This is just over 15 pages.
Chapter 1
I grew up in the Nineties. Nothing much more than my family, neighbourhood and pop culture is memorable from the beginning. Of the rest, it gets interesting. One kid in my neighbourhood- he had so much confidence- he led the way. He fell on ice and had a concussion in sixth grade, 1999. Following his concussion, he’d roam the halls in school during class, cursing loudly.
Another thing that happened was the affair between President Clinton and a young intern. Around that time I watched Marilyn Manson on MTV call every one who wanted to get into heaven an asshole. Never mind the Battle of Seattle. I wouldn’t know for a decade.
The boy with the concussion was one of my first friends. One day in 1998 he put on a CD in his room. The singer growled and the guitar was in drop-d so it was all dark. The album cover was a picture of a little girl on a swing and a lurking, hook-handed shadow figure on the sand. The band spelled their name with a backwards R.
Monica Lewinksi, Korn, the Y2K Scare and the lack of puberty: this is how I entered the Millennium. And my parents divorced. My sister and I had to talk to some sort of psychologist: He asked us whom we’d rather live with.
All my friends were about to part ways as the century changed. When some of us originally got together, it seemed like we found each other safely amongst all the tight-knitted fabric of the grade. But somehow even our small knit was hard to fit into after a while. Everyone analysed each other’s shortcomings as opposed to being linked by them as we had so innocently done.
One other thing that happened before we left elementary school was the Columbine Massacre on April 20th 1999. In Colorado a couple of high school students shot up their school. In seventh grade, we had to go to the school social worker during lunch one or two times in small groups to have discussions about bullying and the like.
In year 2000 my folks had me see a psychiatrist because I barely passed seventh grade. He wears all black now, listens to gothic heavy metal and we divorced. The woman was frightening. The questions were overwhelmingly simplistic. “Do you like school?”
“I guess so.”
Apparently she was highly recommended but why was I on drugs? Yes, I paid attention, but I felt like I was on drugs.
“I don’t feel like myself.”
“How so?”
“Usually I daydream.”
“During class?”
“Yes?”
She stared at me.
One day she said to me, “Would you like to stop taking it tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes. Would you like to stop?”
“Okay?” She was messing with my ego. She was good after all, because I realized I had been enjoying the victimhood of the conundrum and being released from it was threatening to my drama. This was clear to me but it was hard to admit. A daydreamy life for me then: as myself. Victory.
The fits that I had weren’t new but they were increasingly destructive, as I once even threw my amplifier at my window. Neither things broke. Every night I stayed up until three or four in the morning making comics, or pinball machines, whatever I could out of cardboard, or playing videogames all while semi-watching TV. These activities were routinely done with the intent of doing homework afterwards. Although I was tired every day, I could never sleep at night. For some time this had something to do with The Exorcist and the subtle addiction my friends and I had to horror films.
It struck me during a moment of silence in my room in eighth grade that life was once vivid but had somehow become stale, like I had crossed some line without noticing. This was a thing I tried to fathom every day as we all seemed to move along a lifeless belt.
My father at last moved out and he would see my sister and I every other Tuesday and Wednesday but it quickly turned into just him and I. He’d typically show up in jeans, a white shirt and a blazer, his hair cut nicely and his cell phone in his pocket.
“I’m so tired,” I said, watching the cars go by on the turnpike through the diner blinds.
“You seem to be always tired.”
“I am.”
“What are you eating?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you eat breakfast?”
“No.”
“What about lunch?”
“Um. Lunch is breakfast. I get a buttered bagel and a Snapple.”
“That’s not good. Do you eat after school?”
“Usually I make like popcorn.”
“And what about dinner.”
“I’ll usually like micro-wave whatever mom leaves in the fridge, like-“
“Stop saying like.”
“What do you mean?”
“You say like for no reason in sentences.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Does your mother leave you vegetables?”
“Uh. Yea,” I shrugged.
“Do you exercise?”
“Not really.”
In high school I’d be part of the support class again. “Just for the first two years and then you can do your own thing.” It was cool with me. You went during lunch every other day to work on homework and study with the nicest staff members in school and you could daydream all you wanted. There were usually about seven of us in there and they were also the nicest students.
“No one is really liberal or conservative,” one guy said to me once at one of the tables while shaking his bottle of iced tea.
“What do you mean?”
“People are conservative about some things and liberal about other things.”
“I don’t know what I’m conservative about,” I said.
He shrugged and the woman asked if he was going to focus on his paper.
But even if high school was going to be just a bigger version of a place that felt oppressively bland, intimidating, alienating and a mirror of how small I was and awkward I could be, it was going to be different. I was going to find the people.
Chapter 2
It seemed like lots of folks really did have “best friends” or a close knit that lasted a long time. Meanwhile, some folks so obviously went from one crowd to another. And it was never from a small group to a larger one, or from the dangerous or troubled groups to the healthy safe groups. It was only the reverse. If someone changed social situations it was always rich to poor, or more neutrally, from being troubled alone to being in a troubled group. Is this accurate? Maybe it depends on how you look at it. Maybe the “normal” group was drama bound, and the “troubled” group was going to change the world.
My first love, the girl that absolutely changed my sense of identity, was Maya Grey. She was in my third period art class freshman year. She talked with her friends over their art projects and I didn’t talk to them for the whole first week. Her hair was black and not straitened. She leaned over her artwork with her face in her hand. She spoke in a calm voice to her friends about things that in my short attention span seemed pretty mature. She was also in my science class where she didn’t talk to anyone. It wasn’t obvious to me that I liked her. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was a subtle yet burning curiosity. Everyone was an alien life form to me except her, who seemed planted on the ground. Until I met her, I thought people were generally normal and I wasn’t, but she made it seem as though only she were normal and I was normal too deep down, and all I had to do was recognize it.
She was there on that day. It was the second week of school on a Tuesday. The principal interrupted our artwork, conversations and daydreams when he apologized for the interruption. “Our country has been attacked.” Country? Our country has been attacked? “The World Trade Center in Manhattan has been hit by two airplanes this morning. One building was hit just before nine and the other just after nine. It is believed to be a terrorist attack. This is a national emergency. If we need to we will update you with any other information. Today’s schedule is likely to be shortened as a result of this event. For now please go to your classes as scheduled until further notice.”
The next period would have been lunch but I just remember walking with Maya Gray and her friends into the crowded hall and the lunch room. A girl I knew was crying and surrounded by friends. Someone told me that her parents worked at the Trade Center and weren’t picking up their phones.
And for fifth period there was science as usual. The teacher put on the radio and we listened mutually. George W. Bush was only in his second year. He said, “We will hunt them down.” That’s all I remember him saying. “We will hunt them down.”
School was cut short and I went to one particular friend’s house for the one and only time. His six-year-old brother said to me at the door, “The plane goes into the building like this. Boom.” My friend apologized. He showed me his drum set and soon I was home on my floor watching the news. Every channel it seemed showed the same image of the towers burning at the top. As the days passed it was surreal. The reasons why it happened were not immediately interesting. That something on the historical timeline occurred was overwhelming. This meant that it was hard to adjust to being in the after. Time itself became a difficult concept. There was the before it happened, the approximate during, and the constant floating into ordinary days further and further away.
Older people were most interesting for their reactions. They could only say it was the most terrible single incident they’ve lived during. It made me wonder about the rest of the world. Our world was the one in movies. I lived less than an hour east of New York City. The more news anchors said it was terrible the more it seemed that we were lucky the whole city wasn’t on fire. But no one said that. It was curious.
“I just had a thought,” I said to Maya Gray and her friends in art class.
“I’ll mark the date,” said Stacy, who had strait red hair.
“Yea I have to stop starting my sentences with I just had a thought.”
They laughed.
Besides the group in art class that became friends of mine, two people came right to me. The first was Suzie. When I closed my locker she was standing right there holding her books in front of her plead skirt and her black dress shoes were tightly together. There was green and pink highlighter in her blonde pigtails, her blue tank top was dull and blank, and her stockings were torn. She was smiling. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“My friend wanted me to tell you hi.”
“Okay. Who are you?”
“Suzie. Who are you?”
“Pink.”
“Hi Pink. Bye.”
The other was Joel. He hung around all the metal heads and punks in the back of the cafeteria everyday where I was when not in support class. He was wearing a Disturbed band t-shirt when he walked right up to me where I sat on the radiator and asked, “What bands are you into?”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin everyday.”
“I love Zep man. You play any instruments?”
“Guitar. Not well.”
“Cool. I want to get a bass. You want to hang out after school?”
“Sure.”
That was the first time I walked over the creek that ran behind the school, which led into a concrete sewer opening covered in graffiti. He had Disturbed and Slipknot posters on his walls and we listened to Led Zeppelin. The carpet ran up one of his walls to his ceiling and was peeled over in one corner. There was a burn mark shaped like an iron. “I’d kind of like to get out of here before my dad gets home,” he said. “Do you ever hang out in town?”
“You mean like where the movie theatre is?”
“Yea. Some people hang out there on Friday night. We can walk there from here.”
“Okay.”
This is where I met Kurt. On Friday night, there were folks that went to town for the movie theatre or the ice cream place, there were the folks that went into the pool hall, and then there were the folks like us. There were two little kids in the Chinese food place, a brother and sister. They drew pictures on one of the tables; they sat on crates behind the counter, and sometimes they came out and played near us. On the corner outside the Chinese food place was where some folks who looked like metal heads and punks hung out. They sometimes had a small radio playing old punk music on it. They sometimes sat on the sidewalk and talked about Bush and Al-Qaeda and all that. There were mohawks and liberty spikes and chains and black boots and piercings of all sorts but Kurt was rather subtle. He just wore jeans cuffed at the bottom, a white t-shirt and a beanie cap. The first thing he said to me was, “Hey man could I punch you?”
“No.”
“It’s nothing personal. Just one.”
“Hey. Lay off him,” said this older girl Erika who was real tough looking and engaged to this long haired Asian dude who was also real tough looking and always gave me the pound greeting, knuckles to knuckles.
Someone said, “Hey. I think I’m going to go to QYP to get free condoms. Anyone want to come?”
“What do you mean come?”
“I’m not going to QYP bro.”
“What’s QYP?” I asked Joel.
“Queer Youth Pride. It’s around the corner.”
“I don’t want to go by myself man. What if I get in a fight?”
“You’re all pussies,” said Kurt. “I’ll get the condoms.” He put his hands in his tight pockets and walked away.
There were five of us from the corner in a small room but not including Erica and her fiancé because people older than twenty-one were not supposed to be there. There were a few other people in there including one real quiet guy from school named Brian. The facilitator was a woman in her older twenties who asked us questions. “So what are different ways that people could get STDs?”
“From fucking,” said Kurt.
“Right. Anything in which fluids could get from one body to another.”
“Like kissing?” someone said.
“More likely if someone has a cut in their mouth.”
“What about sharing a drink?”
“It’s pretty much the same case however you could get other contagious things. Any other questions? Okay. So drugs and alcohol. What are some reasons that people get high?”
A girl in a big jacket said, “It’s everywhere. How do you not get high when drugs are all around you? I’m like on my way to school and as soon as I step out my door someone offers me a bag.”
“Okay. So it’s available and it’s tempting. What else?”
“It’s an escape,” someone said.
We walked out with paper bags full of condoms and dental dams. It was getting dark. In front of the little brick building was a small crowd of gothic teenagers. One of them was Maya Gray. “What are you doing here?” she said.
“My friends wanted to go to the orientation.”
“Oh good. Now you can just come in when you want.”
I looked at the building behind me. “I guess so.” The punks were walking down the street without me. “Hey, I want to talk to you about something. Do you want to go for a walk real quick?”
“Okay.”
On the other side of the block, in front of the movie theatre I asked, “Do you want to go out with me some time?”
“No Pink. I kind of have a boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
“We should talk online though.”
We were regular buddies then on AOL Instant Messenger.
DreamXvapor: Pink I don’t want to go school anymore.
LIrampage87: Don’t you at least partly like going?
DreamXvapor: Okay. I like art class. Except I try not to hear the stuff Dante Michaels says.
Dante Michaels was a big, athletic guy with a shaved head and earrings. He could usually be seen with a group of pretty girls and heard flirting or making an obnoxious remark, like the time he said to me in art, “Pink your fingernails, are you some kind of transvestite or what’s up?”
One of the girls near him said, “Leave him alone Dante. He’s just experimenting.”
LIrampage: What does he say to you?
DreamXvapor: He doesn’t talk to me. It’s just that -not that he’s much different than the majority of the school- but it’s how everything that’s not cool is gay. It doesn’t seem as naïve when he says it. He says things about Jews too.
LIrampage87: That’s lame.
DreamXvapor: Yea. Not to just narrow it down to him. Sometimes it’s just waking up in the morning. I don’t want to do the whole thing again.
Queer Youth Pride was one big, dim room with a stage. There were usually about twenty to thirty people inside. The first time I went in I saw Stacy, who usually looked pretty ordinary but at QYP her hair was in pigtails and she had multicolour glitter on her cheeks and a sparkly, tight black shirt and a skirt. It was very dark inside and little, white lights were circling around the room. The song “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails was playing.
The oldest person was Lee, a guy that dressed real tough but loved Janis Joplin. He was twenty-one. He read poetry on the stage and he was Janis for the drag show. He was a rather large fellow covered in a wig, beads, feathers, and the whole thing. “Come on and take it!” His big feet stomped on the wooden stage. “Take another little piece of my heart now baby…” He was one of Maya’s best friends.
DreamXvapor: Lee is sort of making feel out of sorts.
LIrampage87: Why?
DreamXvapor: Just something he said to this girl wasn’t right.
LIrampage87: What about?
DreamXvapor: Well I’m not saying what she did was right either…
As the students gathered by the door in the art room waiting for the period to end, Dante said to his friends, “I hate that kid. He’s so gay. He’s such a faggot I want to kill him.”
“Hey Dante,” said Maya.
He turned to her. “What?”
“Can you please not use the word gay like that or call someone a faggot ever?”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I was right here. No one wants to hear those words.”
“Listen girl. I don’t know you.”
Ms. MacCauley said, “Hey. Dante. As long as you’re in this classroom you are not to use those words. Maya is right. It’s offensive.”
Maya crossed her arms and Dante looked at her slyly. “Are we cool?”
“No. You think because you’re so big you can just talk about people like that. I want you to apologize.”
“To who? I don’t care what you think.”
“Apologize to me because my friends are gay and have to deal with bigots like you everyday.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
As summer came I left on a plane to Southern California. My aunt had just produced a children’s album for the mentally disabled and invited my cousins and I to tour with her to street fares and schools. While my aunt played acoustic guitar and sang, the rest of us sang too, played bongos, used props and one time I wore a Hula skirt at a street fare playing the maracas. We ate at Fifties styled burger joints and went to one of her students’ birthday parties. Our countless inside jokes resurfaced again and again. Sometimes we just hung around her house and at real subtle moments my aunt could tackle deeper subjects.
“I just stopped believing is all,” I said in the passenger seat of her truck one day as we passed by distant mountains and open landscape. Some folks were in the other truck and my cousins were sleeping in the back.
“That’s not too unordinary.” She spoke real casually. “But sometimes you look around at nature and say, ‘well, where did the mountains come from and the rivers, and all of that?’”
And later we pulled onto her street and her neighbour asked me, “What made you paint your fingernails?”
I shrugged. When he left I said, “Why do people feel like they should acknowledge the little things people do?”
She said, “People just get concerned. Sometimes when people wear all black or look eccentric it could be a sign for problems that they might have at home or from their past.”
Although I hadn’t used a computer almost for the entire month I was in California, I went on AIM a few days before I went home.
DreamXvapor: I have to warn you that Peter wants to hurt you.
Peter, Maya’s ex-boyfriend, was from another town. He was a target for the punks to talk trash about because he wore big, black high tops. He wore heavy black eyeliner on his dark brown skin. He was into Cradle of Filth, one of the most haunting bands I’d ever heard.
