Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  On Saturday, I met Melissa in front of Camden Town station, and she took me to Camden Lock, the street market by the canal, to look for live-music CDs. We walked back to the Camden tube, rode the northern line all the way down to the central line, got off at Notting Hill Gate and followed the crowds to Portobello Road Market, with its brightly painted flats, pubs, and shopfronts. I bought some cheap jumpers and socks, and then we stopped at the Dub Vendor Record Shack on Ladbroke Grove to check out some reggae. It was like Chrissie Hynde had said, reggae had been the soundtrack for punk. “Look at me.” I posed under the Westway. “I am the Clash!” Melissa took a photo of me with her mobile phone.

  Later we met Nick at the Iskem for a meal. I felt like a fifteen-year-old boy. Melissa’s beauty was distracting. Sometimes I’d have to ask her to repeat things. I wanted to hold her and stroke her sexy, tousled hair very gently. She made a kind of hush in my heart.

  Nick brought her AFI CDs by my bedsit the next day and we listened to those, my best Nirvana bootlegs, and bands I was fond of that were obscure in the States like the Wall, Abrasive Wheels, and the Partisans. Soon we fell into a routine. She came to see me nearly every day. If I was out boxing, she’d sit on the outside steps and wait for me. If I went busking, I left a note on the door telling her where I’d be. Mostly we talked and listened to tunes. Like me, she was mostly involved in the worlds of books and music. She helped me write songs, and was funny and charming, as I played my guitar. I felt she was a rare person. I wondered if I could talk her into looking for a used bass. Every time I’d brought up the idea, she said she’d be too shy to play in front of anyone anyway. She had returned to her own flat, and I offered to visit her in Bethnal Green, but she said she felt claustrophobic there. I guessed that maybe it felt too personal to her, and it was her personal space that had been violated. But she said she didn’t feel like she could keep living at Melissa’s indefinitely, even though Melissa had asked her to stay. She said she was feeling introverted since the attack but was comfortable around me because I’d been there.

  Nick liked my stories about getting arrested for civil disobedience when I was an AIDS activist with ACT UP/DC. She gave me a long-sleeved, black-and-white ACT UP Manchester T-shirt, which I prized. “When I was in DC Jail,” I said, “chatting with a woman in her cell, she told me she’d murdered her girlfriend.”

  “Whatever did you say?” Nick asked eagerly.

  “I said, ‘Oh, so you’re single? Are you dating?’”

  Nick started laughing.

  “Not really. I didn’t know what to say. Once I went to the United States Botanic Gardens and planted marijuana seeds in with the ferns then dropped dope seeds on the White House lawn through the wrought-iron fence when the guards weren’t looking. It was during that stupid Just Say No to Drugs campaign. Another time, I put pink-and-black ACT UP/DC stickers—‘Until There’s a Cure, There’s ACT UP’—on the soles of my shoes and took the White House tour. I peeled them off and stuck them to the carpet every time I bent over and pretended to tie my shoe. But the funniest thing was after the 1987 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights. We’d been arrested at the Supreme Court for protesting against the sodomy statutes, and some of us refused to pay our fines. One of the women with me had given the alias Connie Lingus. In a packed courtroom, the judge referred to her as ‘Ms. Lingus’ and everyone started laughing. We were each given a receipt with ‘Three days in DC Jail’ written on it. We were kind of depressed, thinking about peeing in front of an audience in the horrible prison toilet, until we happened to glance at her receipt. In proper last name, first name format, the first line read, ‘Lingus, Connie.’”

  Nick took me to see Rabies Babies when they played in Hackney at the Lord Cecil pub. She thought the pink-haired guitarist was cute. And we went to see Intensive Care and Deadline with Melissa. But we liked catching shows by older bands like Stiff Little Fingers best. We usually met up with Melissa once a week, and Nick and I stayed at her flat if it was late. I started carrying at least one extra dose of medication in my pocket just in case. Sometimes Nick and I had a night out at Blush, a nearby lesbian club that had a gaudy pink-and-orange sign out front and did nice veggie meals. But mostly we walked places or stayed inside because we didn’t have any money, even though as the Clash song “Cheapskates” says, “I don’t like to hang about in this lonely room / ’cos London is for going out and trying to hear a tune.”

