oh pioneers... (a poem).

            Massachusetts Winter

the first January in this place

was the worst.  i had been cold

before, i had been alone — but not for so many

days in a row.  if time does not “exist” then what

is this weight.  the difference between one snowflake

and ten, how it accumulates on the glass.

watching the wipers, back and forth on the windshield,

we sat unmoving, unable to exit 
the (relative) warmth of the car.

those pilgrims must’ve been fucking desperate, i said,

and you laughed.  a puff of breath.  whatever will 
left to speak was gone then.  breath turned 

to frost, like ash, it covered everything.

it was January when the wind started

blowing through the floorboards of my rented room

rattling the windowpanes.  under siege

sleep was getting hard despite the darkness:
constant.  shivering, the body refuses to surrender, 
afraid it will not wake again.  
so many days

in a row i drove to work in the dark and in the dark

drove home again.

the hours between rose and set in the window of an office

where i sat with pictures of people who died

and books in a dozen languages i do not speak. 

this was a job.  somebody has to do

the remembering, and i

was there.

living between the train tracks and the cemetery,

i remembered everything.  in wool socks on a mattress on the floor,

i heard the train cars rumble and squeal across the bridge

at night, whispering to my body,

i said, sleep

but there was no answer.

that was the year the exodus began. 

we met for one last drink, my friend and i,

the night before he moved to L.A.

it was such an obvious solution i was mad i hadn’t thought of it

first.  so i accused him of cheating — but what 

he said, is there to win? and ordered another round. 

every January now, someone else leaves.  there is a difference

between one and three and ten.

nothing to win is not the same as nothing to lose

when the job is remembering.

the beers fizzled gold in the yellow bar light.

dark wood worn smooth.  a gust from the open door.

i thought of a pile of shoes in a black-and-white photo.

life in bars

            By the end of the night we could love each other, even if we just met.  That’s not the hard part—love.  It just happens.  Week nights, slow nights, any in-between night.  That’s what you need to know if you’re looking for love in the city—it can get lost in the crowds.  Friday nights, Saturday nights—those are not our kind of people.  Our kind of people are stuck behind the bar, slinging coffee, busing tables, heaving the security gates open in the morning and locking them up at night with a clang, keys jangling, the click of the heavy padlock.  Our people are the inbetweens, the early mornings, the afterwards, the ungodly late. 

            A boy was buying me drinks and he didn’t want me to leave, which was more than I could say about myself most of the time.  The minutes trickled on sip by sip until they turned to hours and it all began to taste bland and too sweet.  We sat at a table together like his friends were my friends, and then they were.  The girl they called Tits had sharp, crystal-blue eyes and a tight, rosebud mouth.  She smiled rarely, but when she did it involved her whole face.  As a waitress she was slightly intimidating but you also trusted her completely.  Just when you thought you had been forgotten, you would starve to death, your food would never come—you caught her eye.  She was watching you and watching the kitchen, too:  a dark angel at the order window, a hovering shadow. 

            At the bar, at our table, she sat next to one of her line cooks.  “Good job in there today,” she said.  He looked about seventeen but his tattoos implied otherwise, covering every visible inch of skin from his knuckles to his neck.  When he stood up she said, “Buy me a beer, Buffy.”

            “Me?”  He curled his lip into a sneer.  “Where’s your fuckin’ tip money?”  She blinked at him and he brought a bottle back to the table for her anyway. 

            The boy I was with kept handing me his icy glass of tequila and juice—I never had my own.  I kept saying no, but I kept finding the glass in my hand anyway.  It was unclear to me who, if anyone, was actually paying for anything; I only knew that I was not.  Our tab remained open hour after hour, shared among seven or eight or ten of us.  The bartender was a beautiful boy from Boston with an affable shrug.  That shrug saved him from our hatred—he was too handsome otherwise.  That shrug, and his lack of concern about us, our tab, or the girls at the bar shrieking with laughter to get his attention.  There was an important football game on TV and cable kept going out, but he didn’t care.  A table near the front of the bar was the only one paying attention.  Buffy squinted at them, owl-like behind his horn-rimmed spectacles.  “They seem miscast for the film we’re in,” he said.

            The game we were watching instead took place at the other end of the bar, where our friend Carlos was drinking with a girl in a sweater-vest and a long brown ponytail.  Every few minutes, one of us would get up and say hi to him, like we had just noticed he was there, interrupting whatever conversation he was trying to have with the girl.  We couldn’t figure her out.  Naïve or ironic?  Maybe she was foreign?  “Is she ordering coffee?” somebody whispered.  “What does that mean?” I asked.  “Game over,” said the boy I was with.  “Total party foul.  He’s still drinking and she ordered a coffee?  That’s just rude.”  He shook his head.  I sipped his drink.  He got out his phone and started typing.  We saw Carlos look down a second later, open his phone, and put it back in his pocket.  The girl said something and he cocked his head to the side attentively.  The boy I was with slapped his forehead.  Then Carlos got out his pack of cigarettes and excused himself.  They went outside together, the two boys, in wordless unison. 

            Meanwhile, a man entered the bar with a baby in his arms.  We were transfixed by the baby’s curly hair, his round eyes.  He was transfixed by a shiny balloon bouncing along the ceiling of the bar, trailing a sad tendril of curly white ribbon.  He reached his fat fist towards it, but he could not grasp the ribbon; it was too high.  We stared at him over his father’s shoulder.  The father had no idea.