It stung, knowing that I couldn’t go back to QYP when I got home without dealing with him.
But back in New York it happened soon. Even Joel said in town, “Peter wants to fight you.”
“I’m going anyway.”
“I’ll come with you.”
A big athletic guy in a sports shirt came by and pound-greeted Joel. “What’s up Joel?”
“Hey Travis. This is Pink.”
“What’s good Pink? What you guys up to?”
“Just going to QYP,” said Joel.
“Oh that place?” He nodded. “Okay. No doubt. Never been there.”
“You don’t have to be gay.”
“Yea I know but I got to meet a friend at the pool hall. I’ll catch you guys later.”
As we walked through the crowded hall, Peter stood right next to me. “Hey Pink. I want to fight you.” It was his first words to me ever. “Just wait til you come outside.”
As he walked away I looked at Joel. “Well I’ll just have to walk outside soon enough.”
“Dude,” he said. “Wait in here. I’ll call you in ten minutes.”
When I walked outside, Peter nodded to me and turned from his friends. Joel walked up with Travis. Peter walked slowly forward as I stood facing him with my hands on my hips. He interlocked his fingers and grinned. “Are you afraid?”
I looked at Travis.
“Yo,” said Travis. “I’ll knock you right out. Leave him alone.”
Peter looked back at me. “You can’t stand up for yourself? You can hit me first.”
“Hey Pink,” said Maya softly behind me.
I turned and looked at her. “Hey.” My heartbeat was so hard I could hear it as I turned back to Peter. There was a general circle around us now. “I’m not going to fight you,” I said.
“I just want to hit you once, Pink.”
“Why do you want to hit me?”
“Just want to.”
“Does it have to do with someone else?”
“No man. Just want to hit you.”
I looked at the ground for a moment. My awareness was entirely saturated with Maya’s presence. “It’s because I’m smaller than you,” I finally said. “It’s because you don’t know me and I haven’t been coming here very long. Or it’s because you want Maya to see how defenceless I am well now she can see it but my friends are my defence. I’m coming back here,” I said. “Maybe you’ll hit me next time but I like this place and I have friends here and if you don’t like me it’s too bad.” I turned and walked away with Joel, Travis, Maya and her friend.
Chapter 3
“How many times do you go number two in a day?” asked a doctor when I was nine.
“Six?”
“Six times!”
“…”
“Normal is one or two times.”
“Maybe three times.”
“Which is it?”
“Maybe four?”
So I took medicine for three and a half years. I’m not sure why I stopped but no one noticed. That summer of 02’, I began going to the bathroom more
frequently and losing blood. No one found out about that either and I thought it would go away.
By the winter of tenth grade I hung out with Joel every weekend, I was officially in love with Maya, my favourite band was Type-O-Negative, a goth band, and I weighed eighty-five pounds. Someone told me I was used as an example in a psychology class because I wore a spiked collar and eyeliner. This is when I let my hair grow. This was the year we read To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye.
My mother’s boyfriend moved in with us and he got me a job. He was from the North Shore. He was a foot taller than me and had a voice ten octaves lower than mine but he was younger than my mother. My mother was high strung and Bruce was laid back. His basic friendliness made me want to be closed off and mean.
“Your mother’s a couple French fries short of a picnic,” he would joke. I would quietly look away.
This was challenged when he got me a job. He worked at a ski store on weekends and we would ride to the next town together in his big van, The Grateful Dead on his stereo. He said to me once on the ride, “Your mother loves ya. She’s just not really great at expressing her feelings.” I crossed my arms.
First I was his assistant on sizing people for equipment; I took out trash and organized the back shelves. When it slowed down all the employees joked around. They were from the next towns over from ours. I liked them. Only one gave me a hard time: Ryan, tall, skinny Ryan who was only seventeen and always employee of the month. One time he took my slice of pizza in the back and ate it looking at me. “I hope you hate me,” he said. But some of the employees loved me, especially Tania, a skater girl at the front register. She was twenty-one. “Tell me something Pink,” she’d say.
“Way out in Galaxy 401,” I’d try to spit without thinking, “there are people just like us, only they don’t shower.”
“What if I don’t shower? Does my doppelganger shower?”
“What’s a doppelganger?”
Joel took me to his childhood best friend’s house in the next town. He was a nice guy, Leo. He lived with his sister who was a year older, and their grandmother. Part of their one-story house was a dentist office. There were several people in their basement that seemed to almost live there. The first time I smoked weed was with Joel and Maya in August, but I didn’t get high. In Leo’s basement, I smoked a bong, and got stoned. It was fun. I skipped down the street smiling. Back in the basement I hit the bong again fearlessly.
Suzie got me stoned too. It was in a small room with a bunch of people in her grade playing a Kings of the Stone Age CD. “You’ve never smoked a gravity bong?” a girl with dreadlocks asked me.
“No.”
“Then we must do a grav.”
Instantly I forgot I was even in a room, my age, my story, the year; it was just existence and wonder. The scary part was when they offered a second hit to
me. “No thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yea. I’m too stoned.”
In a diner I told my father how tired I always felt. “When I stand up sometimes my vision blurs and I get dizzy.” What I didn’t tell him was about the cold November day when I forgot the keys to my house. I looked for another key in our garage, where the warm excrement fell down my leg. It was like my body was falling apart. So by December, I was in the hospital. In the waiting room of the gastroenterology department I read Go Ask Alice.
In the spring I felt physically more stable. Almost everyday I walked home from school, which was about three miles. I quit drinking soda and eating snacks at night so I could go to sleep earlier. After dark I’d go for jogs around the block.
“Where were you?” my mother said once when I got back.
“I went for a jog.”
“A jog at this time of night?”
I was confused. “Yes?”
“What’s in your pockets?”
“What do you think?”
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“How do I know you weren’t getting drugs?”
“I don’t care if you think I was getting drugs. I was going for a jog.”
“Well your very suspicious,” she said.
But now that I didn’t have to think so much about my physical survival anymore, I became extremely introverted again, and as soon as I first imagined, just as a fun daydream, killing myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Be it in class, or lying in bed, I tried not to think about suicide, because the thought of it made me want to do it and that in and of itself was a depressing feeling.
One time I thought about suicide in the back seat of a car, sitting in the middle next to Joel. Kurt rode the passenger seat as we went to Mcdonalds for lunch. I was generally real quiet every time, but as aware as I might have been to it’s selfishness, I imagined that my seat would be empty the next day and they’d know that only a day ago I was right there.
Kurt suddenly said to me in the Mcdonalds, “Why do you eat your fries one fry at a time?”
I shrugged and noticed there were three fries in his fingers.
One time Suzie was there. The four guys were at one table and Suzie and I were at the one next to it. “You’re not hungry?” I said.
“It’s this thing about food,” she said, taking one of my fries. “It makes you fat.”
Suzie got me into Mindless Self Indulgence. She took me to an indie techno-punk show in Brooklyn that changed our lives. She brought me to the Poetry Club meeting that spring. There were some fifteen people, mostly girls in a brightly lit classroom sharing poetry, collecting submissions for the zine and organizing the open mike night. I shared a couple of poems in the dimly lit cafeteria in front of about fifty people. It wasn’t the first time I shared a poem with a crowd. The first time was at QYP. My father, holding the zine in his hand, walked over to me where I watched The Simpsons in his living room.
He had just moved into a duplex house in Queens with a woman named Joan who I met at a Super Bowl party. Previously he was using the pullout couch and the kitchen in the office building that he co-owned with my grandfather. As much as I loved the idea of living for free somewhere and sleeping on the floor in that building, I could vaguely understand that Joan probably didn’t dig it so much. She was a quiet lady from Long Island and one time she watched the real famous Al-Qaeda beheading video on the internet with us. The main feeling I had watching the video was nervousness about how Joan felt about it. “That’s unreal,” she said, and went back to what she was doing.
“What is this poem about?” said my father.
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“That would change the experience of the poem.”
“But I’m lucky to have the writer here so please. I think it’s a very good poem but I don’t get it.”
“I think you’re not supposed to get it.”
At the very end of the year the principal called an assembly. “As you all have heard, a southern Christian church group is going to be picketing outside our school tomorrow. They are protesting schools along the eastern states that have LGBTQ clubs. Now, we believe in tolerance here at this school and we try to create an atmosphere of safety. This group doesn’t represent the whole denomination of their church. They are a small group. They have the right to assembly and free speech. What I ask of you all is that you enter the building tomorrow through the side or back door. Please do not intervene with the protesters or give them any attention.”
But as we poured out of the auditorium, Maya said to me, “We’re having a counter protest.” Whether she did have the counter protest with her friends or not, it didn’t even occur to me to ask when it was; I just compared it to going in the back door in my mind, and that’s what I did: I went in the backdoor.
Meanwhile, Brian, the quiet boy who went to QYP once in a while, drew a cartoon of a small group of protesters, huddling together with fear as a larger crowd of people stood calmly around them. An art teacher asked for permission to make copies of it and at least two of my teachers put it up on the classroom walls.
Chapter 4
“They’re jealous of us,” said my father in the diner. “They hate our freedoms.”
“The whole population of Iraq and Afghanistan hates our freedoms?
“No Pink.”
“So why do we drop bombs on villages and kill children?”
“No one wants to kill children. I think you just like to take the unpopular side of things.”
“I’m not taking a side.”
“Changing the subject, are you taking your medicine?”
“What?”
“Are you taking your medicine?”
“You know, I think I got sick because of my diet. I try not to eat so much junk food all the time.”
“But you’re taking your medicine.”
“Yea, but it feels unnecessary. I did a report on genetic engineering.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Because it’s artificial life. It made me think about how forced things are. What’s so meaningful about taking a pill everyday for your life?”
“The doctors said you have to take it.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“You’re just taking unpopular positions on things.”
“That’s not a fair response to all of my thoughts.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Mr Jurns was a tall, skinny man who loved teaching history. He was about forty when I had him in eleventh grade. Jurns was his wife's last name, which he shared as of marriage, challenging gender roles in our society. He was benign and enthusiastic. He taught Twentieth Century American history: Eugene Debbs, World War One, The Depression, The New Deal, World War Two, McCarthyism, the Cold War, counter culture...
"Pink's a hippy," this guy Ronald said.
"Pink is not a hippy," said Jurns.
"Yes he is. He wears socks and sandals."
"Pink," said Jurns. "Do you follow politics?"
"More-or-less."
"Do you know who's running in the election?"
"Kerry and that other guy."
"Dean?"
"Yea."
"Pink is a person of this era. Hippies were not defined for how they dressed; they were... layered."
"Then what is Pink?"
"Leave Pink alone."
Armond, a guy who I don't recall ever smiling, walked into the room across Jurns.
"Armond," sighed Jurns with his arms loosely at his sides, "can you please start coming in to class on time?"
"I had to take care of something."
"You see though that I have to say something when it's every day. If you miss half the class every day you're missing half the experience and you're contributing half of what you could to everyone else's experience."
"Yo, get off my back son. Just teach the fucking class."
"Please leave Armond."
Armond casually walked past Jurns with the one notebook in his hand. He slowed down before the door, turned and said, "Yo I don't need your fucking class, you tall, white fucking Mr. Jurns- what you gonna do? You fuckin punk ass." He pushed the door open with one hand. "Fuckin Jurns. Whatever." He was gone.
The class was still. There were some smiles. One girl put her hand on her mouth and bursted out some giggles making Ronald laugh and tell her to shut up.
Jurns put his hands out as to gesture for calmness. "I'm sorry that you had to experience that," he said. "I worry that you all might not fully appreciate the gravity of the situation."
Kurt’s father taught driver’s ed. Our car consisted of a really tough guy, a pretty girl, a rowdy guy that talked a lot, me, and Kurt’s father Charles. “I served in Vietnam, and I took pot in the countacultcha. So forgive me if my brain floats away once in a while. I’m a product of the Sixties. Make a left.” He pressed play and we listened to The Kinks in the sunshine.
I really dug the man and his stories. “We used to rent out staws to have potties. A pound a pot was twenty-five bucks.”
“Holy shit,” said the tough guy.
“Let’s drive to the Jones Beach Towa.”
This was spring 04, eleventh grade and I spent most of my time alone smoking, reading, walking, and writing.
Maya gave me an interesting look in the hallway at the end of the school year. As soon as we finished our last final exam, we walked to her house. In the pale lavender room, her bottom lip was soft and hard against mine. She hugged me tightly for a long time. When I got home that day I examined what just happened. It seemed I didn’t feel transformed in any way.
It was nice but it only lasted two weeks, and it ended in confusion. I didn’t want to go to town anymore and the new people who Joel was hanging out with didn’t seem to want me around. Suzie’s grade had graduated and I didn’t see her over the summer.
One night Joel called. I was stoned. He said, “Kurt’s dead.”
“Kurts dead?”
“He was hit by a car.”
“Fuck man. When?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m home. Someone just called me. I thought I’d tell you.”
“Thanks.”
We visited Kurt’s mother and Charles. A bunch of the punks, Joel and I crowded in their small, dim kitchen. Both parents were smoking cigarettes. Charles seemed like he had seen so much in his life that he wasn’t surprised. He shook his head. “I think the dumbest thing we did was give Kurty a baseball bat when he was ten. One day he broke all the lamps in the house.”
“The roof,” said the mother.
“What?”
“The roof.”
“Oh that’s right. He went on the roof and wouldn’t come down. What was he, fawteen a somethin?”
On the first day of school in twelfth grade I bumped into Stacy out on the empty sidewalk. “Hey Pink.”
“Hey Stacy.”
“Ready for one more year of this place?”
I shrugged. “Yea. I’ll make the best of it. What about you?”
She looked around and made a face of concern. “Did you hear about the football team?”
“No.”
She sat down on the curb so I sat down next to her. “The football team went on a trip a couple weeks ago and some people came back mutilated.”
“Mutilated.”
“Apparently every year older members of the team haze the new, younger players. This year someone went to the hospital.”
“So they beat him up pretty bad?”
She looked at me. “They sodomized him with a broomstick, golf balls and a pine cone.”
“Oh no.”
There was an assembly called by the principal. “Make no mistake that this tradition of hazing was not known about by the administration and it is going to be of significant commitment on our part that it stops. Unfortunately hazing is normal, in sports and in other fields of society and in all ages. We don’t want this event to be distracting to your education, but unfortunately it is not going to disappear right away. There is going to be media on our campus. You have the right to speak or not speak to the media, but we warn you that they are very likely to edit your words so that you seem to be saying what you don’t mean to. So we suggest that you don’t speak to the media for the sake of the school’s reputation but also for your own sake. We don’t want our school to be getting this attention. Most of our students are good people that do good things but we will only be recognized in this time for what a few people did. So at this time I want to emphasize the word civility. I beg you all to deeply consider what it means to be civil.”
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
My Parents and Tution
Prof. Rebecca Chace
Advanced Fiction, Fall 2009
As I copy and paste 70 email addresses from a word doc to my send box, the earplug to my phone is hanging from my ear. My mother says to me, “Have you spoken to him about your loans yet?”
“Mom. He’s still in grief. He says he’ll pay half of it if I raise half in six months after graduation.”
“Right. Look. I don’t care if his wife died. He told you in your fourth year that you had to pay the twenty grand. If you keep working for nonprofit organizations, you’re not going to pay half of it in six months.”
I return to another web tab and scroll through addressses. “I have to get back to what I was doing.”
“Homework?”
“Outreach. I’m way behind because of Joan’s funeral and dad needing attention.”
“He needs attention?”
“Yea. He always wants to tell me the same stories and I don’t have the guts to cut him short. Like how he bought all this
stuff for Joan but she never used it.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me. Actually, maybe I don’t want to know.”
“Yea so I have to get back to reaching students.”
“Are you coming home this weekend?”
“I don’t think I can leave the house just yet.”
“Bruce wants to see you. Don’t forget he actually has cancer.”
