Bruce Vermont

By Asaf Rubina

After dominating the Miami fashion scene, Bruce and Sasha get the opportunity of a lifetime when an agent from New York catches whiff of their accomplishments as a modeling power couple. For a while, things sound too good to be true, but the couple suddenly finds themselves working apart for the first time in their careers.

As communication between the two starts to dwindle, Bruce finds himself in a compromising position as he tries to adjust to his life alone.

Hoping to make the most of each moment in his new home, Bruce makes every effort to hold on to the basic principles of life just to carry on. As Bruce continues to occupy himself in Sashas absence, things unexpectedly start to fall apart.

As he transitions and reaches out to friends from his former life, Bruce realizes there is no going back. Will Bruce and Sasha manage to adjust? Or will they destroy themselves just as quickly as they destroy each other?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490771663

Asaf Rubina

Asaf Rubina is the author of three other books and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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© Copyright 2016 ASAF RUBINA.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Print information available on the last page.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7165-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7167-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7166-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904804

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Contents

MIAMI

Let’s not let our best days stay behind us

Me and my undershirt are having a civil war

I’m taller than you, you’re shorter than me, let’s fuck

JOHANNESBURG

I dance like a gimp, so sue me

This is enough, I’m over it

You’ll have had better stories

PARIS

Sometimes it’s best to leave the past where it is

All sandwiches served with fries

The night I was perfectly under the umbrella

NEW YORK

Throw Me A Fuck By Monday

I Hate The Earth

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

TALES OF MOVIE THEATRE POOL AND THE SUMMER KITCHEN

SUNSHINE STATE

THE GIRLS

I KNOW IT HURTS, BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO WALK AWAY

TO THE OCEAN’S ELEVEN CREW:

DAY, MULVEY, APFEL, YANIV, NADDAV, TYLER, HARBISON,

SALOME, & ON LIFE

FOR MAKING THIS WORLD FEEL A LITTLE MORE CONNECTED

BRUCE VERMONT

#### I don’t really remember how it all started, all’s I know is that it did. I started to think about really crazy stuff when she was talking to me and I couldn’t really look her in the face. I thought it may have been the weekend out at Johnny’s, maybe some crazy shit I smoked, but no, it was definitely crazy me.

I started going into the city every Monday after those brutal weekends and I wouldn’t snap out of the delinquency. I couldn’t get my mind right. I could barely get my heart to stop from thumping in my chest. There was so much going on between work, the move, her, and me, of course, not really having any money.

She was supposed to go off on some campaign after we moved but none of it ever happened. Like, we just totally sat around each other and got more and more miserable as the week went on.

Monday had total hopes. It was a brand new week. Everything gets done on a Monday. By Tuesday, you should already be working on something. By Wednesday, if you’re not totally in the middle of it, you’re pretty much out of it, and by Thursday & Friday you need to be wrapping up and getting ready to celebrate.

Not us. By Friday we wanted to kill each other. She hated life up north. She missed the beach, she missed the sand, and most of all she missed the attention. Everything was small town back home. Miami never felt like the metropolis Midtown bloomed and I know she was eaten up by the glamour. I always figured she could’ve left. She could’ve met anyone. But she stayed with me, sinking deeper and deeper into the void.

We spun into oblivion, into the darkness, into the misery and turmoil a relationship should never bring lovers to but so consistently does. We hung out in there for quite a while. We chilled, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

I don’t remember who said what first or what brought her to go there, but I remember the day I lost it. I was gone. It was no longer me. I was leaving notes behind, whispering to myself. One day I woke up and I couldn’t see for three days.

There would be moments when I would suddenly be back there. Right there in the living room, helping her unpack. But those weren’t often consistent with the truth and I don’t remember how many of those things actually happened and how many weren’t real. Everything had gone so horribly wrong.

It was a terrible mistake to have ever left home.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

MIAMI

LET’S NOT LET OUR BEST DAYS STAY BEHIND US

ME AND MY UNDERSHIRT ARE HAVING A CIVIL WAR

I’M TALLER THAN YOU, YOU’RE SHORTER THAN ME, LET’S FUCK

JOHANNESBURG

I DANCE LIKE A GIMP, SO SUE ME

THIS IS ENOUGH, I’M OVER IT

YOU’LL HAVE HAD BETTER STORIES

PARIS

SOMETIMES IT’S BEST TO LEAVE THE PAST WHERE IT IS

ALL SANDWICHES SERVED WITH FRIES

THE NIGHT I WAS PERFECTLY UNDER THE UMBRELLA

NEW YORK

THROW ME A FUCK BY MONDAY

I HATE THE EARTH

MIAMI

LET’S NOT LET OUR BEST DAYS STAY BEHIND US

ONE – I had a good spot by the door and I dropped my bag between my feet. I was blocking the entry rather convincingly, but it was all about me at this point. I was enjoying the quiet ride back and being alone hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

She was a stupid bitch from the start, and this of course, I already knew. But then I read Chuck Bukowski’s Women on the plane, and that certainly didn’t help any. All this pitiful self-loathing and depressing dwelling really just fed my current state and I can honestly say that it was just a pathetic read altogether. Antagonizing this and that and every little thing about everyone, and you could tell that it was just written by a miserable person about miserable people and there was no salvaging any relationship the voice was scrutinizing.

