Sketchtasy

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

  And when I look at her eyes again I notice that the blue is sparkling but it’s a lake that’s been poisoned. So I leave the room without saying anything. And when I get downstairs I realize that’s the look in everyone’s eyes. Polly catches me as I’m going into my room—she says are you okay? I say I left San Francisco because of crystal—don’t wake me up until it’s over.

  I need to sleep so I cut up some Xanax and snort it, take two doxepin, put on Moby’s Ambient and get in bed for I-don’t-know-how-long, it feels like a roller coaster not a futon and when I get up the clock says 6:12 but I can’t tell if it’s morning or evening and I go to the kitchen for some water. Polly’s still awake but the house is quiet and I say don’t ever let anyone bring crystal over again, and she nods her head but I’m not sure she understands, so I say listen, I was serious when I said I left San Francisco because of crystal.

  And Polly says it’s horrible. I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again.

  And I say it’s everywhere in San Francisco, there’s nothing else.

  It doesn’t feel good.

  It takes over. It takes over fast. I hope crystal isn’t hitting Boston. Who was that guy who brought it?

  I don’t know.

  Someone else will have to host the after-hours from now on, okay?

  Okay.

  I think about how sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I love, and sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I hate. And sometimes I just feel so lonely.

  LET’S TAKE A BREAK FOR THERAPY

  Whenever I go to a new therapist the first thing I notice is that it’s kind of like being in my father’s office. But then I try to let that go so instead I focus on the details: This furniture has a cherry finish, not teak. This analytic couch looks more like a sofa than my father’s. The ceilings are higher. Bigger windows. Way more light. The carpet is kind of plush. There isn’t any art on the walls.

  Of course Barry has a beard and glasses. Do all psychiatrists have beards? Actually Barry isn’t a psychiatrist, but he’s a PhD psychologist so my parents will still pay. They don’t know that he specializes in hypnotherapy.

  I tell Barry I’m getting ready to confront my father about sexually abusing me as a kid so I want to go right to the memories that I’m aware of but can’t always feel. I want to figure out everything that happened, I want to know exactly when and where and I know maybe that’s impossible so if I can’t know then at least I want to feel it.

  I tell him about my last therapist, Bryce, who always backed away when I started to approach the deeper memories—I would share something small, like taking a shower as a kid, when my father would unlock the bathroom door with scissors and I would freeze, try to cover my dick with a sponge. And then when I got older I would scream get the fuck out—but he would just laugh and say he needed to piss. He and my mother had their own bathroom, and if my mother was using it then there was a third one downstairs.

  And Bryce, who also had a beard and glasses, but lighter hair, almost blond, he said: Maybe that was just horseplay. And right then I froze, almost like a kid, didn’t know what to say, couldn’t speak. When we had our final session I asked him about this, and all the other times when he moved away from the abuse I was trying to talk about, and he told me I was giving him mixed messages.

  Barry says he hears what I’m saying, we can check in about everything, this is an active process. He tells me that with hypnotherapy I always have control. That I’m the one who puts myself into a trance, he’s just there to guide me and I can always come out of it.

  Barry asks me to close my eyes and lean back in the chair that’s kind of like the chairs in my father’s office but fancier because of the electronic controls. Uglier too, but more comfortable. Barry asks me to imagine a relaxing place. Right away I think about dancing, the music all around me, the darkness and the lights and oh, that was easy, I’m floating to the sky yes the sky it’s so calm here. Except then there’s my father in a corner, what’s my father doing in this club, and Barry says where would you like him to be? So I put my father in a big cylindrical box but he keeps reaching his hand out of the box and there’s my mother too, maybe if I make the box bigger? But it’s already time to stop.

  Outside Barry’s office there’s an empty park with grass so green I touch it to make sure it’s not fake. This part of Cambridge feels like a suburban office park, even though it’s right on the water facing the Boston skyline. Not Jeannine and the skyline I’m used to but all the buildings in the financial district. Oh, there’s Jeannine, if I look all the way to the right, somehow a greenish blue against the cloudy sky.