“I’ll probably come in the middle of next week.”
“Well you can at least call me back when I call you.”
“I speak to you at least three times a week.”
“Bruce says you don’t call him back.”
“I have to go mom.”
When she finally let’s me go my father calls a minute later. I answer, “Hi dad!”
“Who’s this?” he asks.
“What’s up?”
“Are you home?”
“Yes. I took care of the dog.”
“Do me a favor. Pick me up from Finnigans.”
“Your car is here?”
“Yes. I’m on the train. Listen. I’m going to let you drive my car. Wait a second. Let me figure this out.”
“I’ll pick you up it’s fine.”
“Listen. At 10:30 be at Finnigans. Just don’t fuck up my car.”
“It’s not even far. I drive mom’s car all the time.”
“Listen!”
“Yes?”
“Do me a favor. Listen. That car was seventy thousand dollars. Ok. Don’t even let me know tomorrow that I let you drive it.”
“Okay.”
The next day is the day that we looked at boats. I deposit change into the Coin Star machine early on a Sunday in Stop n’ Shop. As it counts up past five dollars I start cheering it on. “Yea!” I contemplate whether I should save lunch money by buying bread but it’s only industrial bread and has soy in it and I can’t afford the farmers market bread so I’ll just go broke buying lunch everyday. Then the machine asks if I want to donate to World Wild Life and I curse it for fucking with me and press cash instead of donate, which is for bad people. Then my father calls me. “Listen. Your grandfather canceled on me. Do you want to come with me to the boat show?”
“Will it take all day?”
“You have a date today?”
“I’m just really behind on my internship stuff. I have to reach out to more students. I keep getting side-tracked.”
“Fine. But listen. My father died when I was seven. I can die. You’re going to look back on these times and you’ll be happy
you spent them with your father.”
“I guess I’m coming.”
My mother calls me as I walk home. I say to her through the dangling earpiece, “We’re going to look at boats.”
“He wants to buy a boat!”
“God. I don’t know! We’re going to a boat show.”
“What’s a boat show?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t even wondered that myself.”
“Ok. When are you coming home?”
“I told you about twelve hours ago.”
“When did you say you were coming?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe mid week next week.”
“Call Bruce back. He can use the call.”
“I spoke to him an hour ago.”
“Well he just told me that you’re ignoring him.”
“God. I have to go.”
“Why?”
“I’ll just call you back.”
We stood on the dock and looked at a thirty-two foot boat. “That’s the one,” he said.
“That’s the one that you like to just look at because it makes you feel like you are in the sea.”
“That’s the one I’d like to get. I think it’s affordable.”
The board says $90,000. I say, “Yes. You can say that in a general sort of universal way, or I should say relatively compared
to these like Universal Studios level items, sure, I mean like, if my taxes went to a boat like this I might not even refuse to pay them because I mean like in a world of satellites and ipods, I mean, you can say that if you have perspective of a peripheral mindset of a sort.”
He quietly looks at it. The sky is Bruce. I don’t know what he is thinking. Then he says, “Are you up to some Mexican?”
In the car he picks up a twenty-dollar bill in the cup holder. “Hey life is funny. I found this walking the dog.”
“Yes,” I say.
After a song on the radio he says, “You’ll get me that boat.”
And for some reason, I imagine him riding the boat, and the wind in his hair, and the expansive ocean. I picture him all
alone on the boat.
At the bar in the Mexican restaurant my dad is on his second martini before our food comes, except for the tortilla chips. “Are you going to your mother’s for the Jewish holiday tomorrow?”
“No.”
“What’s the purpose of that holiday?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I used to spend two hundred dollars a month on Hebrew school.” He shakes his head. “I raised you in the Jewish religion
because your mother is Jewish and now you kids don’t even light the menorah. See, your mother has no religion. She doesn’t go to temple-”
“She’s agnostic.”
“It cost money just to be a member of the temple, Shannon. We don’t have that at church. You put something in the basket.”
I almost go into how I didn’t believe in Genesis in first grade but I figure that would further his point. My beans, guacamole and rice come. He says, “Are you sure I’ve never taken you here.”
“I’ve been here with mom.”
“Your mother?”
I eat my beans.
“Well you’re taking Joan’s place. We came here every Sunday. She was so simple man. Not like your mother. Joan paid the check in restaurants. Your mother- forget it man. Did I tell you about the massage in Tokyo? First of all. Listen.” He drank his fourth glass. “Before I tell you about that. Let me tell you about who gave the German massages.” He reaches behind me and kneads my back with his knuckles. Suddenly catatonic, my eyes close and beans pour out of my mouth.
“Feels good right?” he asks.
“I nod in ecstasy”
“Joan used to give me the German massage. We’d go home from here and she’d jump on my back every time and do that
for me. Your mother- when I just married your mother my sensai treated us to a trip to Tokyo. I was the man. We had this hotel in the Park Avenue equivalent of Tokyo. I order a masseuse. I’m expecting a cute Japanese girl. This little, viajo, old Japanese woman lurches into the room. ‘Mr. Ayala. I do you first. I do your wife second.’”
I’m still listening.
“Now, Shannon. Your mother and I were never in love. But that day your mother and I were happy.”
“Have you talked to him about the loan yet?” My mother says behind the wheel at the stoplight. My duffle bag is on my lap. “Fuck this light,” she says.
“I don’t think he ever will care about my loan. He throws my medicine bills on my staircase.”
“What!”
“I know. It’s like half my biweekly paycheck.”
“Well you don’t really have a job, Shannon.”
“I know but I mean I’m a regional organizer and we have to save the food system and the planet.”
“I’m taking him to court. What does he say about the internship? Does he ask you anything about it?”
“Well sometimes he says I’m going to be a doctor. Sometimes he says it’s a good thing, this job.”
“One has nothing to do with the other.”
“What’s the use stressing,” I ask. “He has his own way of thinking. It all makes sense to him. I totally follow his logic.”
“You’re on his side?”
“No. I just see the way he thinks and there’s no bending it. It’s not greed or cheapness. It’s just an aversion to making one’s life too easy. And you’re never going to confront him with a law suit because you’ve been saying it for years.”
“You just watch. Just wait until you graduate. He’ll have his chance.”
“Is Bruce home?”
“Yes. Spend some time with him.”
“Ok. I told the organization, when I went to the training for this my stepmother and stepfather were both in the hospital.
One didn’t go home and the other went home with cancer. So I’m preoccupied with that and with more local concerns that have come up. For example, I’ve been in solidarity with a local community garden and the educational rights movement. So I’ve hardly been doing my job.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want to tell them not to pay me.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I really being paid for activism anyway.”
“Shannon. Do not be stupid.”
“Mom. I’m stupid. I’m just as stupid as dad is. Only I’m stupid in my own way and I hope you see the difference.”
“Did you tell your father this?”
“For some reason I don’t tell him the same things I tell you.”
“Like about your medicine?”
“I don’t know how to.”
“You say, ‘father. Please help me pay for my medicine.’”
“But I don’t like asking him for anything.”
“Shannon. You’re not going to survive being nice.”
Advanced Fiction, Fall 2009
As I copy and paste 70 email addresses from a word doc to my send box, the earplug to my phone is hanging from my ear. My mother says to me, “Have you spoken to him about your loans yet?”
“Mom. He’s still in grief. He says he’ll pay half of it if I raise half in six months after graduation.”
“Right. Look. I don’t care if his wife died. He told you in your fourth year that you had to pay the twenty grand. If you keep working for nonprofit organizations, you’re not going to pay half of it in six months.”
I return to another web tab and scroll through addressses. “I have to get back to what I was doing.”
“Homework?”
“Outreach. I’m way behind because of Joan’s funeral and dad needing attention.”
“He needs attention?”
“Yea. He always wants to tell me the same stories and I don’t have the guts to cut him short. Like how he bought all this
stuff for Joan but she never used it.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me. Actually, maybe I don’t want to know.”
“Yea so I have to get back to reaching students.”
“Are you coming home this weekend?”
“I don’t think I can leave the house just yet.”
“Bruce wants to see you. Don’t forget he actually has cancer.”
“I’ll probably come in the middle of next week.”
“Well you can at least call me back when I call you.”
“I speak to you at least three times a week.”
“Bruce says you don’t call him back.”
“I have to go mom.”
When she finally let’s me go my father calls a minute later. I answer, “Hi dad!”
“Who’s this?” he asks.
“What’s up?”
“Are you home?”
“Yes. I took care of the dog.”
“Do me a favor. Pick me up from Finnigans.”
“Your car is here?”
“Yes. I’m on the train. Listen. I’m going to let you drive my car. Wait a second. Let me figure this out.”
“I’ll pick you up it’s fine.”
“Listen. At 10:30 be at Finnigans. Just don’t fuck up my car.”
“It’s not even far. I drive mom’s car all the time.”
“Listen!”
“Yes?”
“Do me a favor. Listen. That car was seventy thousand dollars. Ok. Don’t even let me know tomorrow that I let you drive it.”
“Okay.”
The next day is the day that we looked at boats. I deposit change into the Coin Star machine early on a Sunday in Stop n’ Shop. As it counts up past five dollars I start cheering it on. “Yea!” I contemplate whether I should save lunch money by buying bread but it’s only industrial bread and has soy in it and I can’t afford the farmers market bread so I’ll just go broke buying lunch everyday. Then the machine asks if I want to donate to World Wild Life and I curse it for fucking with me and press cash instead of donate, which is for bad people. Then my father calls me. “Listen. Your grandfather canceled on me. Do you want to come with me to the boat show?”
“Will it take all day?”
“You have a date today?”
“I’m just really behind on my internship stuff. I have to reach out to more students. I keep getting side-tracked.”
“Fine. But listen. My father died when I was seven. I can die. You’re going to look back on these times and you’ll be happy
you spent them with your father.”
“I guess I’m coming.”
My mother calls me as I walk home. I say to her through the dangling earpiece, “We’re going to look at boats.”
“He wants to buy a boat!”
“God. I don’t know! We’re going to a boat show.”
“What’s a boat show?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t even wondered that myself.”
“Ok. When are you coming home?”
“I told you about twelve hours ago.”
“When did you say you were coming?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe mid week next week.”
“Call Bruce back. He can use the call.”
“I spoke to him an hour ago.”
“Well he just told me that you’re ignoring him.”
“God. I have to go.”
“Why?”
“I’ll just call you back.”
We stood on the dock and looked at a thirty-two foot boat. “That’s the one,” he said.
“That’s the one that you like to just look at because it makes you feel like you are in the sea.”
“That’s the one I’d like to get. I think it’s affordable.”
The board says $90,000. I say, “Yes. You can say that in a general sort of universal way, or I should say relatively compared
to these like Universal Studios level items, sure, I mean like, if my taxes went to a boat like this I might not even refuse to pay them because I mean like in a world of satellites and ipods, I mean, you can say that if you have perspective of a peripheral mindset of a sort.”
He quietly looks at it. The sky is Bruce. I don’t know what he is thinking. Then he says, “Are you up to some Mexican?”
In the car he picks up a twenty-dollar bill in the cup holder. “Hey life is funny. I found this walking the dog.”
“Yes,” I say.
After a song on the radio he says, “You’ll get me that boat.”
And for some reason, I imagine him riding the boat, and the wind in his hair, and the expansive ocean. I picture him all
alone on the boat.
At the bar in the Mexican restaurant my dad is on his second martini before our food comes, except for the tortilla chips. “Are you going to your mother’s for the Jewish holiday tomorrow?”
“No.”
“What’s the purpose of that holiday?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I used to spend two hundred dollars a month on Hebrew school.” He shakes his head. “I raised you in the Jewish religion
because your mother is Jewish and now you kids don’t even light the menorah. See, your mother has no religion. She doesn’t go to temple-”
“She’s agnostic.”
“It cost money just to be a member of the temple, Shannon. We don’t have that at church. You put something in the basket.”
I almost go into how I didn’t believe in Genesis in first grade but I figure that would further his point. My beans, guacamole and rice come. He says, “Are you sure I’ve never taken you here.”
“I’ve been here with mom.”
“Your mother?”
I eat my beans.
“Well you’re taking Joan’s place. We came here every Sunday. She was so simple man. Not like your mother. Joan paid the check in restaurants. Your mother- forget it man. Did I tell you about the massage in Tokyo? First of all. Listen.” He drank his fourth glass. “Before I tell you about that. Let me tell you about who gave the German massages.” He reaches behind me and kneads my back with his knuckles. Suddenly catatonic, my eyes close and beans pour out of my mouth.
“Feels good right?” he asks.
“I nod in ecstasy”
“Joan used to give me the German massage. We’d go home from here and she’d jump on my back every time and do that
for me. Your mother- when I just married your mother my sensai treated us to a trip to Tokyo. I was the man. We had this hotel in the Park Avenue equivalent of Tokyo. I order a masseuse. I’m expecting a cute Japanese girl. This little, viajo, old Japanese woman lurches into the room. ‘Mr. Ayala. I do you first. I do your wife second.’”
I’m still listening.
“Now, Shannon. Your mother and I were never in love. But that day your mother and I were happy.”
“Have you talked to him about the loan yet?” My mother says behind the wheel at the stoplight. My duffle bag is on my lap. “Fuck this light,” she says.
“I don’t think he ever will care about my loan. He throws my medicine bills on my staircase.”
“What!”
“I know. It’s like half my biweekly paycheck.”
“Well you don’t really have a job, Shannon.”
“I know but I mean I’m a regional organizer and we have to save the food system and the planet.”
“I’m taking him to court. What does he say about the internship? Does he ask you anything about it?”
“Well sometimes he says I’m going to be a doctor. Sometimes he says it’s a good thing, this job.”
“One has nothing to do with the other.”
“What’s the use stressing,” I ask. “He has his own way of thinking. It all makes sense to him. I totally follow his logic.”
“You’re on his side?”
“No. I just see the way he thinks and there’s no bending it. It’s not greed or cheapness. It’s just an aversion to making one’s life too easy. And you’re never going to confront him with a law suit because you’ve been saying it for years.”
“You just watch. Just wait until you graduate. He’ll have his chance.”
“Is Bruce home?”
“Yes. Spend some time with him.”
“Ok. I told the organization, when I went to the training for this my stepmother and stepfather were both in the hospital.
One didn’t go home and the other went home with cancer. So I’m preoccupied with that and with more local concerns that have come up. For example, I’ve been in solidarity with a local community garden and the educational rights movement. So I’ve hardly been doing my job.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want to tell them not to pay me.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I really being paid for activism anyway.”
“Shannon. Do not be stupid.”
“Mom. I’m stupid. I’m just as stupid as dad is. Only I’m stupid in my own way and I hope you see the difference.”
“Did you tell your father this?”
“For some reason I don’t tell him the same things I tell you.”
“Like about your medicine?”
“I don’t know how to.”
“You say, ‘father. Please help me pay for my medicine.’”
“But I don’t like asking him for anything.”
“Shannon. You’re not going to survive being nice.”
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Beatrice Bat
Part 1.
In the library of CCNY I sat on a couch a space away from a familiar dark skinned girl, hair almost over one of her eyes. I wrote in my note book a few minutes and then noticed she was playing Sudoku. “How do you do that so well?” I asked.
She was startled. “What?” she whispered.
“You’re finishing that Sudoku. I’ve been playing every night this week and I can never finish. Is there some sort of trick?”
“I write the numbers on top,” she said with a very delicate, crispy, whispery voice. “And I cross them out as I get them so I can see clearly what I need.”
“You finished the crossword puzzle too.”
“Yea. I usually do.”
“What’s your name?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Beatrice.”
“Hi Beatrice.” She was very short, just over five feet tall. I’d been seeing her around and smiling at her for weeks and she always smiled back. “I’m Pink. What else do you do?”
“What?”
“What else do you do?”
“Um. What do you mean?”
“Besides Sudoku and crossword?”
“I draw. Um, and I make comics.”