            “Buy me a baby, Buffy,” Tits said and punched him in the shoulder.  He pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and said, “You know I read that when women look at babies it releases the same chemical in their brains as when men look at porn.”  The baby was free now, tottering near the father’s knees.  Tits and I nodded.

            When the boy I was with came back inside, there was some kind of seat exchange and we ended up sitting at the bar near Carlos.  We ordered another round of beers:  cans of Tecate with lime.  I met more friends.  Ray owned a motorcycle shop and was so completely like a person named Ray that I’m surprised I didn’t make him up.  Leather jacket, leathery skin wrinkled up around his eyes, a big silver skull on his littlest finger, white hair and beard:  what Santa Claus would look like if he rode a Harley.  He smiled like a proud father when the boy I was with showed him his new tattoo.  Jess was the only girl who worked in the bike shop.  She had long, straight brown hair parted in the middle and a gold front tooth I could not stop looking at.  I was more than a little afraid of her and her loud voice and big laugh.  When he touched my face in the way that he does sometimes, the boy I was with, sweeping his palm over my face like a veil, like shutting a curtain, which always leaves me a little confused, disoriented, Jess said, “Whoa!  I want to try that.”  I took a breath and she brushed against my face gently, my eyelids closed beneath her hand.  “That’s fucking intimate, man,” she said.  “You have no idea what I’ve been doing with my hand, you know?  You got to have major trust.”  She laughed and turned away before I could come up with anything to say to that. 

            Next to me, Tits kept getting out her phone, forgetting why, and putting it back in her bag.  She was supposed to be at a party but she didn’t know the address.  “Look it up on your phone,” I said.  “Oh yeah,” she said.  But every time she got it out, there was something else to look at.  The boy I was with was still texting—some to Carlos three seats away at the bar.  He looked up at Tits and said “Text Castle and see if he writes you back.”  “Ok,” she said, and did, and he did, and the boy I was with said, “What a dick!”  He composed a new message to Castle, part of which read BROS BEFORE HOS DUDE.  Tits showed me the text she had sent to him first, which said I want to suck your castle teeth.  “That melts my heart!” I cried, suddenly near tears.  “I know,” she nodded somberly and put her phone away.  Then, “God damn it.  What time is it?  Where am I fucking going?”  She got out her phone again.

            Communications were happening outside of my knowledge all around me.  Or better yet, happenings were happening without communication at all, like a bottomless glass refilling itself magically.  Each of us sat next to each other but also connected invisibly to places and people in other rooms, pressing the same buttons.  In this room, the man and the baby were long gone—we missed their exit.  The balloon had drifted into the long dark hallway by the bathrooms.  Buffy left—his glass was empty—but he gave me his last cigarette before he went, extending the night ahead by some small amount of extra minutes, static minutes in the stillness and dark before decisions get made that can’t be unmade. 

            A row of shot glasses appeared, stretching from one corner of the bar to the next.  Patrick, the bartender, held up a bottle of Jameson.  We booed and hissed.  He turned around, still smiling, and picked a tequila instead.  We cheered.  He poured generously, though not carelessly, glass after glass.  Tits looked up from her phone then, smiled, and said, “Can I have whiskey?”  The bartender shrugged, poured two shots of Jameson.  We raised our glasses, slapped the bar, slammed them down.  The lime burned worse than the liquor, like it had been the victim of some chemical experiment involving bleach and sand.  I spun around on my bar stool until I stopped coughing.  Jess was there behind me, with her hands in the air.  “Brando!” she yelled.  “BRANDO IS PERFECT, MOVE THE SET!”  I had missed some part of this monologue.  “Jess,” she continued, “you’re PERFECT but you’re fucking up the shot!”  She was visibly thrilled, arms swinging, gold tooth gleaming, that sheet of silk-straight hair rippling over her shoulders.  Her smile squeezed around her eyes until they sparkled like dark water at the bottom of a well.

            It was getting dark outside too.  Tits put her hat and her coat on again, like it was serious.  “I have to go,” she said, and we all booed.  “Don’t do it,” I said.  “It’s so cold out there!” 

            “Sit back down,” said the boy whose foot kept dragging my bar stool closer to his.  “Patty wants to buy you a drink.”

            “Sure,” the bartender shrugged.  “What do you want?”

            “No,” she said, closing her blue eyes.  “I can’t.”   

            He opened another can of Tecate.   She opened her eyes and sat back down.  “What happened to that guy who was here last week?”  She took a sip.  “The one who sat over there?  He said he’d be here again this week, but he’s not.”

            That’s the thing about living like this, living in public; we depend on the context.  We belong to a certain point in space and sometimes it’s the right one.  

            “The guy with the crazy hair?” Patty said.

            “I don’t know,” Tits answered.  “He always sits right there.”

            Being a regular is the only way to be remembered, which may be the only way to be sure we exist.  Routine is what saves us from chaos—the pour of Sunday’s bartender, the long pull of Wednesday’s barista versus Tuesday’s—but routine falls prey to the slightest outside forces.  The boy I was with: we knew each other entirely through the restaurant where he worked.  The first time I saw him standing without a counter in between us I was surprised by his shoes, by his height, even his legs.  It wasn’t that I thought they would look different—I hadn’t thought about them at all.  They had not been things to think or not think about.  And tomorrow or the next day or some other day, I would see Jess or Tits or Buffy somewhere at the park or on Manhattan Ave or the train—and would we know each other then?  Jess with her hand on my face, my eyelashes against her skin—would she remember that or not?  Even if she did, what would it matter, what would we say.

