Working on Thanksgiving? he said, as he opened his pea coat to drop the CD into the large inside pocket. That’s too bad.
Outside, the greyness hovered. Cars sped down Market. The door jangled as another customer entered the store. I wanted to curl up in that warm coat pocket and be moved by the weight of him, all over this city I didn’t yet know.
It’s okay, I replied. I have nowhere else to be.
For the rest of the day I turned the exchange over and over in my mind, burnishing it like found treasure, willing it to mean more than it did. I smoked a clove cigarette with Winter, a goth girl I worked with who smelled strongly of vanilla oil and wore her fire-red dreadlocks in high pigtails, and told her about the cute boy I’d rung up. Oh really, she said, unfazed. A cute boy coming into the record store was a thing that sometimes happened.
That I had nowhere to be was not at all true. The following day, a shared day off, I would over-butter the Stove Top stuffing and the green beans, and share them, along with a teriyaki tofu stir-fry and a six-pack, with Rachel and Kat, my best friends. We would lounge, overfull, on the fuchsia carpet of our Fourteenth Street apartment, stoned and giggling under the twinkle of pink Christmas lights, 2,900 miles from home—plum across the world, it felt like—and elated. We’d driven to San Francisco from New Jersey three months earlier, after high school finally, blessedly came to an end. Straight across I-80 in a dying Honda hatchback, with a few zigzagging detours, to begin a self-imposed exile from the suburbs. We mapped our route in a lap-sized atlas: New Jersey to Michigan to Illinois to Colorado to Utah to Nevada to California, playing the same shoebox of mixtapes over and over. Aged seventeen, hair whipping in the highway wind, I only wanted to feel the freedom of the passenger seat, to look at myself in the side-view mirror, see myself being seen. Is all youth the same? That bottom quadrant of my face, an object in the mirror, closer than it appeared, all plump skin, lip gloss, and soda straws. The stick of a lollipop—Lo. Lee. Ta.—jutting out from between my teeth. We wrote postcards home in all-night diners and broke down outside Chicago, coasting down an exit ramp into a service station where Rachel flirted with the mechanic. He took her on a motorcycle ride while the other guys worked on the car and I felt some raw, foreign combination of after-dark panic and jealousy. Around every corner, it seemed, there were men willing to extend to us various courtesies, to give us things for free, to let us in underage, batting away our youth as though it was a nuisance, a gnat, nothing. New worlds were becoming visible, new constellations beginning to hotly twinkle in the night skies of our minds.
When K and I next ran into each other four months later, I was at my other job, at a Mission gift shop. Tower Records girl, he blurted out when he saw me. He was with two friends, similarly dressed and tattooed boys who were cute enough but looked rougher. They didn’t radiate the way K did. He appeared luminous to me. The three of them scuffled around the shop cracking jokes, trying to be inconspicuously conspicuous, flirting without even looking at me. “Sitting On the Dock of the Bay” was playing, and just at the part where Otis begins to whistle, K raised a finger in warning, looked around the store, and said out loud, Nobody better do the corny whistling part, which made me laugh. A few minutes later they left, but a few minutes after that, he came back, and walked up to the counter where I stood.
So, he began.
Yes? I smiled.
Do you have a strict policy against going out with people who’ve purchased that Alice in Chains record? he asked.
It was fairly strict, I was sorry to say, but I would make an exception in this case. Just this once, I said, writing my phone number down on the back of one of the store’s gold business cards.
He began calling me after he got off work in the middle of the night. I was wide awake at the blond wood kitchen table, waiting for the sharp rolling brrrring! of the wall phone. I rolled the ash of my cigarette along the perimeter of a novelty Las Vegas ashtray, working its lit end into a grey and glowing cone. After smoking a few, I lay by the heater in our hallway, which required stretching the telephone cord as far as it would go, and we talked for two, three, four hours. Our kittens walked up and down my back as I did my best to charm him.