  The next time I start hypnosis by imagining I’m on the beach in San Francisco, looking out at the ocean and Barry asks me to write numbers on a piece of clear plastic with wet pink chalk and then erase them, counting down from ten—he says when you get to number one you’ll feel completely relaxed and at ease.

  And it works—it’s like I’m floating out over the water into the sky. Except there’s my father again, my mother too and all that panic so I need to put my parents in a cage but they keep getting out, how do they always get out? Maybe something taller, an opaque box with neon lights on the outside, a warning.

  What about if you watch everything on a movie screen, Barry says, then you’ll have control. So I’m watching Alice in Wonderland in black and white, rows and rows of empty seats and my father reaching between my legs and Alice just keeps falling and falling until I start screaming and we have to leave early.

  My father says he was wrong, he thought I was old enough to go to a movie. And then I’m trapped in a cave, falling and falling past mushrooms and butterflies until I’m stuck at the bottom, but wait, suddenly all the fear drops away. And I feel so relaxed again, floating like I’m on ecstasy, pure MDMA, and I’m watching the lights flickering though now I need to pull myself out of the ditch with a rope except there’s my father running up to me when I get to the top and I smack his face with a heavy metal pitchfork but still he keeps coming back.

  I’m hanging from a noose, the rope starting to squeeze around my throat and my head expands until it’s a balloon while way down below my father is playing with my penis oh how I hate that word, and it’s tiny, he’s tickling my balls and then he puts it all in his mouth, looking up at me and I want to poke his eyes out but I can’t move. And then pop, there goes my head, that’s me, my head way up high and I can’t find the rest, chest to thighs, it’s all gone. Oh, there it is, hanging from the rope like a piece of meat.

  Barry says there’s a lot coming up so I could use more time, maybe twice a week. Afterward I go outside and it’s like a different planet, everything is darker even though it’s the middle of the day—it shouldn’t be this dark, should it? I still feel my head way up in the sky, here’s the center of my body but can I really feel it?

  It’s drizzling out but I like the way the air suddenly feels so fresh so I sit under a tree at the edge of the park, listening to the rain as it starts to fall harder. Thinking about my father and his hand reaching toward my crotch and I couldn’t get away, not even at therapy—when he fell into a trap door his hand came through and he grabbed my balls. I was trying to take that image onto the screen so I could watch from a distance but it never felt distant. Although by the end of the session I was laughing and crying a bit too, and pop, there went my head again, and the paper towel between my actual head and the chair became a sandwich, time for peppermint tea to bring me back.

  I’m sitting under this tree and these guys skate by and suddenly all I can think about is how I need a boyfriend. And what does that mean anyway? Whether everything would be different with someone to hold.

  At my next session Barry asks all these questions about my hair and clothes so we end up getting distracted and I’m telling him how I need to have everything in place when I leave the house, every strand of hair, how that’s the only way I can exist in the world with everyone harassing me all the time. And Barry asks why I think peopl
e are harassing me, which is obvious, right?

  On my birthday, all I want is a cool breeze at the ocean like I’m always imagining at therapy, but I can’t motivate myself to get out of the house until three p.m. so then I figure I’ll just get on the highway and see if I can find the ocean, it can’t be that far. I’m thinking about when I went to Bethany as a kid, stumbling around on the beach with the other teenagers when I first started drinking. And then pitcher after pitcher of margaritas with Erik and Kayti at Las Rocas in high school, and we’d always end up asking why do we drink, it just makes us sad? Or La Rondalla with Joanna in San Francisco, where we wouldn’t get sad, at least not until the next day. And then I think about Colin because I brought my camera, it’s in the same case where Colin’s ashes spilled when I drove cross-country. His ashes spilled all over the lenses, and I haven’t used the camera since.