            That’s why we write some things on our skin in ink, even stupid things; that’s why we sit next to each other and text each other at the same time—to make things exist in the world outside of us where they can be seen by someone else.  Toss enough of these things into the wind and some of them might land somewhere.

            Or that is what I do.  When I let him kiss me against the wall, hard, and bruise my wrists in the grip of his hands, and lose my underwear somewhere under his bed, when I steal his t-shirt in the morning, it’s because then it becomes something real that has happened.  An event.  A thing.  Real.

            For him, maybe these are things you scatter to the wind like you toss a cigarette butt from a moving car, out the window to bounce away behind you, ashes turning to dust, sweat disappearing down the shower drain—something you rid yourself of.

            What will happen tomorrow?  Or the next day, or next week, or whenever one of the waiters moves back to the Midwest and fucks up the whole schedule?  Will I ever see him again, the boy who buys me drinks, if Patty’s not there to pour them, if someone else is sitting in our seats at the bar?   

            I keep leaving my house every morning and I keep walking down the street where everyone else walks, to the train we all ride, where I am living seen or unseen, a thing in the world, waiting to stick to something or melt like snow, depending on the weather.  Depending on who’s watching me. 

the same old traps

it was fall and bay road curved

as it always did

i drove as i always do: fast
around the curves, one hand
in the dark.  everything was ordinary:

i was coming home to you.

and then it was

there.  like the sudden glory of anything new and impossible

a light appeared between the trees
pinkish, papery, the only light for miles.

it was a house inside-out, only
tarp and two-by-fours.  newborn

its burning heart revealed in the naked night 

gone at the next curve.

all winter

i waited for the meaning to come

and drove as i always did

in the dark—nothing
glowing but the ordinary: dashboard, headlights, cigarette.

you were gone.

i remembered the house, but i never found it again

and it meant nothing

no matter how many metaphors i tried.

it was

like you

mute

and

persistent.

there and here

there are things i know about people as soon as i look at them.  like how some people are good at knowing how much something weighs, or how far away something is, or how many things are in a jar without counting each one.  i can't do any of that.  but i know exactly how far a person will bend before they snap.  i don't always believe it, so i end up using my fingers to do a little pushing, to feel the resistance, like feeling a loose tooth. or maybe, since i don't know why i know what i know, i'm hoping i'm wrong.  that maybe i'll push against someone and realize they're not what i thought, that they'll surprise me somehow.

usually, though, i hold back.  something i learned in school, when nobody liked the sound of my voice anymore: i stopped raising my hand all the time.  then the unsaid words just hang in the air, where no one has to look at them.  you learn to take shelter under them.  i never said the word love to jonny, never, never; he would have bolted like a spooked cat across the road at night.  but it was there, over us, like an umbrella.  instead of hurting me, making me vulnerable, that love protected me from the darkness that surrounded him.

it was the darkness i wanted.  that's the thing hard for everyone to understand.  i could see it, but i couldn't see through it, and i wanted to get under there.  i didn't raise my hand.  i waited for him to reach for me, and he did.  maybe there's some reverse law of attraction, where he needed someone like me to absorb the force of that darkness without being destroyed.  the first night in the warehouse, he was the one seeing how far he could go.  underneath the noise, the world was different.  that was the beauty of everything punkrock—you had to avert your gaze so as not to go blind, listen through the muffle of ear plugs unless you wanted to go deaf.  in the room behind the stage, he said nothing, while my skirt slid up my legs.  i said nothing while he pushed me down across the bed.  his friends across the room were talking.  one looked at me, right when jonny put his hand between my legs, blinked before he looked away.  i let him.  i let him.  i let him touch me and i let him watch me.  just like i let him do anything to me, later.  like i let him turn away from me while he slept and i watched him breathe without touching him.  like i let him serve me up to his ex-girlfriend another night, in another dark room, in the basement of the costume shop, where he left me handcuffed to the bed for her.  she tasted like honey that night.  it was in her hair, long and knotted and black, and the coiled tips of her hair brushed across her chest and neck and across my lips and i saw him in the corner of the room, leaning over some project, something he lost himself in, something he made for me and gave to me which i have forgotten.

i never gave him anything.  because i knew better.  the only thing he ever took from me was a bath i made for him in my parents' house, when no one was home.  i didn't look at him then; what he'd done to his skin wasn't something i needed to see to know.  i let him keep it that way.  because he let me hide there in that place with him where there was nothing to say, which was all i ever wanted from him.

the only empty seat on the train was next to him, and i was too tired not to sit there. i'd seen him before. i liked the cut of his hair at the back of his neck—clean and sharp. his eyes hooded and heavy, but bright under there, like he was noticing me those times i saw him around the city. drinking coffee, or at the bar, or just passing him on the corner of 9th street. on the train, he sat reading, hunched over his book, so i thought i might go unnoticed. i closed my eyes. but then i started looking over his shoulder at the page, attracted to words like a dog finding the scent of food—or whatever it is they find when they nose the corners of buildings and garbage cans and gutters, lifting their heads, sniffing. i tried to stop looking. his body leaned in my way, so there i was with his neck and the back of his ear and his big, clean hand on the page. i could see the clean cut of each hair over his ear, the angle of the blade's edge. and his collar. and his jacket. and the little holes worn in the back of his jacket, which i wanted to work my fingers into. this happens to me sometimes on trains or elevators, this false intimacy, when i want to touch a stranger so badly sometimes i have to jerk my hand away. i want to tuck the tags into the backs of their shirts, or pull a piece of lint from their sweaters. it means nothing. but then i am there with that feeling, aching in my hand. and i liked the way he sat leaning over his book, with his body bent toward it, fully involved. the words i caught were indecipherable: sorcery, trough, man, moon, blood. moonchild. it reminded me suddenly of home, of my parents. of the dark wood of the bookshelves in the living room at home, the sharp varnished wintery scent, the fireplace, the sound of the wind in the fireplace, the photograph of my mother and her dog in the mountains when she was young. i wanted so badly to lean against him. to touch the back of his neck. and it made me cry suddenly in that mute, ridiculous, expressionless way, where the tears just appear without warning, like when you stand too long in the freezing cold and can't even feel them wet on your cheeks. what is wrong with me, i thought.