Our relationship was brief and intense. K was gorgeous and inscrutable and funny, unfairly funny, and a little bit mean. His hair looked like something from the fifties, or the forties? Sometimes the twenties, when it hadn’t yet been pomaded for the day and made a shiny dark mop messily befitting a rakish Left Bank poet. Can you fall for a hairline? Some are unflattering or uneven, but his stretched perfectly, ever so slightly bowed across his forehead, so precise as to look like a wire penning in his voluminous straight greasy hair. I wanted his love desperately and I knew I couldn’t be the only one. Some people have that kind of magnetism. I could sense a certain current directed toward him, could almost feel writhing within the city the bodies, the energy of many more girls in many other apartments, hoping he would call. I pictured them and broke out in a fever of jaw-clenching jealousy, even though I knew he liked me. He was hard to pin down, but when I got myself in front of him, he looked at me like I was an ice cream sundae.
K would disappear for a few days and then call, all breezy confidence and purpose.
What are you doing right now? he asked.
What to say, baking a cake? Writing a song? Getting ready to go out? Anything but “nothing.”
Nothing, I said. What are you doing? I could never think of anything cool.
Hanging out with you, he said. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.
His was the kind of attention I felt I just had to take as it came—because I was too young and too shy or because he was intimidating, older, and clearly more experienced. Or was he? I never worked up the courage to ask him where he’d been, why I hadn’t heard from him, what exactly he wanted from me, how many others like me there were. That day, I waited for him outside my apartment in a burgundy skirt. I wore my faded black sweatshirt, the one that said JENN in white felt lettering on the breast, underneath Rachel’s jean jacket, which had clusters of black bobby pins in the pockets and smelled of our smoky apartment. On the pavement in front of our door were smashed avocados that had fallen from a tree. The fruit made matte smudges of lime green and yellow on the ground. The sun was shining and birds were singing like symbols of happiness and naïveté in a cartoon. I rode up Potrero on the back of his motorcycle, the city blurring by me, and when we stopped at a stop sign at the top of the hill, I pictured us from above, a bird’s-eye view of us from a telephone pole. We were a movie poster unrolled against the sky.
K was a smooth operator. On the floor of his Oak Street bedroom, we made out by the light of VHS tapes: ultraviolent Japanese slasher movies, Morrissey music videos, The Godfather. On my walk downhill from Tower after work, I stopped to flirt with him at the bar where he worked the door, and once watched him settle an altercation by strong-arming a drunk and belligerent frat boy into the back of a cab. All right, Joe College, take it easy, he said as he fluidly twisted the guy’s forearm behind his back, hailing a taxi at the same time. Fuck you! the guy was shouting through the window, and K just smiled, cool as a speakeasy gangster, and said, You’re gonna be okay, pal, rapping his knuckle on the top of the car as it drove away.
Everyone in his orbit had a nickname. Mine was Pimentoloaf—I have absolutely no memory of its genesis, I only know that it soon became the only thing he called me and despite being an ugly word for a disgusting luncheon meat, somehow it didn’t even sound odd. We went out for coffee in North Beach and sushi in the Sunset and he made me laugh loudly, a bright, squeaky, sunny sound I barely recognized. He said he thought he should move back to New York with me when I started college in the fall, and we spun a story about what our life could be like there. Plants on the sill of an East Village apartment. A little dog.
While sitting at the laundromat watching the dryers spin my clothes, he told me he’d ha
d cancer, and I drove him to St. Mary’s one day and waited as they scanned him to see if it had come back. Fingering the pages of a paperback as I sat nervously in the plastic waiting-room chair, I felt the familiar charge of responsibility. It had a narcotic effect on me, this sense of mild suffering, the feeling of being needed, of being poised to go through something. If he was sick, I would nurse him back to health. I relished the idea. As it turned out, the cancer wasn’t back that time, but it soon would be, and K would experience his first taste of opiate painkillers, which would alter the course of his life.