“Cool,” I said.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“I’m planning out the next few hours,” I said.
“I would never do that.”
“No? Hm. What do you make comics about?”
“My comics?”
“Yea.”
“Um. Well they’re just about things that happen.”
“What is it that you like about comics?” I asked.
She looked away from me and said, “I like how the illustrator draws particular parts of the story but decides what to leave out. I like that.”
I stared at her as she stared forward, as if she were protecting herself from further inquiries.
“It was good to meet you Beatrice. I will… see you around.”
She smiled at me. “Bye,” she whispered.
The book fair was set up in our campus, a roped off area of shelves with unwanted, cheap books. I saw Beatrice walking by it. “Beatrice!” I called.
She had a corduroy bag with buttons on the strap at her side and was holding a book with both arms against her chest. “Hi Pink,” she said smiling.
“Have you seen the book fair?” I asked.
“No. Is that where you’re going?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
“Okay.”
She followed me through the shelves. “Hey look,” I said. “The Bhagavad Gita. Cool.” She watched me flip through the pages. “Have you ever seen these pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t they cool?”
“Are you going to buy it?”
“No. I have it already just not with pictures.”
She followed me to another shelf. “Hey, look at this,” I said.
“What?”
“It looks like letters between Jack Kerouac and some lady.”
I bought it for a dollar and walked her to class, picking up the black school paper on the way.
“I read your article,” she said.
“The one about the water crisis?” I asked.
“Oh no. The one about going green.”
“Oh yes. The true way to go green,” I said, “is to protest.”
“A guy in my class,” she said, “told me he went to a protest at Baruch College against the budget cuts to CUNY.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m part of that.”
“Those things aren’t publicized enough though. In Paris they started charging tuition at this school and the whole city shut down because so many people were in the street. I think that was beautiful.”
Beatrice and I walked up the big white steps inside the middle of the Met Museum. “Remember that book?” I asked her.
“Which one?”
“The letters between Kerouac and that woman.”
“From the book fair.”
“Yea. I’ve been reading it.” I felt extremely empty because I had nothing else to say.
She took my hand and led me towards the exhibit. The sign said, “Love and the Renaissance.” There were extremely colorful paintings of semi nude people in natural settings surrounded by angels. There were flowers and sometimes alters. Beatrice let go of my hand and jotted notes in her book.
“I think the main thing,” I said, “was that before this time men would marry women by force you know? It was like a form of property and in the renaissance they wanted to make love the central thing and like always, emphasize chastity.” There was a painting of cupid sneaking behind someone in the shadow, putting his mischievous finger to his lips.
We walked through the knight’s armor. “Look how short people were back then,” she said.
“Yea.”
“I’d like a pendant of my own,” she said.
“What’s a pendant?”
“It’s that logo on their chest. See.”
“What would yours look like?”
“It would be a panda with a spear riding a unicorn over a banner that says ‘Go Team Beatrice.’” She giggled.
I wandered into the Asiatic room by myself. The walls were turquoise and the items were wooden.
“Pink,” called her soft voice from the room before me. I felt as if time had stopped.
She held my hand and we looked at a small statue of a fruit bat. “I was at this psychic Reiki healer recently,” I said. “And she told me that she saw this image of a bat while healing me, and that bats to her symbolize transformation.”
“That sounds correct,” she said. “I have a bat tattooed on my back.”
“Can I see?”
“Mm,” she considered it reluctantly. She lifted the back of her shirt. There was a cartoonish bat.
Outside it began to rain so I opened my umbrella. Half of it was broken and hung down so I held the remaining half over both of us, holding her close. “You’re ridiculous,” she laughed.
“So,” I said.
“You can just hold it over yourself.”
“Why? You’d get wet.”
We stopped at a corner for a red light. She was looking across the street and without second thought I kissed her.
On the train I wrote her a stream-of-consciousness letter, read it once and folded it four ways. When she wrote back she said, “I admit that this is my fifth try at writing this letter. I also admit that you make me extremely nervous. I’m also trying to write in pencil because as you say, it’s more sustainable although I have my skepticism about that.”
She walked with me from bulletin board to bulletin board. I held the thumbtacks and she held the posters. She lifted them up from the bottom as high as she could and I tacked them on top.
“That’s the last poster,” she said.
“Good. It’s been good to poster with you and that’s everything on my list.”
“Thank you Pink.”
I took my little notepad out of my pocket and scratched “Posters” off. “Oh no!” I shouted.
“What?” she asked.
“What time is it?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s 4:50.”
“I have ten minutes to submit my entry for the writing contest.”
“So what do you have to do?”
“Run. Can you come with me?”
“Okay.” We ran to the computer lab. I printed the story while she read the contest rules. “You’re supposed to number the pages,” she said, “and write the name of the award you’re competing for on the front page.”
“Fuck!” I yelled.
Soon we were running, holding hands, up the broken down escalators. I ran into the English department sweating, right up to one of the advisors and handed the manuscript to her.
“You’re ten minutes late Pink Noche,” she said in her Russian accent.
Beatrice came walking in.
“Will you accept it anyway?” I said, heaving.
“Yes,” said the advisor. “But this is the last time.”
Beatrice broke into laughter, leaning on her knees and I smiled, took her hand and walked out of the department.
“Who’s this girl?” asked my mother washing a dish in the sink. I leaned against the counter, legs crossed, hands in my pocket watching her go back and forth from the sink to the other counter, letting the water run.
“Mom, you shouldn’t let the water run,” I said.
“What, I’m doing dishes.”
“She’s from school.”
“What school? Your school?”
“Yes. CCNY. My school. What’s sort of interesting is around the time that I met her I bought this book.”
“Yea?” she said, cleaning a knife.
“There’s a parallel because it’s a compilation of letters between this woman when she was dating Jack Kerouac in 1957. Kerouac was older than her. I’m older than this girl, Beatrice. She lived in Morning Side and this girl, Beatrice lives in Morning Side. This woman and Beatrice went to the same high school.”
My mother transferred to the counter, letting the water run. She said, “So?”
I reached over and turned off the sink.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“You’re wasting water.”
“I’m trying to do dishes!”
“I’ll do the dishes.”
“Okay. Do them. Anyway, I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Well the other thing is Beatrice is kind of shy like the girl in the book.”
“Well, that’s okay. She does talk doesn’t she?
“Never mind mom.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yea. We’ve been going out now.”
I was typing on a computer in a small office covered in all sorts of maps, posters that said things like, “Take Action” or with images such as wind turbines. There was a knock at the door. I let Beatrice in and shut the door behind her. “So this is where you save the planet?” she said.
“Well so far I’ve only done extremely local and more health-based environmental issues. I’ve only just began to focus Climate Change. I’ve been working extremely incessantly on it.” She sat on the couch. I turned on a lamp and turned the main light off. I turned off the computer screen and sat next to her. Strangely, some R&B music played through the walls.
I gave her the next letter and she said, “Thank you. I really like reading your letters.”
“I like the drawings you put in mine,” I said. “And you say really insightful things.”
“Thank you.” She leaned against me and said, “Pink. I really like you.”
“I like you.”
“Only, you make me extremely nervous. I had this dream of you the other night. You were in some sort of parade. I was squeezing through to see you. It was like you had super powers or something.”
“Hm,” I said. “I don’t think I have any super powers. I can do this funny dance though.”
“And do you remember meeting me?” she asked.
“I remember seeing you walking by and smiling back at me.”
“No. Before that. Do you remember you helped me register to vote?”
“Oh. Oh I registered hundreds of people to vote this year. I even stood on the street in Harlem and registered people, and in the subway.”
“It was at a table outside. I thought you were in your late twenties.”
“Late twenties?”
“Yea. It’s embarrassing. I realized you were a student when I saw you inside and realized you were probably 25 years old. And I was holding a cupcake and you smiled at me and I bumped right into this woman and dropped the cupcake on the floor,” she giggled. “Then in the library when you so randomly talked to me, and I don’t know why you did by the way, I realized that you looked extremely young and that you were probably only 20 years old.”
I laughed. I wondered what the deal was with this girl. Most people thought I looked younger than I was. Most girls seemed to think I was too funky or gay or skinny or too nice. I thought to myself, “This Beatrice is not human.” I didn’t think I was looking for anyone gentle and good. I thought I was looking for someone weird and outgoing. Beatrice fell asleep on me. I watched her breathe for an hour. She was like a flower.
Part 2.
“Wake up,” I said. She lifted her head from me in the darkness of the bus and the night. “We’re here.”
A group of five of us walked into a hotel room where one friend already was. She greeted us enthusiastically in her Russian accent. “The opening ceremony was so great!” she said. “It was spiritual and like we were all one.”
“Too bad we missed it,” my friend Amy said.
Immediately Beatrice and I curled up together on a bed. “They’re tired,” said Amy. “Louie’s going to be here tomorrow. He’ll miss all the workshops but he’ll be here Monday to lobby.”
“That’s good,” said the Russian girl.
Thousands of people our age swarmed every where in the Convention Center, many in green t-shirts. The seven of us met by a large Rosetta Stone-square block with every alphabet carved out and the shadows of the alphabets projected onto us. We all had name tag necklaces on. “So how was everyone’s workshop?” Amy said.
Beatrice said, “Janine and I went to one about global politics and Climate Change. It really helped me understand things.”
“I went to one about food,” I said. “They had to divide it into two workshops it was so popular.”
Beatrice whispered to me, “Pink, I want to go to the last one with you.” It was Sunday and we hadn’t attended any together in the two days. “I was thinking we could go to ‘Art and Activism.’”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
She held my hand on an island in the middle of Times Square. Someone gave her a jar and said, “Be very careful with this. It’s coal sludge. It’s very toxic.” The 100 of us marched one block to a hotel chanting, “Clean Coal’s a Dirty Joke/Watch Your Profits go Up in Smoke.” We circled in front of a hotel where a coal company was having a black tie affair. Beatrice handed flyers to people passing by. One woman shook her head at us in disgust.
As the sun set we walked out of the dispersing rally and I asked her, “Do you want to meet my friend at an exhibit on robot-art?”
On the screen the robot drew all sorts of patterns. “The robot makes its own decisions,” said the narrator. My arm was around Beatrice in the dark theatre. My friend had a mustache like Salvador Dali. I wasn’t paying attention. I was worried that my mind was fizzling out.
The lights came on. My friend said, “What did you guys think?”
“It was really cool,” she said. “When I was a little girl my father made robots and once he worked on a similar project. I really can’t wait to tell him about this. What did you think Pink?”
“So,” I said. “They are robots stimulated by brain tissue?”
“What?” she said.
“I mean. How did they make decisions?”
“You didn’t understand it?” She looked at me horrified.
I walked her home in the night. She was on her phone. “Dad! I saw a movie that reminded me of you.” She held my hand.
I joined her in the cafeteria where she laughed with her dozen friends. I didn’t pay any attention and didn’t understand their inside jokes. She looked at me with girlish eyes and said, “Are you okay? You seem bored.”
“I’m just kind of tired. I have to go finish some work.”
“Okay.”
On the train I read her letter. She said, “I don’t like that you don’t talk to my friends. I have to tell them that you don’t hate them. They’re important to me just like you are important to me. I know you want to meet my parents but I can’t let you meet them until you at least talk to my friends.”
I walked into the school gym which was filled with hundreds of people in white t-shirts that said Relay for Life. It was a cancer fundraiser. I spoke to my friend until Beatrice saw me. She was wearing the white t-shirt and no shoes. She asked, “Are you staying the whole night?”
“No. I just came to give you this letter.”
“Aw, stay the whole night.”
“The trip to the Climate Change Exhibit is ten tomorrow morning,” I said.
“So. We can just get coffee after this and then go from here.” Then she gave me sad puppy eyes.
I sighed. “For you I will stay.”
A woman said to me, “You’re going to walk laps around the gym in those boots?”
I sat down with Beatrice’s friends in their circle of some 15 people. They were playing cards and joking. “Hey,” I said to Beatrice. “I’m going to talk to my friend.”
My friend Wanda was one of the organizers of the event. “Wanda,” I said. “What can I do to help?”
“Do you want to run the popcorn machine?”
“Okay.”
Beatrice came to me where I was reading my astronomy text book at the machine. I loved my astronomy class. “Why won’t you come hang out with my friends?” she said.
“I’m volunteering.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to. I won’t be here all night.”
“I’ll stay here with you,” she said sadly.
“I’m boring Beatrice. Go hang out with your friends.”
She sullenly left.
When I returned to her I took a short story from my bag to show her. “Look,” I said. “Someone in my class wrote this. I want you to read it.”
After ten minutes she said, “Can I show you all the typos you missed?”
“That wasn’t the point!” I yelled and snatched the story from her and went back to Wanda.
As the people dispersed I cleaned up debris around the gym and she said bye to her friends. I struggled to remove a blue balloon from a paperweight because it was her favorite color. When I gave it to her she said, “Aw. Thank you.”
We walked into the dawn. “I’m really cold,” she said.
“Take my jacket.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
“Let’s get coffee.”
“I’m going to go home.”
“Don’t go home. Come to the exhibit.”
“I don’t think we’re getting along very well right now.”
“Yea but you should still come to the exhibit. It’s about Climate Change.”
“I’ll go another time.”
I sighed. “You might as well go this time so you end up going for sure.”
“Bye Pink,” she said and left.
I walked to another part of campus and sat at a picnic table. After a while of quiet a blue balloon appeared. It floated under a ceiling and in between two walls where I watched it float off into the sky.
Amy said into the conference call, “Janine, You’re going to put up flyers tomorrow. Avery and Pink are going to leaflet from twelve to two. Does every one know what they’re doing for the rest of the week?”
“It’s going to rain on Earth Day,” Said Janine.
“It’s suppose to rain on Wednesday, which is the world’s Earth Day. Our Earth Day is Thursday, which should be sunny. Our events are inside on Wednesday and at 2 people are walking out of class to protest the budget cuts. I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to walk out.”
“Me too,” I said.
I wrote a text message asking people to volunteer for CCNY Earth Day and went through my address book clicking on names to send it to. When I got to Beatrice I hesitated. She had been at a couple of our meetings. She helped make flyers. But she hadn’t been helping at all for the past two weeks and we had hardly spoken. I skipped over her name and then I stopped again. “On the other hand,” I thought, “Just because she’s my girlfriend doesn’t mean she isn’t a person. It doesn’t mean I should exclude her from volunteering on Earth Day.” I scrolled back up and clicked on her name, counter-intuitively.
On the world’s Earth Day, I walked out of my astronomy class into the rain. Amongst the 150 people, someone gave me a sign and I stood up on a bench holding it over my head. I spotted Beatrice with her friends. They were standing outside of the rally talking. I got down and approached her.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“I know. Can I come to your building tonight after six?”
“Sure.”
I returned to the bench. I watched her and her friends walk away. “Does she not agree with this?” I wondered. “Why has she never discussed her feelings about this? Does she think I’m some sort of follower? Does she think I’m too political? Is it because her friends don’t care?”
The next day Avery helped me clean up on the sunny day in front of the school when the CCNY Earth Day dispersed. “I can’t believe it’s finally over,” she said.
“It’s never over,” I said. “But we can sleep tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Where do you go now?”
“I have to talk to Beatrice. I guess me and her are over too.”
“Oh what happened?”
“Oh um… I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”
I sat on the bench in front of her building. Her small form emerged into the windy, leaf swirling, late afternoon. I leaned back, exhausted, arms stretched out on the bench. She sat a foot away from me without touching me, her knees together, both hands on her knees, facing forward and looking down. “I think we should just be friends Pink.”
I was quiet. I watched her hair blow in the wind and her sad, almost indifferent face. It was surreal to hear her say that so certainly after such a short period of time. Just two months earlier she still looked at me with stars in her eyes and wrote as if she didn’t deserve me in her letters.
“Why?” I asked, sincerely.
“We’re just too different. We have nothing in common.”