then bedford avenue came and we piled out of the train car in a throng and my body was pressed against his through the doorway but it didn't matter because everyone's was and then it was over. i had to dart down the street in the wrong direction so i could get out of the crowd and breathe. i kept walking that way, away from my apartment, crying a little.

there's nothing important that it can mean. it's such a little thing. but i am built to notice these things. i am built with this aloneness around me, and i have become expert at delineating its every curve and pulse.

earlier today, a friend said to me, "you're my favorite," and i knew he meant it because he said it without thinking, like it just struck him. i knew he meant it even though we're not good friends; i see him for a few minutes once or twice a week, at most. "i know," i said. it's easy to do everything right for those two little minutes, while the rest of my life is a mess. i'm really good at those minutes.


all these years i worked so hard at being perfect, in order to be loved. i didn't know yet perfection is never loved. now my heart's split in two: between wanting to be loved, and not knowing how to stop wanting. the wanting has its own momentum. it keeps hurtling forward into the closest thing it can crash into, dragging me along after it.

tender traps

I was eighteen, and my body was bony and sleek as a fish. White as a fish, too, with a net of silver-blue veins you could see just under the skin. I still wore clothes in children’s sizes. Not from my own wholesome childhood of tie-dye and hand-knits, but the frilly, lace-trimmed things I had been deprived of. What I wore that night was something I invented with a pair of scissors and an old slip. I cut it above the knee, at the exact height of my baby blue thigh-high stockings. The thin white nylon rolled up at the raw edge. My thighs, my thigh, above my thigh-highs—the center of the world was there. The bright pink scar was there, where I let the last boyfriend open me up and get inside the only way he knew how. Pink and puckered like a little mouth. I wore my new patent-leather platform boots at the bottom, as ballast. In them I stood maybe five-foot-four. On top, my bright red hair, bangs cut straight and short above black-lined eyes. Imagine all this together, and the truth was I looked like tender meat—which is what I heard someone say about us that night. Later, in the limousine.

There was us and there was them. My friend and I were not part of them yet, but we wanted to be. They were older than us, although not by much. At the center of them there was he and she. His birthday was the reason for the limousine. She didn’t know it, but I lived in her shadow all over our city. Everywhere I went she had already been, with her darkness and her long legs and her ropes of hair and her face like the smooth marble of a Greek statue. Some kind of void lingered after her. The air drew tight around her if you stood too close, like gravity was being invented in the hot cave of her chest.

I hardly remember the night outside. Street lamps, asphalt, gravel; the sound of the car door. We stopped sometimes at a bar—black-lit, throbbing—and we floated in and out, my friend and I, right past the bouncers and the bartenders. Someone paid for our drinks. Someone paid for the car. The limo. I don’t know who. But it was a separate world in there. We were snug and plush in that fast black thing, and nothing else was as interesting. We climbed in and out of the car, rearranged ourselves, like musical chairs, each time. They kept me close, though, as the night wore on. He and she—each time, they had me near. We left someone by the side of the road. Someone else we took from one bar and dropped at the next one—an aging drag queen, giant; her wig leaning out of the open roof; she clutched it tight with one hand and batted her impeccable lashes. I held a glass with ice in it, sweating against my knee. My hand was cold and wet. He was sitting next to me, on my left. She, even after the drag queen was gone, held me on her lap. Her skirt was slit high, and the back of my thigh made contact with the front of hers, skin to skin, through the gap between my dress and my stockings. Sudden warmth. I might as well have been wearing nothing for the amount of skirt I had left when I sat down. She put her hands right under the fabric. It felt safe with her holding me like that, meaningless, familiar—like my mother throwing her arm across my body at every red light when she drives. Just an instinct.

But then. Her fingers crawling inside the damp pocket of fabric, tight elastic, tissue-thin. I tried not to notice. So many of us all together in there, with the wind from the roof and streaks of light flickering by and the tires bouncing tires over the seams in the asphalt. My friend saw me and I saw her, over there, with one of their friends. There was nothing we could do for each other now, even if we didn’t want to be there anymore—but we did want it. Next to me, did he see what his wife’s hands were doing? Did my face betray her; did I squirm? She was behind me where I couldn’t see, but when I did, her face was blank as a mask. Oh she she she. Did I mention the sound of her? It was the quiet ringing of metal, of chains and charms and the heavy hoops of her earrings.

At the end of the night I found myself alone in their dark living room. They left me standing there when they walked into what must have been their bedroom. I listened to the kitchen faucet drip. There was a light under the door at the other end of the hall, where my friend had disappeared. I stood, blinking, clutching my purse, until I heard them laugh. “Come on,” they said.

