That year, El Niño hit the Bay Area, bringing unexpected torrents, mudslides, and long, dark monochromatic days of rain. When I think back on that year, I remember the dark grey slab of sky like the too-low ceiling of a shitty apartment. Rain in awe-inspiring sheets and big, individuated cartoon teardrops and endless ambient drizzle, the mist that would spin my hair out into frizz and tell the truth about my Jewishness and my curls. I hated it for that. The gloom was tuned perfectly to the misery in me. It felt appropriately punishing to drag my ass uphill from one job to another in tight black pants with the cold, tinkling rain threatening my eyeliner, my bobby-pinned hairdo. Forty-three days of rain. We stayed inside, bored. Rachel’s sister, Miriam, came to visit, and we made Valentines on the kitchen floor. Another one of our best friends, Miranda, came from the East Coast, and trapped inside, we played with makeup, tried on the prom dresses Kat had stolen from the vintage shop where she worked—stiff, tube-like cylinders of crinoline in pale lavender, pistachio-ice-cream green, and baby blue—and took Polaroids of one another. This was beauty to us—reclining on the cat-hair couch in stolen secondhand party dresses, drinking ruby-lipped from tall cans of beer, or better, a forty. Miranda was the most Kewpie-like of our crew. She was Greek and Irish by blood, but she looked elfin and Asiatic, and wore her hair pinned into two high Björk buns. We oohed and ahhed when she tried on the strapless white dress with the raised turquoise flowers that looked like dots of meringue. As the rain pelted the rooftop, I photographed her on the telephone, ordering takeout chow mein.
But then, like the big reveal after a makeover scene in a movie, there would come a sunny day. The beauty of San Francisco is in these windows of redemptive splendor, we learned, the days when the fog “burns off,” as they say, and gives way to a piercing, almost perversely joyous sunshine. New Yorkers joke about being in an abusive relationship with the city. In San Francisco, I understood this. We were constantly being pummeled by clouds and rain, then promptly apologized to by sparkling sunshine. This is the thing the city does best: convinces you, through a blustery string of freezing, gunmetal-grey days, that life is shit, and then, when you least expect it and most need it, it seems to practically shatter open, revealing a crystalline brightness that pings light around, reflects it off of everything, and air-dries the pale, soaked buildings. It was a magic trick that got me every time. The grey doesn’t usually give birth to the day until about noon, and back then, in the Mission, that was when the city—the parts we cared about, where the young people were—revved to life. Coffeehouse punks came out of their houses, and bartenders began squeezing lemons into pitchers of Bloody Mary mix. On our days off, we curled up in the precious patches of sunlight that streamed through Rachel’s bedroom windows on the quilt that still smelled like her house in New Jersey. Even though it never, ever got truly hot, when the sun came out we put ice cubes into our coffee and smoked cigarettes out the window, then went to Dolores Park and kicked a soccer ball around.
* * *
• • •
K was a master of the art of mixtape seduction, and a couple weeks into our courtship he made me one that remained in heavy rotation until I lost it. But I kept the case, which was adorned with Japanese photo booth stickers in which it looked like a tiny K was suspended in a shiny, ink-black galaxy. One grey afternoon, he came to visit me at the head shop, jangling the bells on the door, and his sudden presence immediately shifted the energy of the small space, seemed to change the very structure of the cells in my body. Everything at attention. I had another hour or so left in my shift, and then a long break before I had to be at Tower. If he waited with me, maybe the sun would be out, we could walk around the corner for a watermelon agua fresca. Yeah that sounds good, he said as he walked around the display case, trespassing on my little employees-only perch, and kissing me decisively. What should we do until then? he asked and kissed me again, this time more firmly. This was what they meant by “butterflies.” This was like a John Hughes movie. Slowly, aware of my back, my ass, my skirt, I padded over to the front door and locked it, turned the little OPEN sign around, and led him into the storeroom at the back of the shop, where we had quick, breathless sex atop a stack of boxes containing tissue-wrapped ceramic bookends in the shape of praying hands that I would unpack, smiling, the following day.
I was collecting experiences, as young people are meant to do, turning them over, layering them on top of one another, comparing them. But then, there was this. The feeling of my body stiffening as a man’s large, tattooed hand (a tattooed hand! this was not yet commonplace in the nineties), the animal warmth of it, settled on my waist and then with a gentle movement of fingers coaxed me forward to be kissed. My life, it seemed, had finally begun.