I knew this was compensation for a longer story that she’d rather not say. Obviously, amongst the whole world, or the whole school, we had hardly different sentimentalities. “She just doesn’t think I love her back,” I thought. “I could get on my knees and tell her that she’s being stupid and that would probably work… but I’m pretty tired, and I don’t mind if my life changes right now.” I was amazed that she still wasn’t looking at me. “Don’t think that I don’t love you just because I’ve been so busy lately,” I said. “When the time comes, no one is important to me. People are replaced by the whole of the world.”
She was still quiet.
“But I thought about something today. Because it was Earth Day. I’ve been so frantic lately and especially today. I think to really appreciate nature you have to relax, like the people of pre-modern times who tended the fields all day.”
“They had it hard,” she said. “They worried about basic survival every day.”
“But I think it’s better to live on the edge of death, to be poor and to live benignly amongst nature.”
“People weren’t happy in those times, I assure you,” she said.
“I’m glad we’re having this discussion. I think we were lacking this.”
“I have to go,” she said. She stood up without touching me and walked inside at the same pace that she came out and with the same sullen grace. Somewhat awed, I watched her disappear.
That night I read her dozen or more letters and closed the lid on the little box. I turned off my lamp and the solar powered lamp that she bought me for Beatmas (she was born on Christmas) automatically turned on and illuminated the picture she drew of me and her laying in the grass, hearts floating up into the sun. I walked outside and in a courtyard I was suddenly struck by the sight of bats fluttering in the trees.
In the library of CCNY I sat on a couch a space away from a familiar dark skinned girl, hair almost over one of her eyes. I wrote in my note book a few minutes and then noticed she was playing Sudoku. “How do you do that so well?” I asked.
She was startled. “What?” she whispered.
“You’re finishing that Sudoku. I’ve been playing every night this week and I can never finish. Is there some sort of trick?”
“I write the numbers on top,” she said with a very delicate, crispy, whispery voice. “And I cross them out as I get them so I can see clearly what I need.”
“You finished the crossword puzzle too.”
“Yea. I usually do.”
“What’s your name?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Beatrice.”
“Hi Beatrice.” She was very short, just over five feet tall. I’d been seeing her around and smiling at her for weeks and she always smiled back. “I’m Pink. What else do you do?”
“What?”
“What else do you do?”
“Um. What do you mean?”
“Besides Sudoku and crossword?”
“I draw. Um, and I make comics.”
“Cool,” I said.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“I’m planning out the next few hours,” I said.
“I would never do that.”
“No? Hm. What do you make comics about?”
“My comics?”
“Yea.”
“Um. Well they’re just about things that happen.”
“What is it that you like about comics?” I asked.
She looked away from me and said, “I like how the illustrator draws particular parts of the story but decides what to leave out. I like that.”
I stared at her as she stared forward, as if she were protecting herself from further inquiries.
“It was good to meet you Beatrice. I will… see you around.”
She smiled at me. “Bye,” she whispered.
The book fair was set up in our campus, a roped off area of shelves with unwanted, cheap books. I saw Beatrice walking by it. “Beatrice!” I called.
She had a corduroy bag with buttons on the strap at her side and was holding a book with both arms against her chest. “Hi Pink,” she said smiling.
“Have you seen the book fair?” I asked.
“No. Is that where you’re going?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
“Okay.”
She followed me through the shelves. “Hey look,” I said. “The Bhagavad Gita. Cool.” She watched me flip through the pages. “Have you ever seen these pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t they cool?”
“Are you going to buy it?”
“No. I have it already just not with pictures.”
She followed me to another shelf. “Hey, look at this,” I said.
“What?”
“It looks like letters between Jack Kerouac and some lady.”
I bought it for a dollar and walked her to class, picking up the black school paper on the way.
“I read your article,” she said.
“The one about the water crisis?” I asked.
“Oh no. The one about going green.”
“Oh yes. The true way to go green,” I said, “is to protest.”
“A guy in my class,” she said, “told me he went to a protest at Baruch College against the budget cuts to CUNY.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m part of that.”
“Those things aren’t publicized enough though. In Paris they started charging tuition at this school and the whole city shut down because so many people were in the street. I think that was beautiful.”
Beatrice and I walked up the big white steps inside the middle of the Met Museum. “Remember that book?” I asked her.
“Which one?”
“The letters between Kerouac and that woman.”
“From the book fair.”
“Yea. I’ve been reading it.” I felt extremely empty because I had nothing else to say.
She took my hand and led me towards the exhibit. The sign said, “Love and the Renaissance.” There were extremely colorful paintings of semi nude people in natural settings surrounded by angels. There were flowers and sometimes alters. Beatrice let go of my hand and jotted notes in her book.
“I think the main thing,” I said, “was that before this time men would marry women by force you know? It was like a form of property and in the renaissance they wanted to make love the central thing and like always, emphasize chastity.” There was a painting of cupid sneaking behind someone in the shadow, putting his mischievous finger to his lips.
We walked through the knight’s armor. “Look how short people were back then,” she said.
“Yea.”
“I’d like a pendant of my own,” she said.
“What’s a pendant?”
“It’s that logo on their chest. See.”
“What would yours look like?”
“It would be a panda with a spear riding a unicorn over a banner that says ‘Go Team Beatrice.’” She giggled.
I wandered into the Asiatic room by myself. The walls were turquoise and the items were wooden.
“Pink,” called her soft voice from the room before me. I felt as if time had stopped.
She held my hand and we looked at a small statue of a fruit bat. “I was at this psychic Reiki healer recently,” I said. “And she told me that she saw this image of a bat while healing me, and that bats to her symbolize transformation.”
“That sounds correct,” she said. “I have a bat tattooed on my back.”
“Can I see?”
“Mm,” she considered it reluctantly. She lifted the back of her shirt. There was a cartoonish bat.
Outside it began to rain so I opened my umbrella. Half of it was broken and hung down so I held the remaining half over both of us, holding her close. “You’re ridiculous,” she laughed.
“So,” I said.
“You can just hold it over yourself.”
“Why? You’d get wet.”
We stopped at a corner for a red light. She was looking across the street and without second thought I kissed her.
On the train I wrote her a stream-of-consciousness letter, read it once and folded it four ways. When she wrote back she said, “I admit that this is my fifth try at writing this letter. I also admit that you make me extremely nervous. I’m also trying to write in pencil because as you say, it’s more sustainable although I have my skepticism about that.”
She walked with me from bulletin board to bulletin board. I held the thumbtacks and she held the posters. She lifted them up from the bottom as high as she could and I tacked them on top.
“That’s the last poster,” she said.
“Good. It’s been good to poster with you and that’s everything on my list.”
“Thank you Pink.”
I took my little notepad out of my pocket and scratched “Posters” off. “Oh no!” I shouted.
“What?” she asked.
“What time is it?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s 4:50.”
“I have ten minutes to submit my entry for the writing contest.”
“So what do you have to do?”
“Run. Can you come with me?”
“Okay.” We ran to the computer lab. I printed the story while she read the contest rules. “You’re supposed to number the pages,” she said, “and write the name of the award you’re competing for on the front page.”
“Fuck!” I yelled.
Soon we were running, holding hands, up the broken down escalators. I ran into the English department sweating, right up to one of the advisors and handed the manuscript to her.
“You’re ten minutes late Pink Noche,” she said in her Russian accent.
Beatrice came walking in.
“Will you accept it anyway?” I said, heaving.
“Yes,” said the advisor. “But this is the last time.”
Beatrice broke into laughter, leaning on her knees and I smiled, took her hand and walked out of the department.
“Who’s this girl?” asked my mother washing a dish in the sink. I leaned against the counter, legs crossed, hands in my pocket watching her go back and forth from the sink to the other counter, letting the water run.
“Mom, you shouldn’t let the water run,” I said.
“What, I’m doing dishes.”
“She’s from school.”
“What school? Your school?”
“Yes. CCNY. My school. What’s sort of interesting is around the time that I met her I bought this book.”
“Yea?” she said, cleaning a knife.
“There’s a parallel because it’s a compilation of letters between this woman when she was dating Jack Kerouac in 1957. Kerouac was older than her. I’m older than this girl, Beatrice. She lived in Morning Side and this girl, Beatrice lives in Morning Side. This woman and Beatrice went to the same high school.”
My mother transferred to the counter, letting the water run. She said, “So?”
I reached over and turned off the sink.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“You’re wasting water.”
“I’m trying to do dishes!”
“I’ll do the dishes.”
“Okay. Do them. Anyway, I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Well the other thing is Beatrice is kind of shy like the girl in the book.”
“Well, that’s okay. She does talk doesn’t she?
“Never mind mom.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yea. We’ve been going out now.”
I was typing on a computer in a small office covered in all sorts of maps, posters that said things like, “Take Action” or with images such as wind turbines. There was a knock at the door. I let Beatrice in and shut the door behind her. “So this is where you save the planet?” she said.
“Well so far I’ve only done extremely local and more health-based environmental issues. I’ve only just began to focus Climate Change. I’ve been working extremely incessantly on it.” She sat on the couch. I turned on a lamp and turned the main light off. I turned off the computer screen and sat next to her. Strangely, some R&B music played through the walls.
I gave her the next letter and she said, “Thank you. I really like reading your letters.”
“I like the drawings you put in mine,” I said. “And you say really insightful things.”
“Thank you.” She leaned against me and said, “Pink. I really like you.”
“I like you.”
“Only, you make me extremely nervous. I had this dream of you the other night. You were in some sort of parade. I was squeezing through to see you. It was like you had super powers or something.”
“Hm,” I said. “I don’t think I have any super powers. I can do this funny dance though.”
“And do you remember meeting me?” she asked.
“I remember seeing you walking by and smiling back at me.”
“No. Before that. Do you remember you helped me register to vote?”
“Oh. Oh I registered hundreds of people to vote this year. I even stood on the street in Harlem and registered people, and in the subway.”
“It was at a table outside. I thought you were in your late twenties.”
“Late twenties?”
“Yea. It’s embarrassing. I realized you were a student when I saw you inside and realized you were probably 25 years old. And I was holding a cupcake and you smiled at me and I bumped right into this woman and dropped the cupcake on the floor,” she giggled. “Then in the library when you so randomly talked to me, and I don’t know why you did by the way, I realized that you looked extremely young and that you were probably only 20 years old.”
I laughed. I wondered what the deal was with this girl. Most people thought I looked younger than I was. Most girls seemed to think I was too funky or gay or skinny or too nice. I thought to myself, “This Beatrice is not human.” I didn’t think I was looking for anyone gentle and good. I thought I was looking for someone weird and outgoing. Beatrice fell asleep on me. I watched her breathe for an hour. She was like a flower.
Part 2.
“Wake up,” I said. She lifted her head from me in the darkness of the bus and the night. “We’re here.”
A group of five of us walked into a hotel room where one friend already was. She greeted us enthusiastically in her Russian accent. “The opening ceremony was so great!” she said. “It was spiritual and like we were all one.”
“Too bad we missed it,” my friend Amy said.
Immediately Beatrice and I curled up together on a bed. “They’re tired,” said Amy. “Louie’s going to be here tomorrow. He’ll miss all the workshops but he’ll be here Monday to lobby.”
“That’s good,” said the Russian girl.
Thousands of people our age swarmed every where in the Convention Center, many in green t-shirts. The seven of us met by a large Rosetta Stone-square block with every alphabet carved out and the shadows of the alphabets projected onto us. We all had name tag necklaces on. “So how was everyone’s workshop?” Amy said.
Beatrice said, “Janine and I went to one about global politics and Climate Change. It really helped me understand things.”
“I went to one about food,” I said. “They had to divide it into two workshops it was so popular.”
Beatrice whispered to me, “Pink, I want to go to the last one with you.” It was Sunday and we hadn’t attended any together in the two days. “I was thinking we could go to ‘Art and Activism.’”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
She held my hand on an island in the middle of Times Square. Someone gave her a jar and said, “Be very careful with this. It’s coal sludge. It’s very toxic.” The 100 of us marched one block to a hotel chanting, “Clean Coal’s a Dirty Joke/Watch Your Profits go Up in Smoke.” We circled in front of a hotel where a coal company was having a black tie affair. Beatrice handed flyers to people passing by. One woman shook her head at us in disgust.
As the sun set we walked out of the dispersing rally and I asked her, “Do you want to meet my friend at an exhibit on robot-art?”
On the screen the robot drew all sorts of patterns. “The robot makes its own decisions,” said the narrator. My arm was around Beatrice in the dark theatre. My friend had a mustache like Salvador Dali. I wasn’t paying attention. I was worried that my mind was fizzling out.
The lights came on. My friend said, “What did you guys think?”
“It was really cool,” she said. “When I was a little girl my father made robots and once he worked on a similar project. I really can’t wait to tell him about this. What did you think Pink?”
“So,” I said. “They are robots stimulated by brain tissue?”
“What?” she said.
“I mean. How did they make decisions?”
“You didn’t understand it?” She looked at me horrified.
I walked her home in the night. She was on her phone. “Dad! I saw a movie that reminded me of you.” She held my hand.
I joined her in the cafeteria where she laughed with her dozen friends. I didn’t pay any attention and didn’t understand their inside jokes. She looked at me with girlish eyes and said, “Are you okay? You seem bored.”
“I’m just kind of tired. I have to go finish some work.”
“Okay.”
On the train I read her letter. She said, “I don’t like that you don’t talk to my friends. I have to tell them that you don’t hate them. They’re important to me just like you are important to me. I know you want to meet my parents but I can’t let you meet them until you at least talk to my friends.”
I walked into the school gym which was filled with hundreds of people in white t-shirts that said Relay for Life. It was a cancer fundraiser. I spoke to my friend until Beatrice saw me. She was wearing the white t-shirt and no shoes. She asked, “Are you staying the whole night?”
“No. I just came to give you this letter.”
“Aw, stay the whole night.”
“The trip to the Climate Change Exhibit is ten tomorrow morning,” I said.
“So. We can just get coffee after this and then go from here.” Then she gave me sad puppy eyes.
I sighed. “For you I will stay.”
A woman said to me, “You’re going to walk laps around the gym in those boots?”
I sat down with Beatrice’s friends in their circle of some 15 people. They were playing cards and joking. “Hey,” I said to Beatrice. “I’m going to talk to my friend.”
My friend Wanda was one of the organizers of the event. “Wanda,” I said. “What can I do to help?”
“Do you want to run the popcorn machine?”
“Okay.”
Beatrice came to me where I was reading my astronomy text book at the machine. I loved my astronomy class. “Why won’t you come hang out with my friends?” she said.
“I’m volunteering.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to. I won’t be here all night.”
“I’ll stay here with you,” she said sadly.
“I’m boring Beatrice. Go hang out with your friends.”
She sullenly left.
When I returned to her I took a short story from my bag to show her. “Look,” I said. “Someone in my class wrote this. I want you to read it.”
After ten minutes she said, “Can I show you all the typos you missed?”
“That wasn’t the point!” I yelled and snatched the story from her and went back to Wanda.
As the people dispersed I cleaned up debris around the gym and she said bye to her friends. I struggled to remove a blue balloon from a paperweight because it was her favorite color. When I gave it to her she said, “Aw. Thank you.”
We walked into the dawn. “I’m really cold,” she said.
“Take my jacket.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
“Let’s get coffee.”
“I’m going to go home.”
“Don’t go home. Come to the exhibit.”
“I don’t think we’re getting along very well right now.”
“Yea but you should still come to the exhibit. It’s about Climate Change.”
“I’ll go another time.”
I sighed. “You might as well go this time so you end up going for sure.”
“Bye Pink,” she said and left.
I walked to another part of campus and sat at a picnic table. After a while of quiet a blue balloon appeared. It floated under a ceiling and in between two walls where I watched it float off into the sky.
Amy said into the conference call, “Janine, You’re going to put up flyers tomorrow. Avery and Pink are going to leaflet from twelve to two. Does every one know what they’re doing for the rest of the week?”