* * *
• • •
I was particularly keen to leave home for California. My parents were in the middle of a divorce and had both taken up with new partners. For my father, who was living in a small, yellowed apartment with a mattress on the floor and one fork, it was a revolving cast of local moms. For my mother, it was Jim, a much younger man she met through work and with whom she seemed suddenly, shockingly in love. My younger sister, Anya, frequently enveloped by pot smoke in her bedroom, still pulled straight As. She came and went from friends’ houses and field hockey practices with her thick athletic braid reaching almost to her waist, seeming, with her long legs and unsettling type-A aptitude for everything, somehow both apart from and already above any family drama. My older sister, Lucia, had graduated from drug-fueled weekend raves to cocaine to full-blown heroin addiction, and I carried her secrets around like a backpack full of body parts, guilty, angry, and exhausted. At home as a young teenager, I learned the detective work of codependency, nurturing along with my fear-crazed parents the delusion that if we could just put our hands on the evidence, we could somehow stop my sister, save her, find out the truth. It had been this way for a few years. Go in there and see if you find anything, my mother whispered conspiratorially whenever Lucia was out or distracted, and I’d slip into my sister’s bedroom, sweaty and stealthy as special forces, to root around in her belongings and retrieve some proof that things were how we thought they were, that we were not insane. No, we were right. I’d return minutes later with her needle exchange ID card, bottles of pills, bits of folded up aluminum foil from the bottom of her purse, tiny plastic bags imprinted with skulls, bearing the ghostly residue of white powder. I dropped these like a loyal dog and was awarded the treat of my mother’s love. Much as I came to resent it, I felt most alive and most treasured when I was called upon to do this important work, to be my mother’s partner in crime-solving. I always rose to meet the challenge of trying to figure out and control my sister’s life, of invading her privacy. It felt like a righteous pursuit, a battle of light over darkness, good against evil. Backed into a corner by heroin, we felt we had no choice. Tracking my sister’s movements was what we must do or else we would lose her. Her survival became a kind of crooked victory we audaciously believed we’d engineered.
Lucia had always seemed too big for our town. She had a certain star quality, even as a child. She loved performing and the excitement of all its preceding necessities: rehearsing, yes—that she did with Fosse-like focus—but also corralling and orchestrating others’ energies, gathering an audience, dimming the lights, and pulling back a bedsheet curtain. A born ringleader, she made programs for our living-room plays, menus for our kitchen-table café, and once the show began, she never broke character. Can I get you anything else or are you ready for the bill? she’d asked our parents earnestly as she cleared plates from our pretend restaurant while Anya and I stood tittering in the wings. Perhaps you’d like to meet the chefs? They’re sisters, you know.
While our grandmother napped one day, Lucia convinced us to put on her clothes and perform a bizarre funerary-style ritual at her bedside, walking in one by one to lay jewelry and other household offerings on her sleeping body. She directed Anya and me in silence, waving us toward the bed and nodding as we placed a comb and a bracelet on Nanny’s gently rising and falling bosom. Lucia took pride in forcing solemnity over a room, holding us as if under a spell. In the backyard, atop the picnic table, wearing jelly bracelets up to the elbow and one lace glove, she commandeered an army of cousins and neighbors, directing lip sync performances of Madonna and Debbie Gibson. Once, she pretended she was a scientist and locked Anya in our dog’s crate to study her. When Anya complained of hunger, Lucia slipped bites of a bagel through the bars. Let her out! I protested. But I like it, said Anya from inside the cage.
In a way, Anya was better matched to Lucia’s intensity than I was. A string bean with a wild, tangled mane of mysteriously blond hair, she had seemed to be in possession of an excess of ardor from the very beginning of life. It emerged as a tantrum or through her drillbit kisses, moments when she glommed on to me and wouldn’t let go, or in the form of frantic dancing. For a time, around five or six years old, she carried a cassette player around the house. After a sleepover once, she barged in and woke up my friend and me with a 6:00 A.M. rendition of Ella Fitzgerald’s “A Tisket, A Tasket.”
My sisters liked a spectacle, and it could be thrilling to be their assistant, apprentice, understudy. Lucia especially made you want to go along with her. I wasn’t shy, exactly, but I drew no power from being the center of attention. I retreated with a book when their games grew most elaborate. When my sisters belted out show tunes, harmonizing perfectly at ages seven and twelve, I didn’t know where my weaker voice fit. It often got lost in the middle. You be the boy, Lucia would say, you can’t be Cosette, you’re Jean Valjean.