In the room was a dark red tent, suspended from the ceiling. I realized this was the bed. I walked up to the curtain and pulled at the edge—they were there, waiting. She leaned back, out of focus. He reached for my hand. I let my bag drop to the floor and crawled forward on my knees. He pulled me in. “I have my shoes on,” I said. Someone unlaced my boots and tossed them out of the tent. I think my eyes were closed. I could feel my heart rise up in my throat, all trembly. They pulled me close as they kissed each other. It was like trying to have a conversation with someone smarter than you without saying anything stupid. I was so small I slid myself into the spaces between them. He smelled like leather and milk mixed faintly with motor oil. She smelled like baby hair and jasmine and herbal tea. Between them both, the smell of many piercings, that smell of skin, slightly dirty, and hot metal. Her nipples caught small glints of light from the street lamps outside that slipped between the curtains. I think she kissed me first, but I don’t know if that was before or after I bruised her neck and my stockings ended up bunched around my ankles. Somebody pulled me free of them, eventually. Somebody pulled my bra up around my neck. I was slim and slippery, and every time I got untangled from them, it was like coming up for air far from any land. So I kept swimming. Her lips were soft and serious, probing. His stubble grazed my cheek, my chest, the back of my shoulder. Fingers pressed into me at the base of my spine and held my whole quivering being there. The smells all heated up and mixed together until she moaned, “No, no, no, not the—” and I smelled something salty like a tide pool turned inside out.


The blurriness—it’s not just memory fading at the edges of things. It was blurry from the start. My eyes were half-closed. It was like being underwater, with everything distorted and magnified and slow as honey. That’s just what happens. Sex is the water part of this metaphor. You go under and it’s a different world down there. Creatures down there you’ve never seen before, phosphorescent, prehistoric.

solstice

Summer came and we chased it down to the water's edge. There were fences everywhere, though, where we used to walk right into the East River and sit on half-submerged cement slabs with bottles of beer turning warm in our hands. Brown glass, water lapping, sounds of voices behind us, the dirty oyster scent of it. Now I can't find that place. The broken-windowed buildings are gone. There's new glass and condos crowding around the old horizon. They own it now, and we had just missed visiting hours: the park was closed. We could see the sun setting through the chain link fence. So we went to the pier instead and watched it sink over Manhattan until security came. They herded everyone out, beyond another chain link fence someone strung across the middle of the empty road. Who does it belong to? It's never us or anyone we even know. It's always someone else owning everything.

So we kept going. Chasing the water, riding north, till we got to the one no one wants: the dirty Newtown Creek. It was darker now. Tiny sailboats bobbed near the bank on the Queens side of the river. They looked like toys. White sails nearly glowing in the dark, white triangles snapping soft and then stiff in the wind, the sound like a flag slapping against a flag pole. Right at the edge, we could have touched the black water. But we knew better. There's a poison seeping up from beneath, under the mud at the bottom. Someone else did that, too, which is why this one thing can be ours.

we were here: a story

We Were Here

            Slumped in the backseat, I can see the light of the streetlamps streak across the cool glass where I am pressing my fingers because I need to feel something cool against my skin.  Leah is up front because she’s carsick again.  We only let her sit there when she complains.  So I’m behind Tasha, instead of next to her where I belong, when the car picks up speed for the bridge.  I feel a crack of air from the open window rush over me as she flicks her cigarette out.  It’s muggy inside and there are haloes around every light.  The dashboard glows between the front seats, loud with little neon signs and buttons.  They’ve all got something to say, but I’m not listening, I’m not listening at all.  I’m not the one driving tonight.  I watch the orange ember of Tasha’s cigarette bounce away in the rearview mirror.  The body next to mine presses closer as Tasha leans on the gas pedal.  I can feel the pressure of her foot pull on us and the hollow space in the back of my head where something tightly curled unfurls like a flag in the moment of weightlessness when we fly, five girls, over the rise. 

            In the air, my stomach flip-flops.  Even Leah laughs out loud.

            “You don’t seem that carsick,” Tasha says.

            “Well, that’s because I’m sitting in FRONT now.”

            “Whatever,” somebody next to me says—Sara or her sister Julie.

            It’s always the beginning or the end of the night when we’re in the car; it’s that infinite time in between other times.  We’re half-drunk, half-tired, half-sick of each other already.  Sometimes I’m the one driving and Tasha’s next to me, squeezing my knee where my skirt slides up, saying do it again, and I do.  I do it over and over if she wants, back and forth across the bridge.  The seams of the asphalt bump under the tires and the light flickers through the suspension cables in two different rhythms, and I wish her hand was on my thigh right now.  There’d be so much less to explain later.

            Sometimes we go back and forth across the bridge squealing and laughing until someone threatens to piss their pants or barf, or we remember important things could be happening without us.

            This is what it’s like to be young.  It’s the feeling of moving.  It’s the feeling of someplace else to be.  Our city is full of empty spaces to speed through, empty parking lots and all-night diners and overpasses and bridges to nowhere and a big wide-open sky that never gets any closer no matter how fast you’re going.

            When the tape deck crackles with the first familiar notes of a song we all know, Leah reaches forward to turn it up at the same time that Sara says, “I’m like so sick of this song.  The Sisters are good,” she goes on, “but not once you listen to the same fucking song a hundred-million times.”

            Leah is singing along like a karaoke queen and pretends not to hear.  She’s in drama club, so her affinity to Sisters of Mercy is inevitable, in my opinion.