“It’s going to rain on Earth Day,” Said Janine.
“It’s suppose to rain on Wednesday, which is the world’s Earth Day. Our Earth Day is Thursday, which should be sunny. Our events are inside on Wednesday and at 2 people are walking out of class to protest the budget cuts. I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to walk out.”
“Me too,” I said.
I wrote a text message asking people to volunteer for CCNY Earth Day and went through my address book clicking on names to send it to. When I got to Beatrice I hesitated. She had been at a couple of our meetings. She helped make flyers. But she hadn’t been helping at all for the past two weeks and we had hardly spoken. I skipped over her name and then I stopped again. “On the other hand,” I thought, “Just because she’s my girlfriend doesn’t mean she isn’t a person. It doesn’t mean I should exclude her from volunteering on Earth Day.” I scrolled back up and clicked on her name, counter-intuitively.
On the world’s Earth Day, I walked out of my astronomy class into the rain. Amongst the 150 people, someone gave me a sign and I stood up on a bench holding it over my head. I spotted Beatrice with her friends. They were standing outside of the rally talking. I got down and approached her.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“I know. Can I come to your building tonight after six?”
“Sure.”
I returned to the bench. I watched her and her friends walk away. “Does she not agree with this?” I wondered. “Why has she never discussed her feelings about this? Does she think I’m some sort of follower? Does she think I’m too political? Is it because her friends don’t care?”
The next day Avery helped me clean up on the sunny day in front of the school when the CCNY Earth Day dispersed. “I can’t believe it’s finally over,” she said.
“It’s never over,” I said. “But we can sleep tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Where do you go now?”
“I have to talk to Beatrice. I guess me and her are over too.”
“Oh what happened?”
“Oh um… I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”
I sat on the bench in front of her building. Her small form emerged into the windy, leaf swirling, late afternoon. I leaned back, exhausted, arms stretched out on the bench. She sat a foot away from me without touching me, her knees together, both hands on her knees, facing forward and looking down. “I think we should just be friends Pink.”
I was quiet. I watched her hair blow in the wind and her sad, almost indifferent face. It was surreal to hear her say that so certainly after such a short period of time. Just two months earlier she still looked at me with stars in her eyes and wrote as if she didn’t deserve me in her letters.
“Why?” I asked, sincerely.
“We’re just too different. We have nothing in common.”
I knew this was compensation for a longer story that she’d rather not say. Obviously, amongst the whole world, or the whole school, we had hardly different sentimentalities. “She just doesn’t think I love her back,” I thought. “I could get on my knees and tell her that she’s being stupid and that would probably work… but I’m pretty tired, and I don’t mind if my life changes right now.” I was amazed that she still wasn’t looking at me. “Don’t think that I don’t love you just because I’ve been so busy lately,” I said. “When the time comes, no one is important to me. People are replaced by the whole of the world.”
She was still quiet.
“But I thought about something today. Because it was Earth Day. I’ve been so frantic lately and especially today. I think to really appreciate nature you have to relax, like the people of pre-modern times who tended the fields all day.”
“They had it hard,” she said. “They worried about basic survival every day.”
“But I think it’s better to live on the edge of death, to be poor and to live benignly amongst nature.”
“People weren’t happy in those times, I assure you,” she said.
“I’m glad we’re having this discussion. I think we were lacking this.”
“I have to go,” she said. She stood up without touching me and walked inside at the same pace that she came out and with the same sullen grace. Somewhat awed, I watched her disappear.
That night I read her dozen or more letters and closed the lid on the little box. I turned off my lamp and the solar powered lamp that she bought me for Beatmas (she was born on Christmas) automatically turned on and illuminated the picture she drew of me and her laying in the grass, hearts floating up into the sun. I walked outside and in a courtyard I was suddenly struck by the sight of bats fluttering in the trees.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Gates of Margo
2/2010
Someone once told me, “17, that’s when everything goes wrong.” It seems that when I started hanging out with Margo I literally drove into some other world when I was 17 and then drove out of it when I was 18. These transitions happened in events that seem to me like two gates.
1. Mount Misery
After a few months of driving a car and hanging out with Margo, often while she would run into a store for a scratch-off and a Dutch cigar, I’d sit there in my own world, skinny, pale, sleepless, with a prophetic feeling that we were within hours of death, I would stare at the same, dull, Long Island roads aligned with soulless houses and strip malls.
Margo was just over five feet tall. She had black hair with pink ends, a ring in the middle of her nose, she was pale, showed cleavage where she’d stick her money, wore colorful shoes, tight jeans, a tight hoodie zipped up halfway, thick, black, rectangular framed glasses, had long, red finger nails, had drawn on, high arched eyebrows, and would walk fast and usually talk fast and incessantly. I was a skinny boy that looked young for my age. My head was all shaved except for 2/3rds of my scalp, a big patch of hair that hung almost to my shoulder and had blonde streaks in it that were always dyed one color or another. I wore black, blue or red eyeliner, sometimes big circles drawn around one eye. I wore some colorful, striped shirts from the thrift store or black band t-shirts. I cut thumb holes into my long sleeves.
Margo would get back in the passenger’s seat and gutting the Dutch Cigar out of the slightly open door while telling me, “We have to get Lance, but I’m going to say to him that I have to be home at five, because that’s when we could get the yay from Patty and I don’t want to share it with him.” I’d reach past my coffee, water and red bull and put on the oldies station.
She got the way to move, me Cherry
(She got the way to groove me)
(She got the way to move me) Cherry baby
(She got the way to groove me) Alright
We were in my car in a parking lot before midnight, behind an elementary school. Margo’s red fingernails pointed upwards as she played a geometric puzzle on her phone. I was reading Allen Ginsberg’s Pocket Book of Poetry.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
“What are we doing?” Margo said in a complaining drone.
“I don’t mind just talking,” I said while reading.
She was quiet. Then she said, “Let’s go to Mount Misery.”
I rose from the book. “Mount Misery? I drove so much today Margo.”
“But I have to be home in an hour. I want to do something before the night is over,” she said.
“I just don’t want to drive all the way over there. It would be more climactic for me to not drive for two seconds,” I said.
“Okay. Do you have any pot at your house?” she asked.
“Well. Yes. But my mother’s going to ask me what I’m doing. I’d rather just not go into my house.”
“I don’t want to finish these lines here. I want to finish them at Mount Misery.”
“Why do you like that place so much anyway?” I asked.
“I feel good there. There’s something comforting about it,” she said.
I drove off in disbelief that I was actually embarking on that trip. On the highway I put on what I called moon glasses. They highlighted colors but made darkness darker. The lights looked like yellow stars through them and the darkness dark like space. Margo was quiet from crashing. 50 Cent was playing on the radio.
Look homie, I don’t dance. All I do is this.
It’s the same two-step wit a lil’ twist.
Listen pimpin’, I aint new to this. I’m true to this.
Pay attention boy, I teach how to do this shit.
Mount Misery was a long, narrow, windy, inclined path through some woods off the turnpike. There was little light and cars needed to drive very slowly to get through. We drove shortly in and parked at the gate for a small cemetery. After we snorted two short lines, a rowdy car of Goths stopped behind us on the road. One gothic girl got out and the jokesters went off without her. We were getting out anyway for fresh air. Margot and the girl talked and I went into the graveyard to pee. As I unzipped near a grave, I heard dashing. The trees shook in the woods and through my moon glasses I saw footprints in the bright, yellow-glowing snow.
After I returned we all went for a walk in the cemetery. “I think I saw someone run into the woods,” I said.
“No you didn’t,” said Margo.
“It’s probably that guy that tries to scare everyone,” said the girl.
“You mean that guy,” Margo said, “Who drives that beat corvette really fast through the path?”
“Yea. Weird things are more likely to happen to you hear when I’m around because I tend to put bad luck on people.”
“Really?” asked Margo. “Maybe you should walk a little bit farther away. No, I’m just kidding.”
“It’s true though,” she continued. “Terrible things happen to people when I meet them.”
“I wouldn’t even know darling,” Margo said. “Crazy things are always happening to me anyway. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
The car of goths was waiting at the gait. The girl kissed Margo and said goodbye. The car took off and Margo said to me, “So are you ready to do one monster line at the top of the hill and then we’ll drive home?”
I nodded.
We drove up to the top of the hill, where the path ended. Margot sorted the coke. I said, “Sorry Margo. It’s been rap all night.” I switched the station to classic rock.
Yeah, keep your eyes on the road, your hands up on the whe-el
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands up on the whe-el
Going to the road house, gonna have a re-al,
good time
After our lines we rubbed the ends of cigarettes in the coke bag, lit the cigarettes and cruised down the hill and rounded the bend. The first drag of the cigarette tasted sweet and satisfactorily poisonous.
Let it roll, baby roll
I cruised a little faster. A truck came at us. I drove around it onto some ice and, screaming, we slammed into a tree; Margot’s window shattered on both of us and my head slammed against the steering wheel. The music had stopped: I yelled, “Margo!
“Wait! I can’t find-“
“Margo, are you alright!”
“Stop yelling! I can’t find my glasses!”
There was glass in my mouth. The windshield was broken. My moon glasses and cigarette had flown somewhere.
“I found them,” she said. “Pink, there’s glass in my mouth.”
“Me too.”
“Is my face bloody?” she asked. There were cuts on her face that were only bleeding a little bit.
“You have some cuts but it’s not so bad.”
“I’m going to call the police,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t drive this car.”
“Shit,” she said. “I have to go bury my razor blade and the bag.” She got out of the car.
With shaky hands I dialed 911. “Hi I just crashed my car on Sweet Hollow Road.”
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“No.” While talking I saw Margo talking with people at a car that had been coming our way. At the end of the call I ran out towards them.
“These are my friends,” she said to me. “This is Pink.”
“Are you okay man?” said the driver.
“Yea man! We crashed to Roadhouse Blues, which is pretty ideal.”
“You’re fucked up Pink,” Margot said. “You’re going to be like what the fuck in a minute.”
I turned back to look at the car. The whole front was bent inwards. I went in the car to see if there was anything I needed. Margo’s friends took off
and she got in the car. “They’re going to come back to drive us home,” she said. “They just need to drop people off first.”
“Cool.”
“Did you call your mother’s boyfriend?”
“No. No, no, no.”
After a minute I said, “Margo.”
“What?”
“Just before we crashed, I had a vision of a woman in a white gown screaming in the woods.”
“Really?”
“Yea.”
“What did she look like?”
“She had black hair. She was in her forties.”
“Cool.”
The police car came, it’s red and blue lights flashing on the trees. The officer gave me a report to fill out. Margot called her grandmother while I narrated the whole story excluding the cocaine and the moon glasses.
“Hi Grandma,” she said. “Yeah. Listen. Pink and I got in an accident. We’re okay and my friends are going to drive us home.
“Just some cuts,” she said. “Yea, I think so.” She turned and asked me, “Are you okay?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, he’s okay. He’s just has this gash between his eyes.” I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the big, red bump and a dry line of blood
between my eyes.
For some reason the police had us stand outside but didn’t invite us into their car. We were cold, standing on the edge of the haunted woods. I prayed that all of the ghosts in the woods would come out and scare the police. There was a thick, 12-foot branch hanging from a nearby tree, dangling by a thread. I walked over and pushed it. It swung slightly.
The cops left when Margot’s friends came and we got in her friend’s car. “You can drop Margo off first,” I said.
“Is she closer?” the driver asked.
“I need to be home,” Margo said.
“How long have you had that car?” the driver asked.
“I’ve been borrowing it from my mother’s boyfriend.”
“Shit. Does he have another car?”
“Yes.”
At home, my mother was on the couch with the light on, the TV on and she was folding laundry into a basket. I sat on the other couch. “I crashed Bruce’s car,” I said.
“You what? You crashed Bruce’s Car? Are you okay? You could have died! Were you drinking? You could have died, Pink. You could be dead! Were
you on drugs? Who was there?”
“It was just Margo and I. We didn’t drink or smoke anything.”
“Is Margo okay? Do I have to call her grandparents?”
“She’s fine. She just has a few cuts on her face.”
“They could sue us Pink. Don’t you understand? Now I have to deal with that! You better call Bruce. Where’s the car?”
“It was towed.”
“Towed? That costs money. Why didn’t you call Bruce?”
“I just didn’t want to tell you yet.”
“You don’t respect Bruce. He does so much for you and you disrespect him. Call him right now.”
I called him. He said, “Hey buddy. Aren’t you with Margo? What’s up?”
“I’m sorry. I crashed the car.”
“Oh shit. Are you and your friend okay?”
“Yea but the car is wrecked.”
“Are you in it now?”
“No. I got a ride home.”
“So you’re with your mother?”
“Yes,” I said unintentionally dreadfully.
“Oh god. Is she flipping a shit?”
“Yes,” I said rubbing the back of my neck, looking over at my mother faulding clothes and muttering to herself.
“So it’s not possible to be driven,” he stated as a question.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Where’d you crash?”
“Into a tree on the side of this really dark road. The path was so narrow and I went around this truck and got caught on the ice.”
“Where?”
“It’s called Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington.”
My mother said, “What were you doing in Huntington?”
Bruce continued, “Sweet Hollow Road. What were you doing there?”
“It’s just like a place to go because we were bored. It’s just like a haunted road.”
“Okay,” said my mother, irritated. “Give me the phone.” I gave her the phone and got up but she said, “Sit down. You don’t go anywhere.” Then she
sat down and said, “He’s fine. He’s just stupid. He could have died and he doesn’t have any respect or appreciation that you let him borrow the car.”
Then she said to him, “Yeah, but you know what? It’s not fare. How many kids have to fucking die because they don’t give a shit? Okay. Okay. I have
to go. You too. Bye.”
I looked at her and she looked at me. She asked me, “What is wrong with you?”
I shrugged. “I’m a terrible person. I should die.”
“No. You’re just disrespectful. God.” She fumbled trying to put a thought together and then finally said, “I don’t know anymore. You know what? Go
away. Get out of my face.”
In my room there was an Exorcist movie poster on the wall of the possessed girl and her green, scarred, cold face. I tore it off the wall, crumpled it
up and threw it into the closet. I took the lid off my stereo and opened the triple CD cartridge. I reached beneath it and pulled out a glasses case. I sat
on my bed taking a bowl out of the glasses case and a dime bag, crumpled a big weed nug in the bowl and took a drag. I sat there for a moment thinking about whether anything really happened at Mount Misery that would cause me to still feel terrorized by everything around me, or if I was just torturing myself from infantile projections. Why was it that I still felt as though I was in the woods?
The worst thing that could possibly happen has happened and now I’m still here and this life is really still happening. Do I really have to feel what all of these conditions dictate that I feel? Can I just be happy anyway even if everyone around me tells me that I’m in deep shit and am fucked forever?
What if I watch TV? Can I shake Mount Misery off me if I just sit here in the dark?
I looked at the room, already bored with the same old life that I had been living. It seemed like a good enough reason to look into another world for a little while. I turned on the TV and watched South Park, the extremely bright and colorful, two-dimensional cartoon with mocking-toned voice-overs. I ran down to the kitchen for munchies. On my jog back up the steps this female presence in my mind, some eternal consciousness that was not me but was within my awareness and was part of me suggested to me without words, happiness is always an option.
2. White Railings
Just over a year later I was nearing the end of my first year of college at some prestigious art school in Manhattan that I had already transferred my transcript from, to a public school somewhere else in the city and planned on moving in with my father partly to shorten the commute and partly to change my scenery. It was a Wednesday, the one day that I didn’t have work or school, and I was in my neighborhood driving my black Volkswagon Jetta through the wet, sunshiny day to meet a best friend of Margo’s that I had been dating since August. Jenna, my girlfriend, was a thin, Indian girl that wore tight jeans and tight red tank tops and listened to Jay-Z. She smoked long cigarettes and was mildly addicted to coke.