  One night we walked to the video shop and rented a film about football hooliganism. The rest of the night I couldn’t stop singing, “Get yer tits out, get yer tits out, get yer tits out for the lads!” Nick was doubled over laughing. “I can’t help it,” I said. “It’s stuck in my head now.”

  “Why don’t you sing it for Melissa?” Nick asked. “I dare you.”

  I didn’t get to see Melissa as often as I liked because she had a grown-up job and a busy schedule with her own circle of friends. In other words, she had a life. But Nick and I went busking, and I’ll always remember her in her black jacket, carrying my plastic-wrap-covered amp against her body so it wouldn’t get wet. While I played, she would entreat onlookers for coinage and clap her hands in black fingerless mitts. I had a pair of gray ones and found I could actually play with them on if I was really cold.

  When I felt hesitant, I would look over at Nick and she would cock her head at me and grin, rain slanting down her face. Her presence was reassuring, and I tried out new songs that we’d written together like “Rapist Nazi, Fuck Off!” When we made enough money, we ordered pizza from Pizza Hut or Tasti Pizza, which both delivered. Or we rang up Spicy Wok on Seven Sisters Road. It did a lot of different curries like king prawn, vegetable, and mushroom. It wasn’t expensive and had free delivery. The nights were getting colder, and the curries were a treat.

  Nick often stayed overnight at mine, and I knew she was afraid of being alone. We slept crammed into my single bed. Lately she seemed agitated and troubled about something she wouldn’t talk about. When Nick didn’t appear for two consecutive afternoons, I was worried. I told myself that just because she and Melissa were my entire London social life, that didn’t mean she didn’t have other mates she’d been neglecting. I tried calling her on the phone but got no reply. I rang Melissa, but she hadn’t heard from Nick either. Four days passed, then a week, and I became genuinely concerned—beyond my usual, oversensitive OCD paranoia that I was unlikable and somehow at fault. It was hard to go busking without her.

  On Saturday, Melissa rang to ask if she could come round. When I opened up the door with its panes of stained glass, I was so happy to see her I had to stop myself from jumping all over her like a puppy. I’d just finished showering and I was barefoot, wearing a faded, black-and-yellow 999 tour T-shirt from the late seventies. I’d re-dyed the green portion of my hair because it looked too sallow against the bright pink. My hair was supposed to look like the fluorescent cover of the first Sex Pistols album. My tiny shower didn’t drain well. My feet were green from standing in the run-off water from my hair.

  Melissa gave me a quick hug. “How are you? What in God’s name have you done to your feet?” She threw her black denim jacket on my bed and took off her round, blue-tinted sunglasses. When she unzipped her black hooded sweatshirt, I saw a black Angelic Upstarts T-shirt I thought suited her that said “I’m An Upstart.” She didn’t wait for an answer and walked around my room looking at pictures I’d stuck to the walls with Blu-Tack. Kurt Cobain in a London launderette. Kurt lying on his back playing a Univox Hi-Flyer. Kurt in a dress.

  Melissa sat on my bed and rifled through my Nirvana bootlegs. I sat next to her. She rubbed the top of my head dry with her hand and ran her fingers through my hair. “Me darlin’, it’s not just your feet.”

  I had jumped out of the shower and dressed quickly because, even though it was bright and sunny outside, my room was chilly. When Melissa had knocked on my front window, I’d run to let her in without looking in a mirro
r. “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ve got a green forehead.”

  “I never. Oh, go on.”

  “Don’t believe me, mutant.”

  I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. “You can barely notice it.” I pulled on a red-and-black plaid shirt, the flannel worn thin, and snapped on a green, leopard-print studded bracelet around my left wrist.

  “A green forehead doesn’t have to stand out to be noticeable.” Melissa leaned back, crossing her ankles, her feet encased in black bovver boots. “I’m feeling dead anxious about Nick. I haven’t been able to reach her all week.”

  “Me neither. Maybe she’s out with her mates ’cause she’s feeling better.” Hair-dying always makes me feel optimistic.