Everyone was always drunk, which that and of itself, was fine. But it was hardly the good kind where everyone gets laid and pukes their brains out. It was more often the shitty one where everyone is arguing and yelling about how they really feel to each other and I just didn’t want to relate. But I kept reading.

Everything about it just seemed so sincere and it was very challenging to turn away.

I just landed in JFK and was catching the hundred stops from Sutphin to the loft we were renting back in Williamsburg. Compared to the beach life, it was such a mess to be here. I decided to skip the line for cabs and slowly ease my way back into the city. That shit looked like a chaotic zoo riot, arms dangling in the air.

I was having doubts about the adjustment from the flat back home to this new cramped surrounding. I felt as if this part of Brooklyn was something I would struggle to get used to. We lived right upstairs from the liquor store. Three hip dives to jump into underneath and two new things opening up next door. The food so proper at every turn and I could barely shit right.

Everyone was so young here. There were hardly families or business folk. It seemed like everyone around me was just screwing around. There wasn’t this disconnect of thirty somethings who still tried to capture their teens like you saw in Miami. Here people were proud of who they were at the moment.

Down south everyone was always so caked and covered. Nothing was authentic. Nothing was genuine. Everything from the toes to the hair clips were just a figment of someone’s imagination and a daddy’s trust fund dispersed and allocated horribly wrong. Everyone we were close to got caught up in the junk that was turning into an epidemic at the beaches or seemed to have tanned themselves retarded.

When Sasha and I got our deals, we surprisingly got them together, and moving to the city was really a no brainer. It was where we wanted to be all along. The industry was shifting right beneath our feet and we knew we had to shimmy accordingly. Besides, it was easy to see that we were next in line to get caught up in the poobutt if we didn’t get out of the queue.

I look down and notice my overnight bag has a tear by the handle and get a tad red, but reflect back on my travels through the Andes, and I figure it’s the least of my worries.

I was going home alone. She was already off to the gallery tour in South Africa capitalizing on the World Cup for six weeks. Here I was just stuck by myself heading back to the loft. Although I am just one stop from lower east side, it’s still disappointing to go back alone when Sasha is already out there surfing her opportunities. Can we at least get our foot in the door of the new place?

This was to be the first time we were to be apart for more than a couple days in the past three years and the first time she was working alone since I could even remember. I thought I would give it a shot and this opportunity would give me a little time off and allow me to take advantage of my circumstantial city life. I was hoping I’d develop a respectable portfolio of friends on my own.

I got rid of jealous tendencies early in our relationship and felt confident in her professional ambitions and our separation. Besides, I had a few projects that Sebastíön lined up and I was looking forward to embracing my character and presence in this new, unexplored terrain. Although they were small jobs and certainly wouldn’t be too strenuous on my workout routine, I still felt like I was coming home to something. Perhaps he was just trying to keep me distracted from his attempts at Sasha.

Why he didn’t book me with her in the first place was completely beyond me. Why he didn’t brief us on the project together was also something worth speculating about. At this point none of that really mattered yet. I don’t think we got a good overview of what the project was for anyways, but it certainly didn’t seem too outlandish.

We had our whole lives ahead of us. To start calculating risks to such a high extent would have been foolish. In her absence I knew I would feel competitive, so I would need to stay productive so I’d have something to show her when she returned.

Sasha never met Sebastíön. After that night at the party everything was done by phone and she would relay the details to me. I was worried that we never actually all sat down to talk about the details in person. As a trio. Everything was always in email after that first night, which I always found to be really weird.

I finally make it to Broadway and walk back to the pad. The sun was coming down over the buildings and the sky was that shade of nostalgic purple. I felt as if I was reflecting on three lifetimes and for some reason, I felt so sad.

Hours go by the bottle of red, and I decide to walk downstairs and head outside to light a cigarette. Still no calls or messages from Sasha. That’s cool. Must be the time difference. How many hours ahead was it in Africa? What year was it there?

Everything was moving so fast in our lives, and at twenty-two I really couldn’t ask for more. We both ditched our attempts at the uni and got agents from a career fair that came to the stadium the fall of our sophomore year. From there everything really spiraled out of control. It all took off after that and it was really only the summer after when we got our proper offers in New York that the agency really took their perception of us to a whole new level.