Earlier that morning I drove to the DMV in the rain, listening repeatedly to a Nine Inch Nails song from the early nineties. The DMV was in a town closer to Queens, in an area extremely dense, developed, industrial, beat and poured on by rain.
In this place it seems like such a shame.
Though it all looks different now,
I know it’s still the same.
Everywhere I look you’re all I see.
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be.
I sometimes wondered what it might have meant that a boy from a Jewish house and a girl from a Muslim house lived on opposite sides of a town border road called Jerusalem and were dating each other. I drove down Jerusalem, over the overpass and before I made it to her school to pick her up, (she was a senior in high school) I parked on a side street to wait for her to call me. Since the sun had come out, I decided to put on The Velvet Undergound, a band from the 60s, and some of their particularly raspy songs.
(White light), white light goin’ messin’ up my mind
(White light), and don’t you know it’s gonna make me go blind
(white heat), aww white heat it tickle me down to me toes
(White light,) Ooo have mercy white light have it goodness knows
After some 15 minutes after she didn’t call me or even pick up her phone, I decided to move from that spot. I drove the opposite direction towards my old high school on the other side of town. Of course when I got there kids were pouring out of the school to get home and walk dogs, go online, watch TV, smoke a bong, change for practice, go to work, watch porn or masturbate without it but with classmates on the mind or play the drums.
Escaping the 2:30 tangle, back on the road, I had to take two long roads, 106, the main road of my early life, and at the end, Jerusalem. Down 106,
I turned up the song, Sister Ray. It was the longest Velvet Underground song. The guitar played one riff repeatedly, an electric viola squeeled, the singer droned on nonchalantly.
Doug and Sally inside
They cookin’ for the Down Pipe
Who’s staring at Miss Rayon
Who’s busy licking off her Pig Pen
Seemed down at Jerusalem there was one massive, black cloud in the sky. Now I wasn’t sure whether I was heading for Jenna or not. My cell sat neutrally in the cup holder not vibrating.
By the middle of Sister Ray I was turning on Jerusalem.
Cecil’s got his new piece
He cocks it shoots it between three and four
He aims it at the sailor
Shoots him down dead on the floor
I drove down past my street and I drove past the yard of my old elementary school and I drove to the border of 3 towns where cars were all
cramming to a slow down onto the overpass because there was a light right after it. I slowed at the slope and it occurred to me to drive left and see some friends at my old job, for they certainly showed more love for me than my girlfriend. While I contemplated whether turn left of go forwards, the black cloud either moved or broke and a shaft of light illuminated the wet, vertical, white railings of the overpass. This inspired me to make the left to see my good old friends.
Now who is that knocking
Who’s knocking at my chamber door
Now could it be the police
They come and take me for a ride-ride
When I turned a car that I didn’t see drove into the front corner of my car: the air bag exploded in my face as I pressed down on the brake and the car spun. While it was spinning, in the silence of the silenced music, I recognized the feeling of the worst possible thing that could happen is happening, that I might not even survive, and I accepted it. When it stopped I pushed down the airbag and all I could see was bright light illuminating orange dust that flew up from the airbag. The bridge of my nose hurt as if I was punched. I pushed the door open but it would only open a fifth of the way. As I climbed out, both sets of my limbs hurt, even my cribs and shoulders, I said out loud, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord.” I then hoped that I was having an epiphany.
What’s the epiphany? Is my life changing?
There was the girl that collided with me, standing in front of her car, which was half off the road on the pass. It was apparent that she was a student from the high school. “I just bought that car!” she yelled.
“You’re alive,” I said, approaching her. “You’re alive. That’s good.”
“As her complaints faded out of my attention I walked like a withered tree to the sidewalk near her car and paced slowly back and forth. A man asked me if I was okay, a tough guy in Speedo shades and a windbreaker.
“I’m cool.”
Then he went to her. I called my mother.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I crashed at the intersection of Jerusalem and Loring. Car’s dead. I’m fine. A girl is mad.”
“Stay right there.”
As I waited I looked at my ruined car and laughed. Two young teenagers on bikes on the other sidewalk told me to stop laughing and past over the top of the hill.
An ambulance and my mother came. My mother just asked if I was hurt and if I was drinking. And, “Where’s Jenna?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed in a disgusted way and we went in the ambulance by invitation. We sat on boxes while a paramedic interviewed me. I took a yellow lollypop from my pocket and unwrapped it.
“Last name?”
“Noche.” I put the lollipop in my mouth.
“First name?”
“Pink.”
My mother was filling out a form.
“Any pain?” the paramedic asked.
“My ribs hurt, my leg, my arm.”
“Son. Please take that lollipop out of your mouth. It’s pretty disrespectful. This is a serious situation.”
I looked at him madly. My mother said, “Just take it out Pink.” I slow took it out. My mother said, “I don’t think this is necessary. I can take him to our doctor.”
“He could have a concussion mam.”
“Did you hit your head Pink?”
“The airbag hit me.”
“Do you feel dizzy?”
“No.”
“Yea. It will be cheaper if we go to our doctor. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure? Pink, speak up if you feel that your bones hurt severely.”
“I’m cool,” I shrugged and put the lollipop back in my mouth.
The Velvet Underground CD was stuck in the car stereo forever but I grabbed a roach joint from the car and got in my mother’s jeep. As we drove onto the road I spotted Jenna with some friend of her. “Can you pull over?,” I said, “It’s Jenna.” My mother pulled over a bit and Jenna came to my window.
“Hey,” she said, smiling.
“Hi.”
“Was that your crash up there?”
“Yea.”
“That looked bad. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Going to the doctor.”
“Did anyone else get hit?”
“Some girl. She’s okay.”
“Man. I was going to call you.”
“Whatever Jenna,” I said.
“I was just going to go to Erica’s first.”
My mother said, “Come on Pink.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
“I’ll call you later.”
I nodded and put my window up as we took off.
My mother said, “That girl is selfish. She only cares about herself.” For an instant I almost defended Jenna. “Lose that girl, Pink. Just focus on school
and don’t drive for a while. Take a cab to the train. There’s only a few weeks left.”
We drove in silence. Then she said, “Where were you going?”
“I was supposed to pick up Jenna an hour ago but she was a no-show so I was going to go to see my friends at the store instead.”
“I don’t even want to hear about that Jenna anymore. God forbid you should have a concussion. Hopefully we don’t get sued.”
There were two quiet magazine readers in the carpeted lobby. My mother leaned against the desk, keys in hand. “Hi. My son just had a car accident. He might have fractured some bones.”
I sat on the X-Ray table, my mother in the chair. The doctor was outside. My mother was in the dim. We were quiet. I looked ahead of the few
remaining weeks of school left without a car. I wondered how I was supposed to meet with Margo. I looked at how I was moving far away in a few months. It suddenly became clear that even if I wasn’t moving something was naturally steering me away from Margo anyway. I wanted to fight this thing, which seemed to be divinity. I wondered how I could fight it. It was going to win. I began to cry.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t worry about the car,” she said. “Is it the car? Hey,” she barked. “At least you survived.”
“I know. That’s what I said to that girl,” I wiped the tears from my cheeks. Tears went into my mouth.
Then after a moment I cried harder and covered my face.
“Are you okay Pink? Is it that selfish girl? Tell me. Look at me,” she continued. “Is school bothering you? Pink! Look at me…
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let it out. Let it out. Tell me when you’re ready.”
“It’s,” I muttered. “It’s because…”
“What?”
“Margo.” I looked at the floor. “I can’t be friends with Margo anymore.”
Someone once told me, “17, that’s when everything goes wrong.” It seems that when I started hanging out with Margo I literally drove into some other world when I was 17 and then drove out of it when I was 18. These transitions happened in events that seem to me like two gates.
1. Mount Misery
After a few months of driving a car and hanging out with Margo, often while she would run into a store for a scratch-off and a Dutch cigar, I’d sit there in my own world, skinny, pale, sleepless, with a prophetic feeling that we were within hours of death, I would stare at the same, dull, Long Island roads aligned with soulless houses and strip malls.
Margo was just over five feet tall. She had black hair with pink ends, a ring in the middle of her nose, she was pale, showed cleavage where she’d stick her money, wore colorful shoes, tight jeans, a tight hoodie zipped up halfway, thick, black, rectangular framed glasses, had long, red finger nails, had drawn on, high arched eyebrows, and would walk fast and usually talk fast and incessantly. I was a skinny boy that looked young for my age. My head was all shaved except for 2/3rds of my scalp, a big patch of hair that hung almost to my shoulder and had blonde streaks in it that were always dyed one color or another. I wore black, blue or red eyeliner, sometimes big circles drawn around one eye. I wore some colorful, striped shirts from the thrift store or black band t-shirts. I cut thumb holes into my long sleeves.
Margo would get back in the passenger’s seat and gutting the Dutch Cigar out of the slightly open door while telling me, “We have to get Lance, but I’m going to say to him that I have to be home at five, because that’s when we could get the yay from Patty and I don’t want to share it with him.” I’d reach past my coffee, water and red bull and put on the oldies station.
She got the way to move, me Cherry
(She got the way to groove me)
(She got the way to move me) Cherry baby
(She got the way to groove me) Alright
We were in my car in a parking lot before midnight, behind an elementary school. Margo’s red fingernails pointed upwards as she played a geometric puzzle on her phone. I was reading Allen Ginsberg’s Pocket Book of Poetry.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
“What are we doing?” Margo said in a complaining drone.
“I don’t mind just talking,” I said while reading.
She was quiet. Then she said, “Let’s go to Mount Misery.”
I rose from the book. “Mount Misery? I drove so much today Margo.”
“But I have to be home in an hour. I want to do something before the night is over,” she said.
“I just don’t want to drive all the way over there. It would be more climactic for me to not drive for two seconds,” I said.
“Okay. Do you have any pot at your house?” she asked.
“Well. Yes. But my mother’s going to ask me what I’m doing. I’d rather just not go into my house.”
“I don’t want to finish these lines here. I want to finish them at Mount Misery.”
“Why do you like that place so much anyway?” I asked.
“I feel good there. There’s something comforting about it,” she said.
I drove off in disbelief that I was actually embarking on that trip. On the highway I put on what I called moon glasses. They highlighted colors but made darkness darker. The lights looked like yellow stars through them and the darkness dark like space. Margo was quiet from crashing. 50 Cent was playing on the radio.
Look homie, I don’t dance. All I do is this.
It’s the same two-step wit a lil’ twist.
Listen pimpin’, I aint new to this. I’m true to this.
Pay attention boy, I teach how to do this shit.
Mount Misery was a long, narrow, windy, inclined path through some woods off the turnpike. There was little light and cars needed to drive very slowly to get through. We drove shortly in and parked at the gate for a small cemetery. After we snorted two short lines, a rowdy car of Goths stopped behind us on the road. One gothic girl got out and the jokesters went off without her. We were getting out anyway for fresh air. Margot and the girl talked and I went into the graveyard to pee. As I unzipped near a grave, I heard dashing. The trees shook in the woods and through my moon glasses I saw footprints in the bright, yellow-glowing snow.
After I returned we all went for a walk in the cemetery. “I think I saw someone run into the woods,” I said.
“No you didn’t,” said Margo.
“It’s probably that guy that tries to scare everyone,” said the girl.
“You mean that guy,” Margo said, “Who drives that beat corvette really fast through the path?”
“Yea. Weird things are more likely to happen to you hear when I’m around because I tend to put bad luck on people.”
“Really?” asked Margo. “Maybe you should walk a little bit farther away. No, I’m just kidding.”
“It’s true though,” she continued. “Terrible things happen to people when I meet them.”
“I wouldn’t even know darling,” Margo said. “Crazy things are always happening to me anyway. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
The car of goths was waiting at the gait. The girl kissed Margo and said goodbye. The car took off and Margo said to me, “So are you ready to do one monster line at the top of the hill and then we’ll drive home?”
I nodded.
We drove up to the top of the hill, where the path ended. Margot sorted the coke. I said, “Sorry Margo. It’s been rap all night.” I switched the station to classic rock.
Yeah, keep your eyes on the road, your hands up on the whe-el
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands up on the whe-el
Going to the road house, gonna have a re-al,
good time
After our lines we rubbed the ends of cigarettes in the coke bag, lit the cigarettes and cruised down the hill and rounded the bend. The first drag of the cigarette tasted sweet and satisfactorily poisonous.
Let it roll, baby roll
I cruised a little faster. A truck came at us. I drove around it onto some ice and, screaming, we slammed into a tree; Margot’s window shattered on both of us and my head slammed against the steering wheel. The music had stopped: I yelled, “Margo!
“Wait! I can’t find-“
“Margo, are you alright!”
“Stop yelling! I can’t find my glasses!”
There was glass in my mouth. The windshield was broken. My moon glasses and cigarette had flown somewhere.
“I found them,” she said. “Pink, there’s glass in my mouth.”
“Me too.”
“Is my face bloody?” she asked. There were cuts on her face that were only bleeding a little bit.
“You have some cuts but it’s not so bad.”
“I’m going to call the police,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t drive this car.”
“Shit,” she said. “I have to go bury my razor blade and the bag.” She got out of the car.
With shaky hands I dialed 911. “Hi I just crashed my car on Sweet Hollow Road.”
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“No.” While talking I saw Margo talking with people at a car that had been coming our way. At the end of the call I ran out towards them.
“These are my friends,” she said to me. “This is Pink.”
“Are you okay man?” said the driver.
“Yea man! We crashed to Roadhouse Blues, which is pretty ideal.”
“You’re fucked up Pink,” Margot said. “You’re going to be like what the fuck in a minute.”
I turned back to look at the car. The whole front was bent inwards. I went in the car to see if there was anything I needed. Margo’s friends took off
and she got in the car. “They’re going to come back to drive us home,” she said. “They just need to drop people off first.”
“Cool.”
“Did you call your mother’s boyfriend?”
“No. No, no, no.”
After a minute I said, “Margo.”
“What?”
“Just before we crashed, I had a vision of a woman in a white gown screaming in the woods.”
“Really?”
“Yea.”
“What did she look like?”
“She had black hair. She was in her forties.”
“Cool.”
The police car came, it’s red and blue lights flashing on the trees. The officer gave me a report to fill out. Margot called her grandmother while I narrated the whole story excluding the cocaine and the moon glasses.
“Hi Grandma,” she said. “Yeah. Listen. Pink and I got in an accident. We’re okay and my friends are going to drive us home.
“Just some cuts,” she said. “Yea, I think so.” She turned and asked me, “Are you okay?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, he’s okay. He’s just has this gash between his eyes.” I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the big, red bump and a dry line of blood
between my eyes.
For some reason the police had us stand outside but didn’t invite us into their car. We were cold, standing on the edge of the haunted woods. I prayed that all of the ghosts in the woods would come out and scare the police. There was a thick, 12-foot branch hanging from a nearby tree, dangling by a thread. I walked over and pushed it. It swung slightly.
The cops left when Margot’s friends came and we got in her friend’s car. “You can drop Margo off first,” I said.
“Is she closer?” the driver asked.
“I need to be home,” Margo said.
“How long have you had that car?” the driver asked.
“I’ve been borrowing it from my mother’s boyfriend.”
“Shit. Does he have another car?”
“Yes.”
At home, my mother was on the couch with the light on, the TV on and she was folding laundry into a basket. I sat on the other couch. “I crashed Bruce’s car,” I said.
“You what? You crashed Bruce’s Car? Are you okay? You could have died! Were you drinking? You could have died, Pink. You could be dead! Were
you on drugs? Who was there?”
“It was just Margo and I. We didn’t drink or smoke anything.”
“Is Margo okay? Do I have to call her grandparents?”
“She’s fine. She just has a few cuts on her face.”
“They could sue us Pink. Don’t you understand? Now I have to deal with that! You better call Bruce. Where’s the car?”
“It was towed.”
“Towed? That costs money. Why didn’t you call Bruce?”
“I just didn’t want to tell you yet.”