            “Come on.”  Sara is not discouraged by our lack of response.  It’s all the easier to disagree with everything we haven’t said.  “We’re going to listen to enough of this whiny crap at the house.  I mean, seriously, do we have to be all goth all the time?”

            Julie is only older by a year, but likes to remind Sara as often as possible.  “It’s not like you have to come with us.  You know, we could drop you off someplace to hang out with your friends who are cooler than us—oh wait.”

            I do not like sitting in the back seat with them, but at least I’m not in between them.

            “Shut up, Julie.  Why do you have to be such a raging bitch?  I’m just saying I’m tired of this song—”

            “Shut the fuck up, both of you,” Tasha says, hitting the eject button.  “God!  Nobody’s cooler than us and we’re going to listen to Madonna and that’s it.”  She pops the tape out, inserts one of her infinite collection of Madonna mix-tapes, and turns it way up.  All with one hand on the wheel and her eyes on the road.  I don’t have to sit next to her to see this.  I know it by heart—how the night outside reflects on her clear blue eyes in flashes and moving arcs.

            Then there’s nothing else to say, and we begin the ritual of passing one item after the other from hand to hand to hand: lipgloss, cigarettes, eye-liner, perfume, paper coffee cups, crumpled dollar bills, packs of gum, the glowing red disc of the car lighter.  In the shifting light and weaving traffic, we perform a ballet of careful hand-eye coordination.  We spray each other’s hair, check each other’s teeth, pour liquids from bottle to bottle.  Then, just after the train tracks, there is the final flurry of powdering and patting and smoothing and scrunching. 

            

            Everything, all of this, is about the glory of our arrival, which is announced by the clatter of heels against pavement as we tumble out of the car in a cloud of vanilla-cherry-liquor-hairspray-scented smoke and glitter.  

            The glory of arrival is what makes up for the lack of places to go.

            We park in the shadow of the Benjamin Moore Paint Factory sign:  a black rectangle in the night sky.  The side facing Broadway is lit up all night long, like someone might have a Friday night paint crisis and find salvation here. 

            In the empty street, Madonna falls silent.  Tasha climbs out of the car and says, “Alright, bitches.  Let’s go.”  On the corner ahead there’s an old church with boarded-up windows that we keep talking about breaking into, but tonight is not the night.  (Tonight is never the night—we’ve worked too hard to look this way.)  So we turn and walk down the sidewalk to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and open the gate.  The small white house inside has metal-grated windows, and its resemblance to a crack-house is not just coincidental.  It almost definitely was one, before our friend Conrad rented it for band practice slash recording studio purposes.  He told Tasha they found needles and pipes everywhere when they were cleaning up the basement.  But we don’t care what it was before.  Now Christmas lights shine all over the Astroturf-and-cement backyard.  Deep bass notes swell out of the house and rise to meet us as we line up to stuff our two dollars in the glass jar sitting on the porch.  Tasha always puts in a five.  I can feel it still, from crossing the bridge, the flip-flopping in my stomach, and it’s mixing with the vibrations of the music.  Tasha’s ahead of me, but when she reaches back to grab my hand and pull me close to her, it’s like the world’s as it should be again, because we’re together and we’re here.

            “Conrad,” she says, and he opens his arms to us both at once.  He’s built like a superhero and dresses like one too.  Broad shoulders and bulging muscles, tight black t-shirt and leather pants, etcetera.  I think I can feel his abs rippling as he presses us against his chest.  Even in our platform shoes, he towers over us, which is why he can wear makeup and still emasculate the hell out of every boy we know.  He sings like David Bowie crossed with Peter Murphy and we worship him and fear him and never ask him to buy liquor or cigarettes for us.  He knows exactly how old we are.  He knows a lot of things he shouldn’t.  Like that his best friend Andy fucks Tasha in the backseat of his car sometimes before going home to his girlfriend of a hundred-million years.

            Where am I while this happens?  Sometimes waiting for Tasha in the car, finishing my cigarettes, then hers.  Sometimes I’m still inside, dancing like I don’t care I’m alone.  Sometimes I’m in the back room rolling around on one of the dirty couches where so many have rolled before. 

            I don’t mind too much when I have to wait for her.  Andy’s the DJ, and he’ll play any song we want if Tasha just bats her eyelashes at him.  And he’s not the one she goes home with at the end of the night.  After the two a.m. Taco Bell stop and dropping everyone else off one by one, at the end of the night it’s just me and Tasha.  We fall asleep with smoky hair in my big bed, where we smear mascara all over the pillow cases and wake up with the sweat of vodka tangled in the sheets.  In the morning, it’s me and Tasha: drawing each other’s eyebrows, putting ourselves back together again with the help of CoverGirl and Almay and copious quantities of one-hundred-percent cotton Q-tips.  We do it over and over again, the next night, the next weekend, and everything else in between—high school and parents and boyfriends—is just that, just in between.

            When she says “Conrad” he says “Babygirls” and before there is too much of that, Leah and Julie and Sara are pushing us from behind to go on, get inside.

            The backyard smells like clove cigarettes and Rave extra-super-hold hairspray.  We are people who like to look at each other and not say anything, like gazelles and lions eyeing each other across the savannah.  Our scene is not a loud scene. 

            I notice him by the fence and neither of us speaks and then Sara says, “Who’s got the vodka?”