The big city was where everything was supposed to go off. That was where we’d get our big break. While on site behind the scenes in Miami glamour shows, we’d hear about other models who were scooped by agencies. They’d talk about their contracts and how they hit it big and were able to get out of their parent’s basement and into the billboards of Times Square.

Sasha and I had it much better as we had our own apartment and gained our independence long ago. But we wanted money. We wanted exposure. We wanted fame. I know I did and Sasha and I could have done it together. New York was going to give us all of it.

This career only had a lasting impression of five, six maybe seven years max and we would have to be ridiculous to not capitalize on the efforts of our youth right away. We certainly didn’t think twice when the dotted line was placed before our eyes.

What I didn’t know was what a love dump this transition would create, in what felt like an overnight storm. Foreign emotions would develop as Sasha and I would be exposed to new opportunities. But at the time, all we knew was New York was where everything was going to happen and we would do everything it took to get there.

Sasha got the opportunity in Africa with the World Wildlife Fund that she simply just couldn’t turn down just six months before our move. With the rent scene being so demanding and our savings only stretching so far, we struggled when we noticed the agency taking about a third of what we were making from the Guess, Diesel, Lacoste, and Sasha’s Gucci campaign. We saw the WWF project as a means to potentially seal our efforts and pay off the entire flat and start fresh in the big city.

Africa wasn’t my first choice. For starters, it was ridiculously far. It was a fifteen-hour flight with no stops from JFK to Tambo. The constant theme that we’re still young and could still afford oops moments enabled our acceptance for the whole thing to sustain. It was also a great excuse for Sasha to head down there for what we thought was a good cause. I would never approach the trip for business, or even leisure for that matter. But when all the final details were arranged and as I thought I would be a part of it, I really ended up getting the boot and being left behind.

I walk around the apartment cracking doors open, and there’s a dry scent in the air. A combination of wood and heavy-duty cement batter being stirred and ready to be poured. There was no central air in the loft and the funds from the campaign were certainly going to fix that right up, chip chop.

I move my bag from the living room floor and walk up to the room before undressing, then putting on my Hotel Monteleone robe my good mate from Israel picked up for me the last time we were in the French Quarter.

I go to the sound system and blast Little Dragon’s latest, a band that I always found so deep and compassionate on record, yet so weak and fragile live. Some things didn’t translate well into the physical, I know.

I ooze into the shower as the hot water begins to steam the room and am surprisingly at ease to be back in what I now call home. A few moments after, I am found sitting on the couch staring at the copy of Ralph Going’s Airstream we purchased in MUMOK on our trip to Vienna several winters ago. How the serenity of the realism pushed me to ease. I hope Sasha had a safe flight and I can’t wait to hear what she thinks of the loft.

Staring at the copy, I begin to feel my doubt. I know what time can do to people and hope that this separation doesn’t create a strain on our relationship. But there was no thinking about any of that now. I had the whole season ahead of me, and I was still young. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

I heard summers in the city were a complete social disaster and it was something I was going to embrace as a challenge and overcome.

I grab another bottle of the complimentary red that got shipped on my return and climb to the rooftop again after getting dressed. The sky is now shaded pink and tinted black and it looks like Sasha’s duvet that she never packed with the down blanket that nearly clotheslined 300 geese, is draped over the deep blue.

I’m up about ten floors or so, eleven with the rooftop and can see the skyline blinking randomly throughout. I hear a tugboat tug its horn, trains rattle to the left, cabs honk flights below. I hear a gun shot in the distance, the roar of sirens and movement following, gushing by in a massive fury.

I feel so fortunate to be here. Strong, youthful and alive, and find it completely absurd that there’s no demand for my presence anywhere and no deep interrogation of my well being upon my return. Sebastíön hasn’t dialed in yet and Sasha hasn’t called and for some reason, I begin to sob.

TWO—Everything was going so well for us. We found such a glorious offer at such a young age that the opportunity was certainly worth capitalizing. We had a decent apartment back in Key Biscayne, and sure Sasha’s parents owned the place, but it wasn’t too much of a pain having to answer them.

There were long weekends that seemed to last for months on end. When you’re not focusing on rent, utilities, insurance, car note or any other petty every day mindfuck, you’re able to concentrate on your professional and creative profile to such a higher extent that it’s no wonder we got the deal as quickly as we did.

Those that tend to succeed usually sacrifice the skin on their back to get there. For us, there was nothing really there to sacrifice. Everything was consistently accommodated.

Think about the writer who sits in an office everyday because his projects haven’t been picked up by agents. He has to find some way to make the rent and put food on the table since his passion isn’t glorifying his current lifestyle with a pension, or even a moderate income for that matter. It impacts his art, and even his connection with it. A slight resentment may even be established.

Since our rent check was in the back pocket each month, all we did