“You don’t respect Bruce. He does so much for you and you disrespect him. Call him right now.”
I called him. He said, “Hey buddy. Aren’t you with Margo? What’s up?”
“I’m sorry. I crashed the car.”
“Oh shit. Are you and your friend okay?”
“Yea but the car is wrecked.”
“Are you in it now?”
“No. I got a ride home.”
“So you’re with your mother?”
“Yes,” I said unintentionally dreadfully.
“Oh god. Is she flipping a shit?”
“Yes,” I said rubbing the back of my neck, looking over at my mother faulding clothes and muttering to herself.
“So it’s not possible to be driven,” he stated as a question.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Where’d you crash?”
“Into a tree on the side of this really dark road. The path was so narrow and I went around this truck and got caught on the ice.”
“Where?”
“It’s called Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington.”
My mother said, “What were you doing in Huntington?”
Bruce continued, “Sweet Hollow Road. What were you doing there?”
“It’s just like a place to go because we were bored. It’s just like a haunted road.”
“Okay,” said my mother, irritated. “Give me the phone.” I gave her the phone and got up but she said, “Sit down. You don’t go anywhere.” Then she
sat down and said, “He’s fine. He’s just stupid. He could have died and he doesn’t have any respect or appreciation that you let him borrow the car.”
Then she said to him, “Yeah, but you know what? It’s not fare. How many kids have to fucking die because they don’t give a shit? Okay. Okay. I have
to go. You too. Bye.”
I looked at her and she looked at me. She asked me, “What is wrong with you?”
I shrugged. “I’m a terrible person. I should die.”
“No. You’re just disrespectful. God.” She fumbled trying to put a thought together and then finally said, “I don’t know anymore. You know what? Go
away. Get out of my face.”
In my room there was an Exorcist movie poster on the wall of the possessed girl and her green, scarred, cold face. I tore it off the wall, crumpled it
up and threw it into the closet. I took the lid off my stereo and opened the triple CD cartridge. I reached beneath it and pulled out a glasses case. I sat
on my bed taking a bowl out of the glasses case and a dime bag, crumpled a big weed nug in the bowl and took a drag. I sat there for a moment thinking about whether anything really happened at Mount Misery that would cause me to still feel terrorized by everything around me, or if I was just torturing myself from infantile projections. Why was it that I still felt as though I was in the woods?
The worst thing that could possibly happen has happened and now I’m still here and this life is really still happening. Do I really have to feel what all of these conditions dictate that I feel? Can I just be happy anyway even if everyone around me tells me that I’m in deep shit and am fucked forever?
What if I watch TV? Can I shake Mount Misery off me if I just sit here in the dark?
I looked at the room, already bored with the same old life that I had been living. It seemed like a good enough reason to look into another world for a little while. I turned on the TV and watched South Park, the extremely bright and colorful, two-dimensional cartoon with mocking-toned voice-overs. I ran down to the kitchen for munchies. On my jog back up the steps this female presence in my mind, some eternal consciousness that was not me but was within my awareness and was part of me suggested to me without words, happiness is always an option.
2. White Railings
Just over a year later I was nearing the end of my first year of college at some prestigious art school in Manhattan that I had already transferred my transcript from, to a public school somewhere else in the city and planned on moving in with my father partly to shorten the commute and partly to change my scenery. It was a Wednesday, the one day that I didn’t have work or school, and I was in my neighborhood driving my black Volkswagon Jetta through the wet, sunshiny day to meet a best friend of Margo’s that I had been dating since August. Jenna, my girlfriend, was a thin, Indian girl that wore tight jeans and tight red tank tops and listened to Jay-Z. She smoked long cigarettes and was mildly addicted to coke.
Earlier that morning I drove to the DMV in the rain, listening repeatedly to a Nine Inch Nails song from the early nineties. The DMV was in a town closer to Queens, in an area extremely dense, developed, industrial, beat and poured on by rain.
In this place it seems like such a shame.
Though it all looks different now,
I know it’s still the same.
Everywhere I look you’re all I see.
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be.
I sometimes wondered what it might have meant that a boy from a Jewish house and a girl from a Muslim house lived on opposite sides of a town border road called Jerusalem and were dating each other. I drove down Jerusalem, over the overpass and before I made it to her school to pick her up, (she was a senior in high school) I parked on a side street to wait for her to call me. Since the sun had come out, I decided to put on The Velvet Undergound, a band from the 60s, and some of their particularly raspy songs.
(White light), white light goin’ messin’ up my mind
(White light), and don’t you know it’s gonna make me go blind
(white heat), aww white heat it tickle me down to me toes
(White light,) Ooo have mercy white light have it goodness knows
After some 15 minutes after she didn’t call me or even pick up her phone, I decided to move from that spot. I drove the opposite direction towards my old high school on the other side of town. Of course when I got there kids were pouring out of the school to get home and walk dogs, go online, watch TV, smoke a bong, change for practice, go to work, watch porn or masturbate without it but with classmates on the mind or play the drums.
Escaping the 2:30 tangle, back on the road, I had to take two long roads, 106, the main road of my early life, and at the end, Jerusalem. Down 106,
I turned up the song, Sister Ray. It was the longest Velvet Underground song. The guitar played one riff repeatedly, an electric viola squeeled, the singer droned on nonchalantly.
Doug and Sally inside
They cookin’ for the Down Pipe
Who’s staring at Miss Rayon
Who’s busy licking off her Pig Pen
Seemed down at Jerusalem there was one massive, black cloud in the sky. Now I wasn’t sure whether I was heading for Jenna or not. My cell sat neutrally in the cup holder not vibrating.
By the middle of Sister Ray I was turning on Jerusalem.
Cecil’s got his new piece
He cocks it shoots it between three and four
He aims it at the sailor
Shoots him down dead on the floor
I drove down past my street and I drove past the yard of my old elementary school and I drove to the border of 3 towns where cars were all
cramming to a slow down onto the overpass because there was a light right after it. I slowed at the slope and it occurred to me to drive left and see some friends at my old job, for they certainly showed more love for me than my girlfriend. While I contemplated whether turn left of go forwards, the black cloud either moved or broke and a shaft of light illuminated the wet, vertical, white railings of the overpass. This inspired me to make the left to see my good old friends.
Now who is that knocking
Who’s knocking at my chamber door
Now could it be the police
They come and take me for a ride-ride
When I turned a car that I didn’t see drove into the front corner of my car: the air bag exploded in my face as I pressed down on the brake and the car spun. While it was spinning, in the silence of the silenced music, I recognized the feeling of the worst possible thing that could happen is happening, that I might not even survive, and I accepted it. When it stopped I pushed down the airbag and all I could see was bright light illuminating orange dust that flew up from the airbag. The bridge of my nose hurt as if I was punched. I pushed the door open but it would only open a fifth of the way. As I climbed out, both sets of my limbs hurt, even my cribs and shoulders, I said out loud, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord.” I then hoped that I was having an epiphany.
What’s the epiphany? Is my life changing?
There was the girl that collided with me, standing in front of her car, which was half off the road on the pass. It was apparent that she was a student from the high school. “I just bought that car!” she yelled.
“You’re alive,” I said, approaching her. “You’re alive. That’s good.”
“As her complaints faded out of my attention I walked like a withered tree to the sidewalk near her car and paced slowly back and forth. A man asked me if I was okay, a tough guy in Speedo shades and a windbreaker.
“I’m cool.”
Then he went to her. I called my mother.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I crashed at the intersection of Jerusalem and Loring. Car’s dead. I’m fine. A girl is mad.”
“Stay right there.”
As I waited I looked at my ruined car and laughed. Two young teenagers on bikes on the other sidewalk told me to stop laughing and past over the top of the hill.
An ambulance and my mother came. My mother just asked if I was hurt and if I was drinking. And, “Where’s Jenna?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed in a disgusted way and we went in the ambulance by invitation. We sat on boxes while a paramedic interviewed me. I took a yellow lollypop from my pocket and unwrapped it.
“Last name?”
“Noche.” I put the lollipop in my mouth.
“First name?”
“Pink.”
My mother was filling out a form.
“Any pain?” the paramedic asked.
“My ribs hurt, my leg, my arm.”
“Son. Please take that lollipop out of your mouth. It’s pretty disrespectful. This is a serious situation.”
I looked at him madly. My mother said, “Just take it out Pink.” I slow took it out. My mother said, “I don’t think this is necessary. I can take him to our doctor.”
“He could have a concussion mam.”
“Did you hit your head Pink?”
“The airbag hit me.”
“Do you feel dizzy?”
“No.”
“Yea. It will be cheaper if we go to our doctor. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure? Pink, speak up if you feel that your bones hurt severely.”
“I’m cool,” I shrugged and put the lollipop back in my mouth.
The Velvet Underground CD was stuck in the car stereo forever but I grabbed a roach joint from the car and got in my mother’s jeep. As we drove onto the road I spotted Jenna with some friend of her. “Can you pull over?,” I said, “It’s Jenna.” My mother pulled over a bit and Jenna came to my window.
“Hey,” she said, smiling.
“Hi.”
“Was that your crash up there?”
“Yea.”
“That looked bad. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Going to the doctor.”
“Did anyone else get hit?”
“Some girl. She’s okay.”
“Man. I was going to call you.”
“Whatever Jenna,” I said.
“I was just going to go to Erica’s first.”
My mother said, “Come on Pink.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
“I’ll call you later.”
I nodded and put my window up as we took off.
My mother said, “That girl is selfish. She only cares about herself.” For an instant I almost defended Jenna. “Lose that girl, Pink. Just focus on school
and don’t drive for a while. Take a cab to the train. There’s only a few weeks left.”
We drove in silence. Then she said, “Where were you going?”
“I was supposed to pick up Jenna an hour ago but she was a no-show so I was going to go to see my friends at the store instead.”
“I don’t even want to hear about that Jenna anymore. God forbid you should have a concussion. Hopefully we don’t get sued.”
There were two quiet magazine readers in the carpeted lobby. My mother leaned against the desk, keys in hand. “Hi. My son just had a car accident. He might have fractured some bones.”
I sat on the X-Ray table, my mother in the chair. The doctor was outside. My mother was in the dim. We were quiet. I looked ahead of the few
remaining weeks of school left without a car. I wondered how I was supposed to meet with Margo. I looked at how I was moving far away in a few months. It suddenly became clear that even if I wasn’t moving something was naturally steering me away from Margo anyway. I wanted to fight this thing, which seemed to be divinity. I wondered how I could fight it. It was going to win. I began to cry.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t worry about the car,” she said. “Is it the car? Hey,” she barked. “At least you survived.”
“I know. That’s what I said to that girl,” I wiped the tears from my cheeks. Tears went into my mouth.
Then after a moment I cried harder and covered my face.
“Are you okay Pink? Is it that selfish girl? Tell me. Look at me,” she continued. “Is school bothering you? Pink! Look at me…
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let it out. Let it out. Tell me when you’re ready.”
“It’s,” I muttered. “It’s because…”
“What?”
“Margo.” I looked at the floor. “I can’t be friends with Margo anymore.”
Monday, February 8, 2010
Transformed
I was 16 I think. It was summer. There were some people talking to my mother in the kitchen. I looked through her album collection because I'd already enjoyed her Janis Joplin and The Turtles CDs. I also knew her boyfriend's collection too well and exhausted his Kinks, Hendrix, Violent Femmes, Pink Floyd and other CDs. For the first time I saw the spine labeled, Lou Reed: Transformer.
The Velvet Underground was my favorite band then. I was high as much as I could afford to be to the point of being high in front of my mother and forgetting I was high. Class though was one place I couldn't manage but the bus stop, my off-periods, and before gym and art classes were lighting up times, with the scratchy, mellow Velvet Underground playing in my head. They were just like any band except their long, one verse songs were more simple than the Kinks and felt shrouded in the mist of sleepiness and other worldliness, sad people found in the holy ghetto blocks of 1960s New York City and I blazed in my shrouded teenage suburbs in their soundtrack.
This was new. I knew the band broke up in 71 or other. What came later, I vaguely knew the that the singer, Lou Reed wrote Take a Walk on The Wild Side, which was all I knew. On the cover his face was death white against a black background. His eyes were thickly rounded in blackness, more death. He had a big round acoustic half-in the photo. It said Lou Reed on a yellow melting top border, Transformer. "What does that mean?" I thought. I snuck it past the kitchen and went to my room upstairs. I first lifted the cover off my stereo, opened out the 3 CD cartridge, reached in half to elbow length and took my eyeglass case from the bottom. Then I put the CD in & the volume to 12, a low level, not wanting my mother to hear in case it was embarrassing. Some ordinary electric guitar riff began and it was like regular old rock n roll, between Kinks and the Stones so I put it to 15, the case back on the stereo, took the bowl from the glasses case and filled it with pot. I put it to 16 and blew smoke out the back window. As it went on I felt it was much happier than Velvet Underground, much more alive and particularly flamboyant. It became much to let my mother know so I lowered it to 13 and then 12 but sat near the stereo and took a hit. I looked at the back of the album cover. There were two pictures next to the song list, a woman or man, maybe a transvestite emerging from dark curtains, making a kissing face. The other was a man in a tight t-shirt, muscles, a cop hat or other and very tight jeans. There was a huge, long bulge half way to his knee. "Is that supposed to be obvious?" I wondered. Then I felt very high. "Could mom hear the music?" There was a broadway element to the music. There was a very gay element. It was happy, proud, outlandish, very 70s and still very rock n roll. I remember half way through thinking that liking the music was a decision. Either be embarrassed by it and turn it off or love it forever and turn it up. So I turned the extravaganza up and felt very good. Later I'd tell my mother I took it and I never gave it back, ever.
The Velvet Underground was my favorite band then. I was high as much as I could afford to be to the point of being high in front of my mother and forgetting I was high. Class though was one place I couldn't manage but the bus stop, my off-periods, and before gym and art classes were lighting up times, with the scratchy, mellow Velvet Underground playing in my head. They were just like any band except their long, one verse songs were more simple than the Kinks and felt shrouded in the mist of sleepiness and other worldliness, sad people found in the holy ghetto blocks of 1960s New York City and I blazed in my shrouded teenage suburbs in their soundtrack.
This was new. I knew the band broke up in 71 or other. What came later, I vaguely knew the that the singer, Lou Reed wrote Take a Walk on The Wild Side, which was all I knew. On the cover his face was death white against a black background. His eyes were thickly rounded in blackness, more death. He had a big round acoustic half-in the photo. It said Lou Reed on a yellow melting top border, Transformer. "What does that mean?" I thought. I snuck it past the kitchen and went to my room upstairs. I first lifted the cover off my stereo, opened out the 3 CD cartridge, reached in half to elbow length and took my eyeglass case from the bottom. Then I put the CD in & the volume to 12, a low level, not wanting my mother to hear in case it was embarrassing. Some ordinary electric guitar riff began and it was like regular old rock n roll, between Kinks and the Stones so I put it to 15, the case back on the stereo, took the bowl from the glasses case and filled it with pot. I put it to 16 and blew smoke out the back window. As it went on I felt it was much happier than Velvet Underground, much more alive and particularly flamboyant. It became much to let my mother know so I lowered it to 13 and then 12 but sat near the stereo and took a hit. I looked at the back of the album cover. There were two pictures next to the song list, a woman or man, maybe a transvestite emerging from dark curtains, making a kissing face. The other was a man in a tight t-shirt, muscles, a cop hat or other and very tight jeans. There was a huge, long bulge half way to his knee. "Is that supposed to be obvious?" I wondered. Then I felt very high. "Could mom hear the music?" There was a broadway element to the music. There was a very gay element. It was happy, proud, outlandish, very 70s and still very rock n roll. I remember half way through thinking that liking the music was a decision. Either be embarrassed by it and turn it off or love it forever and turn it up. So I turned the extravaganza up and felt very good. Later I'd tell my mother I took it and I never gave it back, ever.
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