            We adjourn to the bathroom to swig from a plastic Coke bottle, Leah, Sara and I.  Tonight, Julie thinks it’s embarrassing and cliché for us to go to the bathroom together.  Next week it will be Sara who says so, or something just like it.  The sisters’ worst fear is that they are exactly the same, so they take turns with personality traits and opinions to maintain a constant level of disagreement.  You could shuffle them like a deck of cards, deal two hands, and watch them go at it all night.  It’s always a fair fight, and whoever loses this one will win the next time.

            Leah’s parents are lawyers and she goes to a different high school and she doesn’t really give a shit about any of us, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, one knee crossed over the other.  Doesn’t even pretend to.  Her point is to be somewhere other than where she should be.  Plus, she doesn’t know how to drive—says she never has time for driver’s ed with all her AP classes.  She takes the bottle wordlessly.  Sara’s talking about how annoying Julie is and someone’s been pounding on the door for too long to ignore but we do, drinking fast till we get dizzy.  At a lull in the music, I hear Tasha’s voice yelling, “You fucking cocksuckers, let me in!”  She almost falls through the door when I open it and Sara spits up some Coke because she’s laughing too hard.  Leah acts grossed out, which we ignore as usual.

            “Jesus Christ,” Tasha says.  “I just went to request a song.  I guess I have to catch up with you guys.”  She throws her head back finishes the bottle in one long gulp.  The light in the bathroom is red, like a darkroom, so she’s dyed cherry-popsicle from head to toe, skin and hair all equally pale in the regular light of night.  They call us Snow White and Rose Red out there, the ones who recognize us from parties but don’t know our names.  She’s got a snag in her fishnet tights.  She tosses the empty in the corner—near but not in the trash can.  Leah’s eyes get huge, and I wait for her to say something while Tasha bends over with the lighter.  She props one foot on the edge of the tub next to Leah, first the right, then the left, Leah squirming beside her.  She pinches the lace between her fingers to hold it away from her skin and fixes the hole in her tights, then continues with a series of perfectly spaced smoldering holes.  She says, “Don’t worry, ladies.  I’ve got some more for later.”  Leah fans the smell of melting nylon away with a hand in front of her nose while Tasha pulls another Coke bottle half-way out of her purse, gives us a wink.

            The dance floor is where we rule.  Not the front room but the second room, where it’s a little darker and the sound’s a little deeper.  We use our eyes when we dance; even if our bodies never touch, something invisible between us keeps other people out.  Tasha leans against the wall with parted lips, half-smiling.  She crosses her arms in front, then unfolds them as she turns to the side with one hand fluttering.  She acts like she’s unaware of the eyes watching her orbit, which is something I have never been good at.  There is an open window behind her that looks onto the backyard.  I close my eyes and open them and he is watching me there.  What he looks like through the frame of the window is very far away, like something in a museum.

            If he were a painting, he would be a portrait of someone unspeakably sad trying to pretend like they’re not.  Looking at him does something to me that makes Tasha say, “What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing,” I say.  “Johnny’s here.”

            When he walks in, Julie and Sara stop to talk to him.  He keeps his hands in his pockets and it’s a long time before he makes his way over to me.

            I watch the way his hands stay in his pockets as he leans over, whispers “Hello” in my ear, then kisses me there, on the cheek. I tell myself this means something.  We had sex twice before he even kissed me on the lips, so in public on the cheek must be something.

            “Hello, sir,” I say, and I put my arms around his neck because I don’t have any pockets.

            “How are you tonight?” he says.

            “I’m fine,” I say.  “And you?”

            “Very well, thank you.”

            In a minute he says, “You look lovely.”           

            And I say, “So do you,” which makes him smile.

            What Johnny looks like actually is nothing I’ve ever seen before.  He is the strangest person I have ever brought to my house and my parents, who think of themselves as understanding people, don’t understand at all.

            His hair is one thing: long in some places, shaved in other places, blacker than anything because there is no sheen to it, no visible surface, something more like a void, like your hand might reach for it and fall right through.  Then there’s his face, which is chalk-white and soft, except for the eyes.  The eyes even gravity cannot escape from.  Altogether, it is too much.  I can’t resist.  I want to erase the years of scars that climb his arms like coils of rope. 

            I tried to count them once while he was sleeping, but I lost track when I realized they didn’t stop at his arms.

            When he sleeps sometimes I listen to him breathe and it is completely without rhythm.  I wish someone could explain to me how that’s possible.  It doesn’t sound like the breathing of something alive, and sometimes I think he’s going to die right there next to me.

            These are the usual things I think about when I see Johnny, when we touch each other and I see people watching the way we touch each other.  But tonight I’m thinking more.  I’m thinking about the cut on my thigh and how it got there.  I wonder what it means and I keep looking at his face like it might tell me something.  But he says things in the usual way, and his eyes look down in the usual way.

            I haven’t told Tasha yet, about what happened when I went to his store after hours, and I am dying for that part of the night to come.

            He works in a costume shop, which is the only thing that makes sense for the way he looks, and there were mannequins all around us in the dark, dressed up in corsets and wigs.  Every time a car turned onto the street the headlights lit up everything, torsos and limbs and weird moving shadows.  Then there was darkness again.  In the middle of all this, I was up on the glass countertop with a razorblade pressed against my thigh.  His hand held the blade there waiting.  Like it was a question and I knew the answer.  I flexed my fingers in the secret cave under my thighs, hiding by my bitten fingernails.