Naturally, the older we got, the more dangerous the spectacle. We started going to punk rock shows at City Gardens in Trenton, and I watched her abandon herself to the sweaty throng, get tossed around by the undulations of the crowd or whipped about by a mosh pit. It was the same fearlessness and surrender as when she swam in the ocean. She once laughed while confiding in me that she’d been tripping on acid in math class that day, and the carefree sound of the laughter terrified me: Was it a confession or a provocation? Didn’t she know it would frighten me? I realized that she was often stoned while driving us to and from school in our mom’s old silver Saab, but I didn’t want to get her in trouble, so I asked if she would teach me to drive. It was only a couple miles anyway, and I was almost fifteen.
Lucia was glamorous. She became best friends with an equally glamorous British girl whose parent was a visiting professor at Princeton, and the pair seemed to have more fun than anyone else in school. They watched episodes of Absolutely Fabulous and dyed their hair the same colors as Patsy and Edina. They bought cigarettes from a hesher at school who carried a guitar case filled with cartons of them, and smoked where the cool kids did, in the area we called Varsity Smoking. One spring, Lucia contracted mono and stayed home for a month, tanning on the roof and listening to Saint Etienne on a boom box.
The only time our parents ever left us alone overnight, Lucia threw a party in the backyard. It was summer, and they’d driven upstate to collect Anya from her first sleepaway camp. At the impromptu party, where guests multiplied like swarming insects—so many people I’d never seen before, where had they come from?—my boyfriend and I walked through the smoky mob, then retreated upstairs to observe the debauchery from a bedroom window.
You’ll take care of the house and be responsible, right, my darlings? my mother had said that morning. How convincingly Lucia had nodded, tilting her head to question the question itself. Why yes, of course, Mother, she’d said, in a posh English accent. Now I could see her in a lawn chair below, holding court from her perch on a skater’s lap.
You’re Lucia’s sister? a boy asked me as I stood by my locker not long after that party, his face full of all that that meant to him. What did it mean—that I was cool? Easy? That now we had a party house?
Yeah, I answered.
He just raised his eyebrows and smiled.
For all the uncertainty, the fear, that Lucia introduced, she was also brilliant, glittering with an enviable knowingness, and when it came to getting some
thing done or getting the grade, she always pulled it off at the last minute. She made things look easy. Often at night, with the whole household winding down, she was just sitting down at the dining room table to plow through the day’s homework, which she was smart enough to do in fifteen minutes. Once, we awoke in the morning to find that she’d baked two large trays of perfect madeleines in the night. What is this? I asked. For French class, she answered nonchalantly. I have to make some presentation. For college, she had her heart set on going to Tisch, the competitive drama school at NYU. Before her audition, she stayed up all night learning Ophelia’s monologue from Hamlet—O my Lord, my Lord, I have been so affrighted! she exclaimed in the kitchen as I packed my lunch—and was, of course, accepted. The deeper into addiction she got, the less common these moments were, but Lucia never completely lost this magic. It’s part of what kept hope alive in our family.
chapter three
When I was five or six, I asked my mother about religion. I had become curious about the churches in our town, around which on the weekends clustered well-heeled, sandy-haired congregants clad in taupes and ecrus. What is church? I asked, and she answered that it was a place where people went to practice their religion. What is religion? I pressed. That drew a pause.
A lot of beautiful pictures and stories, she eventually said. Some of them are very scary. People have been looking at them for a long, long time—they use them to make sense of the world.
Are the pictures and stories real? I asked.
No, she said flatly, not missing a beat.
A few years later, my mother shed her skin, leaving domesticity behind to go back to school and earn a graduate degree in art history. Something was stirring in her. Months earlier, she’d torn an image of a David Hockney swimming pool—monochromatic blue, more cornflower than aqua—from an art magazine and stuck it with a magnet to the fridge beneath some words she’d cut from an advertisement in the newspaper: “Other worlds do exist.”
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 3