  “It’s not like her not to be around at all. I’ve left messages. I’ve gone to her flat. We used to be really close when Jake was still here. They’re my best mates. The three of us did everything together. Now I don’t know.” Her voice grew quiet. “But it isn’t like her not to give me a bell when I’ve asked her to.”

  “Not one single bell?” I played with a ring on her pink-tartan bondage trousers.

  Melissa eyed me suspiciously, not sure if I was taking the piss. “Sweetheart, to give us a bell means ringing up on the telephone.”

  “I know what it means. The dog and pony.”

  “The what?” She rubbed her forehead, gazing at me with eyes the color of the sweet roasted chestnuts I bought in bags from street vendors when I was busking around St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London.

  “Cockney rhyming slang. I can’t believe you don’t know it. Dog and pony, telephone me.”

  “Dog and bone.” Melissa tried not to laugh. “Dog and bone is the telephone.”

  Damn, I thought because I’d been imitating her accent. I really wanted to sound like her. Nick’s Mancunian was also affecting me, and I never quite knew how my vowels were going to come out whenever I opened my mouth.

  Melissa had made a list of places she thought Nick might go and asked that we split it in half and look for her.

  “Isn’t that a bit extreme?” I said. “Why are you so concerned? She’ll think we’re stalking her. She has a right to privacy.”

  “I know. It’s a feeling I have. Like she might be reacting to what happened to her. Like she might do something self-destructive.”

  “Does she normally do that?” I asked.

  Melissa hesitated. “She’s really depressed about the rape. And she doesn’t always take the best care of herself.”

  “Are you thinking of something in particular?”

  “Another time she disappeared from my life. Even if we don’t see each other, we usually talk on the phone at least once a week. I went round her flat and found her deathly ill from a really bad flu. She’d had it at least a week and could barely get out of bed to go to the loo. She wasn’t eating or answering the phone. She hadn’t called her clinic. I made her stay with me until she got better.”

  “Give me my half of the list,” I said.

  TRACK 19 In His Hands

  I scoured the gay and punk clubs of East London. Then one evening, at the end of my list with no joy, I ended up in the West End in Chelsea near the Sloane Square tube because I’d remembered a lesbian pub I’d been to there once donkey’s ages ago, an oasis in a desert of posh called Gateways. It was the oldest continuously running lesbian pub in London. I wasn’t sure exactly where it had been, but I remembered which side of the street it had been on. I walked down trendy King’s Road, which still had some historic punk left in it. I passed the black shopfront and green letters of BOY, the punk shop that made the neon-striped shirts Melissa sometimes wore. She’d gotten them before BOY became such a designer thing. I had a yellow leopard T-shirt from there, the only thing I could afford.

  After I found the building I thought had been Gateways but wasn’t, and had exhausted all other possibilities, I turned off the King’s Road and went to the Chelsea embankment. I passed Vivienne Westwood’s World’s End, the shop that had once been the legendary SEX where the Sex Pistols were born. Knackered, I sat on a bench above the Thames, looking out at wrought-iron lamp posts strung with white fairy lights. It started to rain. I zipped up my green army-surplus jacket, put up the hood, and headed for the tube, singing the Elvis Costello song “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” under my breath. Back at mine, I rang up Melissa from the communal payphone in the entranceway outside my room. When the line beeped, I pushed in a 10p coin.

  “How you doin’ darlin’, alright?” Melissa’s familiar voice made me feel warmer and drier already. She had reached the end of her half of the list and hadn’t come up with anything either. She gave me Nick’s address and warned me not to walk there alone late at night because the area could be a bit dodgy. I told her I’d been there before. It was one of the areas I’d lurked in when I’d been at university looking for the people in my head.

  The next day, I walked down Old Bethnal Green Road past council estates with tower blocks shooting up into the sky and peace-sign graffiti. For a change, it was damp and chilly. I was wearing a woolly gray Doc Martens beanie. It had “Dr Martens Air Cushioned Sole” and the Dr Martens cross logo embroidered in bright yellow thread in a circle on the front. I pulled it down over my cold ears and it caught on my copper-colored eyebrow ring. By the time I’d got it sorted, it was raining bullets. I walked past blackened brick terraces, past a school, and down Pollards Row. The large, bleak Westminster Arms looked like a ship against the gray sky. I found Nick’s Victorian and pressed the buzzer. Melissa had told me Nick lived on the first floor facing out, so I called up to the window that was hers. I lingered in front of her building, hoping she’d come home. When I got hungry, I wandered down a desolate side street to the Sky Blue Fish Bar for cod and chips.