  Maybe I could do a performance with Colin’s ashes—come onstage with the camera, snap photos, tell the audience these are the first pictures I’ve taken since I drove cross-country. Flamingo Pink, that’s what I would call it, the color of his hair. My hair too, and I didn’t even know him that well. We were friends, but he was much older and there wasn’t enough time to get past that.

  People passed around his ashes at the memorial, and I took a cupful, thought I’d throw them at businessmen downtown and yell WE DIE, YOU DO NOTHING. Colin died with pink hair, and maybe that was partially because of me. He told me I was brave for dyeing my hair.

  I knew Colin was dying when we met—of course, that was true of a lot of fags in ACT UP, and everywhere in San Francisco, really, you went to a club one week and the next week the DJ was dead. I’m sure just as many people are dying in Boston, but it’s like no one cares. If I threw Colin’s ashes onto an audience here, I wonder if they would believe the ashes were real. Maybe people would discover chunks of bone—what would that make them feel? The ones who are familiar with the deaths of their friends. The ones who aren’t.

  So I’m driving along and I don’t even know where I’m going—I took a turnoff that said Cape Cod but now I’m stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’m worried I’m not going to get anywhere so I turn around and then I’m back in Dorchester and I don’t know what to do. Oh—there’s the giant gas tank on the polluted bay, but at least it’s water. I park and start walking down a path, but it’s too muddy so I walk right by the water and I notice the sand isn’t just sand, it’s little pieces of bricks and cement and asphalt and old rusty cans and empty bags of Lay’s and Cheetos and is that a condom? I jump up on the boulders to walk to the end and somehow it’s pretty right now with all the air blowing, the little tiny waves in the water and no one around. There’s the highway right there but also kind of not right there and I take off my shirt to feel the sun on my skin even though it’s still chilly out and that makes me dance from boulder to boulder and when I stop I notice all these geese up ahead, walking away through the mud and leaving big tracks.

  But then it’s the next day and I’m worse than I’ve been in a while, thinking what am I doing with my life what the fuck am I doing I mean why am I living with these horrible people in this apathetic town and can you believe no one has called from the gorgeous roommate flyer Polly made, I mean we put it up all over town. How are we going to find a new place?

  Then I realize I have a cold. So I find an acupuncturist in the yellow pages and he uses electricity to zap away my cold while I use hypnosis techniques to float. Then I’m sitting outside at Downtown Crossing and I still have a bad headache, and my teeth hurt too, but I must have more energy because I’m thinking about checking out the bathrooms at Jordan Marsh while I’m waiting for Polly to page me. I’m sitting on a bench with all these old people in baseball caps and sun hats, top-forty soul pumped in from somewhere, and some guy says they always do it that way, why do they have to do it that way, and I’m guessing when he says they he means black people but he doesn’t say anything more so I ignore him. And I think this might be the first real spring day, one minute warm but not too warm, and then suddenly chilly but not too chilly.

  Then there’s Avalon without drugs, and for the first time I’m relieved when the music ends so I can finally go home and get some rest. Then the next day I feel a little better, but for some reason Joey insists that we go to Moka. I can’t believe I have to sit in this het-owned, het-run, het-overrun chi-chi gay café with all these South Beach tanning salon casualties carrying Neiman Marcus makeup bags, hetero-wannabe couples spouting a bunch of top/bottom bullshit when they’re not comparing couture and throwing shade shade shade. How many times do I have to hear someone say: I saw her on the block. On the block. On the block.

  Bitch, what were you doing on the block?

  In therapy I’m trying to explain the crash from ecstasy, how all the joy in the world fades away and then there’s only sadness and pain. That joy—it isn’t possible without the drugs, it’s just not a sensation your body can make. You can take more pills to fall asleep, but still there’s the next day, you have to deal with the next day.

  Hypnosis is kind of like drugs except I don’t crash so hard. But every time I leave I think about smoking again. The only addiction I’ve totally quit is coffee, and that was back in San Francisco. For the first few weeks, whenever I craved coffee I would do a bump of coke, and that really helped.