It’s hard to remember the quality of pleasure I felt during the actual sex. When I was younger, it was always hard to tell whether I was enjoying the experience or merely the sensation of being wanted, which at the time was almost everything. Like all the other adventurous activities in my life, sex brought about a vague heightening, a feeling of arousal that was pure nerves, the quivering of fear and uncertainty. It was the same feeling I got from punk rock, from seeing certain bands play live, the same wincing sense of naughtiness I’d felt that day in eighth grade when I bought a cassette by a band called Dayglo Abortions. The album was called Feed Us a Fetus and it had a picture of Nancy and Ronald Reagan smiling on the cover, sitting in front of a plate with a tiny bloody baby on it. I liked that heart-pounding, these small, private pushings of the envelope, moments when I thought to myself, Am I allowed to be doing this? And then felt vaguely ill from the high of realizing that yes, I could do it, I could in fact do whatever I wanted. Being with K always had this wild quality. The city itself did. Maybe my friends and I were just eighteen with time to kill and, once we’d clocked out, we had nothing to do—no homework, no soccer practice, no parents. The hours of freedom were like extra money burning a hole in our pockets. It made us itchy for trouble, our looming adulthood like a cold we had to feed. We poured in candy and cocktails and boys and drives to the beach and day trips spent praying the little Honda would make it up steep, guardrail-less climbs. We grew a tenderness for the particular Bay Area flavors of bad art that were everywhere on earnest display, and we went to the big museums and saw good art and to the Roxie theater when Kurt & Courtney came out and the drag queens snaked around the crowd-control belts in baby-doll dresses and fruit-punch lipstick. We smoked West Coast weed, which came in fresh, moist clumps from which you could tear a small piece to smoke as if ripping a bite from a hunk of bread. As with all of the flora and the produce in California, it looked so much greener, so much more alive than what we were used to back home, and the high was so strong I occasionally had to lock myself in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, feeling my face and wondering at the greasy magnificence of my 3-D ugliness, thinking, Hang on, hang on, CALM DOWN, there must be an end to this. Thinking, Is this fun? Am I having fun? Things felt lawless then, like you couldn’t call for help. There was a chimerical excitement and some fear in that anticipation, that not knowing. Time and darkness had a different quality, didn’t they? Without cellphones, text messages, without a map? We went out for the night and hoped for the best.
* * *
• • •
For all of his affection, there was also something adversarial in my relationship with K. The flipside of his chivalry—which could make me feel so regal and special, so much like a lady in the most encompassing, old-fashioned way—was chauvinism. He held the belief that men and women were two distinct and opposing teams, that they were fundamentally doomed to misunderstand and hurt each other. This wasn’t something unarticulated that I read into our dynamic. It was stated breezily but plainly, an anchoring tenet of his worldview. When a friend called him late one night and said he’d been cheated on by his girlfriend, K said tersely, Well, that’s what you get for trusting a chick—a line that landed cruelly on my teenage e
ars, somehow stunned me, even though I knew that men spoke to each other this way about women, like we were an invading force to be beaten back, like we were double agents. I lay on his mattress and watched his back as he listened to the guy’s tale of woe. He turned to me after a couple minutes and made the bored yada yada motion with his hands, rolled his eyes back a bit to suggest to me that the conversation was tiresome, that he was trying to wrap it up and would be with me—a chick, who shouldn’t be trusted—shortly. Meet me tomorrow, I’ll buy you an ice cream, he told his friend, and I imagined the two sitting on a bench, laughing and commiserating about girls and their conniving, while they licked their scoops down to tight rounded masses, economically, the way boys do. I was jealous of his friend—that he would command K’s attention, and hear his honest riffing about relationships, something I could never really get from him. I was jealous, too, in the nonspecific way I often was of men. Just that they were men, that their voices weren’t lilting and full of question marks, that they seemed to move through space with so much more ease.
But I also felt for K—it wasn’t his fault. He’d been raised this way. He bore the wounds of a boyhood spent being doted on by his mother and urged to toughen up by his father. K’s dad was a first-generation Italian raised in Philadelphia during the Depression, who played minor league baseball and became a French horn player in the San Francisco Symphony, blending athleticism and cultural sophistication fairly seamlessly, although K would be the first to remind me that symphony musicians are like any other musicians and not exactly known for gentility. He was tall and handsome and affable with a mile-wide mean streak that the whole family knew to do their best to steer clear of. When his wrath came down, it was frightening. K was the favorite child, the beautiful first boy born to Italian Catholics—so, basically a small god—on whom his father’s hopes were pinned. That meant that the pressure was on him to conform to rather narrow ideas about manhood. K was encouraged to cultivate physical strength through sports. Once, in elementary school, he found himself unable to fight a bully—he’d been told by his dad not to bother coming home unless the principal called to say he’d fought the kid, but K had only managed to hit the kid with his Land of the Lost lunchbox. So his father took him to a boxing gym in the Tenderloin and threw him into the ring so he could learn to fight with his hands. He got chewed right up that day, but he kept going back, until he was the one doing the chewing.