  I didn’t want to go back to my lonely room, so I drifted aimlessly around the area. I pushed open the yellow door of a pub called the Hope, but Nick wasn’t inside playing on any of the fruit machines. In my head, “Pretty Green” by the Jam began to play, “I’ve got a pocket full of pretty green. / I’m gonna put it in the fruit machine.” I strolled past a faded, green shopfront that said “Holloways” next to a billboard advertising liquor and a poster proclaiming “London Flooding is a Real Danger.” I turned onto Pollard Street with its corrugated metal barriers and old cars parked by the side of the road.

  I roamed the streets of plain brown terraces—Quilter, Barnet, Wimbolt—their names adhering to my brain and becoming part of the legend of my quest like I was a character in an epic novel. I passed the blue sign of Imperial Van Hire, churches, dead white curtains in flat windows, so much corrugated silver fencing I thought I was inside a Coke can, more housing estates, green wrought-iron fencing around dead brown grass, and the London Picture Centre. My shoes slid on wet cobblestone roads piled with rubbish.

  I moved further out of Nick’s neighborhood, going all the way to Brick Lane in Banglatown. The Brick Lane Market was now closed, and I breathed in the warm, spicy smells emanating from the curry houses. I felt empty. To cheer myself up I sang “Wasteland” by the Jam under my breath. “‘Meet me on the wastelands, the ones behind / the old houses, the ones left standing prewar / the ones overshadowed by the monolith monstrosities councils call homes.’”

  It was dark, but I couldn’t make myself head for home. I went down Brady Street all the way to Whitechapel and ended up at the street market on Whitechapel Road. I browsed through stalls of fruit and vegetables, clothes and household items illuminated by bare white light bulbs. Across the road, the gold letters of London Hospital were visible above the pitches. The rain slowed to a drizzle. I looked at lit-up dead chickens hanging in rows beneath green awnings. I slogged through cardboard boxes, broken wooden crates and onion sacks, pretending to be interested in grapes, oranges, tomatoes, potatoes and fuzzy pink jumpers. I watched women in saris and dresses with their
blue-and-white-striped Tesco’s bags hurrying toward the tube.

  I huddled deeper in my coat. Too cold to loiter any longer, I took the tube all the way to Hampstead because I didn’t want to go back to my room alone. By the time I reached Melissa’s flat, I was almost in tears. Upset at not finding Nick and feeling so bloody lonely I ached, I hoped Melissa was home and not otherwise engaged. The lights were off in the front room and she didn’t answer my knock. I argued with myself that it was ridiculous to stand outside and wait for her. I was an adult. I was being too needy.

  I walked to where she kept her car and it was there. I went up the road to the Old Orleans, sat at one of the green outdoor tables and ate a small white pizza, hoping she’d stroll right past me if she were coming home on the tube. When I’d been at university, the Old Orleans had been a Pizza Pizza Express, a pretty, white building with blue neon. When it started to pour, I abandoned my table and ducked into the local pub, a tall, brown-and-white-striped brick building with “The Horse and Groom” in big gold letters on the front. I sat on a barstool in the window and drank a warm pint, continuing to watch the street. At least the pub had remained the same.

  When I was too restless to sit any longer, I walked the long way round to Melissa’s flat, past gray, red, and white terraces and flashy, brightly painted shops. Pretty lights glowed softly from inside and I felt very much on the outside, watching my breath turn white. It seemed gentle and quiet here, but I felt as empty as I had in Bethnal Green. Melissa still wasn’t home. Exhausted from walking in circles all day, I leaned against her door. I told myself I’d only stay ten minutes, randomly deciding ten minutes, though bordering on needy, wasn’t actually criminally pathetic. The rain pelted the petals off the last of the roses in her front garden. It went through me like silver darts. I moved some wet leaves around with the toe of my shoe.