  Barry says he thinks it would be easier without the drugs, and I just feel so angry because he doesn’t understand that drugs are the best thing for me in Boston. And yes that’s a trap but maybe there’s something liberating about it too. I kind of want to walk out right now and never come back, but then Barry says we only have a little time for hypnosis, so I lie back on the chair and suddenly I’m thinking about Jonathan from childhood, lying on his Star Wars sheets, kissing and hugging, touching each other, running through the field in his backyard, looking for golf balls.

  BRIGHTER DAYS

  Maverick Square is kind of cute in an old-town sort of way, even though there’s a Store 24 that closes at midnight, which should be illegal. Polly and I do our laundry in the square, which is kind of a hassle but then we get to walk around and look at all the cop cars, why are there always so many cop cars? I start taking photos and after I get them developed I go to Kinko’s and print out GET A BRICK, white on black with my mesmerizing Quark-XPress skills, cut and paste and then I’m ready for a wheatpasting adventure but Joey and Polly are scared. Finally I get them to look out while I tape the posters to the cop cars, and that’s kind of fun. Not as fun as wheatpasting, but still.

  I’m trying to get rid of my acne so I figure I need to sit out in the sun a little bit every day so I put fresh lemon juice on my face even though it burns like hell and then I walk down to the new park by the water. There’s never anyone there, maybe because of the rotting fish smell, but that’s starting to go away so I lie in the little strip of chemical grass for a few minutes. I guess there’s going to be a water taxi, which sounds kind of strange because who would take a water taxi to East Boston?

  Anyway, when I get home I put fresh cucumber on my face and that helps for a moment. I’m making oats again, and Polly’s smoking—the usual. I’m looking at the train map to figure out where we should go once we save enough money to take our trip cross-country and figure out where to move. My mother’s on the phone asking Polly about the weather but I know she just wants to tell me I shouldn’t be hustling. I’m not interested in having that conversation again.

  Now Polly and I have a three-bedroom all to ourselves, that’s the important thing—hopefully we’ll never see Sham-poodle or Her Highness Marshall ever again. Now we have a whole extra room for my desk and books and boxes, and Polly’s makeup table. Unfortunately there’s office carpet in the bedrooms but there’s lovely black-and-white checkered linoleum in the kitchen and dining room, and even an empty living room up front with hardwood floors.

  Our prized possession is the dining room table—one of those big round metal porch tables courtesy of Au Bon Pain—
their salads aren’t that great, but I’ve always liked those tables. Sure, it was a bit tricky to get it in the car, especially driving through the tunnel at three a.m. with the trunk open, but honey it was worth it. So worth it that we went back and grabbed two chairs—figured we better do it right away, because now my car is making some scraping sound on the asphalt so I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.

  There’s only one cab company, and they take forever. We’re not that far from the Blue Line, and then it’s only a few minutes to glorious Government Center and all those screeching Green Line trains, but then the T closes and the tunnel does make it seem like we’re in another world. We’re right by the airport, but that’s not really going to help us get to Avalon, is it?

  Every time we go anywhere in East Boston, everyone stares. I mean everyone. At the laundromat it’s mostly the kids who talk and point and laugh, until finally one of them comes up to us and says: Are you from Boston?

  These kids all have East Boston accents, almost like Southie but maybe a little more nasal. I’m starting to like these neighborhood accents, even if they often come with awful people. And sure, I could point out to these clueless kids that hello, East Boston is really just a neighborhood in Boston—it’s not like it’s its own town or anything. But instead I just nod my head—sure, we’re from Boston.

  This kid looks impressed. Meanwhile, Polly and I are using the hot cycle on the washing machines to make sure we don’t have crabs again, and while we’re waiting we go outside where it’s not quite so sweltering and pretend everyone isn’t watching. Eventually we head home and while we’re walking over the bridge to nowhere someone starts yelling hey, hey, but we’re not going to fall for that one. Then a bottle flies right over our heads, bounces off a wall and smashes on the sidewalk a few feet in front of us.