At an Italian bakery at the end of a date, he explained to me how mystified his parents had been when he discovered heavy metal, and then punk rock, in the eighties. He laughed as he described the horror on his father’s face when he noticed a boot print on K’s back after a show. His dad was in his sixties by the time K was a teenager; he had absolutely no point of reference for a mosh pit. “What the hell kinds of movies are you going to anyway?” he shouted. The generational rift between them became ever wider as K grew into a young man and his father began losing control over him.
Eventually, I had that moment every kid has, where you think you can beat up your dad, he said, smiling as he polished off our cannoli and licked powdered sugar from his fingertips.
Everyone has that moment? I asked incredulously. He nodded as he chewed.
Yeah, when you’re sick of being pushed around and you think you’re finally big enough to take on your old man? Everyone has it, he answered.
Oh, I said. A bookish girl with sisters. What did I know. And what happened when you did that? I asked.
I lunged at him and he cracked me in the face, broke my nose, he said, instinctively reaching for the bridge of it and running his thumb and forefinger over the place where it went slightly crooked.
I drew back in disgust. Your own father broke your nose? I’m sorry but that’s child abuse. I shook my head. That’s horrible.
Eh, K said, shrugging. I had it coming.
K continued boxing, then took door-guy jobs where he continued fighting, but only as a last resort, he said, when words wouldn’t do the trick. More than fighting, he enjoyed the strategy involved in assessing other men, determining their threat level, managing their outbursts, leveling them only when necessary. He was very good at it. He did this scanning and evaluating wherever we went, and it made me feel safe, like a red carpet of protection being rolled out before me. After an adolescence spent confusedly navigating the murky waters of male attention, it was like having my own Secret Service.
Part of falling for K was falling for this origin story, the tale of a sweet boy who had a certain predilection for violence bred into him, beaten into him. He wasn’t born like this, that story went, and it allowed me to believe that somewhere deep in there was a very gentle soul. The tender tough guy: that’s a story so many women are charmed by. He had cultivated a stylized Raging Bull masculinity that found romance in the flare of a hot temper and the amorous apology afterward. But that was all reserved for someone special, and mostly, he was just playing the field. To him, girls were like trophies to collect. And you had to know how to get rid of the ones who were too needy, too clingy, too crazy, too slutty—it was a get-them-before-they-get-you mentality. He insisted that he was in search of “the one,” but I think that was just a way to keep the ladies on their toes, forever vying for that position.
Still, the overwhelming sense I had about K was that he could see and understand me, that he understood everything. He seemed experienced above all. Maybe this was because he was older, or appeared so much more confident than me or any of the boys I had known, but also because he was somehow familiar. I read some continuity into K’s nature—there was great overlap between his gregariousness, his anything-for-a-laugh humor, and the boisterousness on my mother’s side of the family, and I was comforted by that. Into my rainy and disgruntled grunge nineties, he’d appeared in his khakis and bright white T-shirt, as if from A Bronx Tale–era East Coast. I thought about how to make him laugh, how I would retell the events of the day to him. Every song was about him. Onto a dollar-bin record I paint-markered “fifteen minutes with you / oh I wouldn’t say no,” a quote from a Smiths song, and gave it to him as a birthday card.
While K and I were involved, my little sister, Anya, came out to California to visit. With her two long blond braids and baby face, she looked too young to get into bars, so we drank and smoked pot at home and went for walks and out for burritos. We lay in the living room talking and crying about our parents’ divorce and our sister’s drug dramas, and I told her I was really and truly in love. We cried about that, too—just love, the idea of it, that I was grown enough to have found it. Was there anything higher to reach for in this world? I know it sounds crazy, I sniffled, but I feel like my whole life has changed.
* * *
• • •
Four months after I began falling for K—about eight months into our California life—the kitchen phone rang around midnight. It was Anya, her teeth chattering audibly.
Where are you? I said.
Home. Her voice quavered. I’m—
What is it? I asked. Lucia, I thought, as I drew a sharp breath. Anya, what? Tell me.
Lorenzo died tonight, she said. He overdosed. He wasn’t with Lucia, he wasn’t at home, but she’s freaking the fuck out. Mommy and Daddy just went into the city to get her.
A bloom of fear spread, buckling my waist. They lived together, Lucia and Lorenzo. They were mad about each other. They intended to get married in just a month’s time. I blinked and pictured him blue. Stiff. Not as I’d seen him last, shirtless and barefoot, tan and happy, taking a long drag off a cigarette in the Tenth Avenue apartment they’d recently moved out of. He was twenty-one.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 6