            We had been snorting lines off the counter.  That’s what it was for, the razorblade.  We were not alone.  His friends were there, Christopher, and a girl I didn’t know.  There was a whole wall of windows.  I thought anyone could see us, but he didn’t care; he picked me up by the waist and put me there on the counter.  My skirt was sliding up and the glass was cold and smooth.  I needed that feeling then, of something cold and smooth like glass.  He hiked my skirt higher and higher and stood between my knees.  I looked behind his head to see the others.  They were laughing.  There was powder coating the back of my thighs and where my fingers were hiding and I could smell it in my nose.  Metallic.  He kissed me then, on the mouth, and he kissed me everywhere, and I leaned back, and he bent down, and I guess it was there on the counter.  He held it to my leg and looked up at me.  Behind his hand was his wrist and on his wrist were those scars and behind them there was him.  I nodded my head, and it didn’t hurt so much.  Maybe that was the drugs.  He kissed me some more.  He cleaned the blood he drew, erasing the long red line with his tongue.

            The look in his eyes did not change, before or after.

            Now he takes his hands out of his pockets, maybe to show me they’re empty.  I dance away from him slowly, trying to stay afloat.  I look for Julie and Leah and Sara and Tasha because they are the islands I swim toward.  He follows me a little, grazing my hips with his fingertips.  I can see that he wants me to say something, but I just smile at him.  Finally he says, really quiet, “I hope I didn’t hurt you.  Last night.”

            “No,” I say.  “It’s ok,” I tell him.

            Tasha is gone.  I try not to act like I’m looking for her.  He grabs my hand as I leave the room, squeezes it while I walk away from him.

            I wander the house and I can’t find her in the yard or the front room, or the porch or the back room, but I notice Andy is missing from the DJ booth.  In a dark hallway between dark rooms there’s a black curtain hanging over the wall.  Behind it, there’s a doorway and a flight of stairs leading to the attic.  Most people don’t know it’s there.  I push the fabric back and peer up the stairs where Andy has Tasha pressed against the wall.  It’s loud and they don’t notice me.  Tasha’s leg is lifted high, in the crook of Andy’s arm, and I have a view straight up her skirt, of the pale stripe of flesh above her thigh-highs, of the bubblegum-pink thing he is reaching for with his hand, while he groans and she giggles and I don’t want to see what happens next, but I do.  And then I let the curtain fall, and think about it.  What all of this is.  This wanting to get inside of things.

            Tasha is the reason I get discounts at the record store and free drinks at bars and she is the reason bouncers forget to check our IDs.  Because of the way she cocks her head and looks up from under her blonde bangs, because of the little black star tattooed on her breast.  I don’t have to do these things because she does them for me.

            I wonder what makes me different from Andy or any of those boys.  What makes me different from Johnny besides the mark he made on me.  If we are always going to be one of us marking the other, or marking ourselves so everyone knows who we are, what side we’re on.

            This is the night the police come and kick us all out of the house.  We stand in the yard, impatient because we don’t understand what’s happening, while they walk up and down the porch pointing to things.  The magic has gone with the music and the lights are too bright.  Conrad nods his head and keeps his giant arms folded across his chest.  They say something about a cabaret license and Tasha whispers to me, “Isn’t that a wine?”  It hurts too much to see him like that—our hero!  He’s bigger than them.  In the comic book version, our hero would never go down without a fight.  “I got your cabaret license right here,” he’d say.  KA-POW.

            We turn away so we don’t have to watch what is really happening.  We hurry to the other side of town where we hear there’s a warehouse party.  If we leave right now we might not miss things that could be happening without us.  We don’t turn at the train tracks to go over the bridge again because we don’t want to squander the rest of the night. 

            We don’t know yet that we’re not coming back.        

            The bridge is still there, the little white house, the church.  They are there where they were, I think, but we are not. 

            What I remember about that party is mostly from pictures Tasha shows me—later, spread across a table at a café where Conrad is our waiter and somehow the years haven’t changed him, only us.

            He calls us Babygirls, but we are not. 

            I don’t remember the camera.  Where did it come from?

            Tasha shrugs.  “I had a whole universe in that purse.”  Her hair is longer but still smooth and white as the inside of a seashell, a pair of folded wings.  It sways when she laughs.  She’s still the prettiest thing in the room and I feel again what it’s like to be the one sitting with her.  But now she’s not mine.  I only have two hours before she has to be home to breastfeed.  “Can you believe how huge my tits are?”

            She has two kids, a husband, Madonna bumper stickers on her minivan.  I have this scar on my thigh I can never explain.

            She shows me we were there:  skinny seventeen-year-olds in fishnet stockings, leaning against her Dodge Daytona with our arms wrapped around each other.  The rest of them, too:  Leah and the sisters, posing for the camera, smoking, pouting, standing in combat boots in somebody’s shower.  Of Johnny, there’s only his shoulder with the back of my head at the edge of one frame.  A flash of red hair.  I remember I held his hand, what it felt like—cool, damp, rough like stone—but there’s no picture of that.

            I tell Tasha I can’t find the bridge.  I’ve been gone a long time, but I drive up and down Broadway whenever I’m here, looking for it. 

            Tasha says, “What bridge?”

            “On the way to the house, remember?”  I nod in Conrad’s direction.

            “Oh yeah,” she says, then she’s quiet while I watch her eyes flicker over the tail lights and traffic ahead like we’re there, in the car, again.  Her pale blue, clear-as-water eyes are painted just like mine.  My hand remembers how to draw the thin black line, the way it curves down and up and flattens at the corner:  a sharp, clean wedge.  It ends just above the freckle whose position I still know by heart.  The shape of that black line, how to trace it perfectly—we taught each other that.