was really nice to meet y'all." She stood up and almost looked like she wanted to hug me, but she reached down and tugged on the hem of her shirtdress.
"It was nice to meet you, too." I smiled at her. She seemed sweet. Even if she didn't look like the classiest person ever, she was really friendly.
TJ and Mordred exchanged faux-thug handshakes and we crept our way to the door.
"Come back some time, and maybe we can have dinner together! Double date!" Crystal was calling out the door.
"Bye!" We called to them.

We never had dinner or double dated. In fact, I never thought even thought about Crystal and TJ afterward until just a few days ago. There was a bi-racial couple in the grocery store the other day, and they seemed so happy and innocent. Their curly headed little girl sat in the grocery cart screaming her lungs out, and the couple was still laughing about something they'd said. It made me wonder where TJ and Crystal are now. Justin would be three years old. I want to pretend they're okay and they're happy and safe like the couple in the grocery store. I want to believe that they are still in love, that they work long hours and pay for daycare, but they still go out to eat with the kid occasionally. I want to believe Crystal still talks to her mom. I want to believe they go to Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families. That the photo album has gotten bigger.

I want to know its possible to pull off crazy-love, no matter what the cost.