Frankie started bartending, which is bad for her boozing, but I got all her friends together and we got her a new computer for her twenty-first birthday, so she can record her music again. She’s getting really good and labels are starting to pay attention. I hope she blows up and gets a big place so we can get the fuck out of here.
Frankie left early for the bar tonight, to have dinner with a coworker, and I was alone in the apartment. I hadn’t seen my ma for a week, easy, which has been good. We’re toxic when we’re around each other lately, unable to keep from fighting like cats, so this reggae shithead is a blessing. I was naked under a towel, walking from my room to the shower, when the door flew open and she marched in. She seemed lucid enough, not drunk, probably just hopped up on her pills, which, I’ve learned, gives her sharpness a particular flavor.
Her hip has been really bad and she can barely walk. She told me she has something called necrosis, which corrodes the cartilage in your joints, and hers is completely gone in her hip, so it’s bone on bone. She says it probably started when I was nine.
As she limped into the house, swinging her body from doorframe to doorframe, I realized that pain and difficulty with basic function are making her frustrated and angry. I had a moment of sympathy for her until she turned around and spat, “Where the fuck is my shit?”
“What shit?”
“My fucking glass bottles that were right here!”
The violence in her voice, the aggression she brought to the equation, precocked, meant that this interaction was not gonna end well. My resentment for a laundry list of her failures, her exhaustion from trying to grapple with that, plus the pain of her body was like a bunch of M-80s stuffed into a shoebox. It took five minutes for the whole thing to blow.
In no time I was screaming at her, desperately begging her to shut up and stop screaming at me, that I didn’t fucking do anything, that I didn’t know where her stupid bottles were, and maybe she should just go buy some legit speed. That sent her into the disrespect routine and she went off on that for a while.
Finally I told her to go fuck herself when she called me an evil piece of shit, and she got in my face. I actually thought about decking her, and pushed her shoulders. She picked up the mop that Frankie bought and briefly brandished it at me. I snapped, screaming at her, taunting her to hit me, to hit her own child, about what a pathetic bullshit excuse for a mother she’d have to be to do that. She told me I was a pathetic excuse for a child. That I was a bourgeois spoiled brat little yuppie with nothing to offer the world except my talent, which I’m apparently wasting.
She smacked the mop handle onto the ground and caught my foot, causing me to yelp and lose my mind. Dropping the towel, I wrested the stick out of her clenched fist and smashed it against the wall, again and again, until it shattered into splinters. Screaming “Fuck you,” I dropped it and went into my room, throwing on my clothes and storming out into the night.
I got into the cab I’m in now and told the driver to head to Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, where I’m supposed to meet Jonathan for a beer picnic on our pier. I’m staring out the window as the city creeps by, feeling like I swallowed a cup of glass shards.
I put my forehead on the window, wishing to God I were any one of those people out there who look so happy and functional, free of this darkness, living real lives without all this violence.
My face scrunches into itself and I start to cry. Big, heaving, snotty sobs come out of me, which I do my best to hide from the driver by scooting out of his line of sight. I feel so much pain, like a balloon in my chest area, like something I wish would just burst and kill me.
I’m clenching my fists in my lap, squeezing them so tightly my nails are digging bruises into my palms. I wish my bones would break so I could have something to show for the massacre inside me. What will I tell Jonathan, I wonder, how will I explain the gravity of what just happened? How will I move through this feeling to be present with him?
Once, we sat in a cab for forty minutes without saying a single word to each other. He told me he thought that was the definition of love, two people who don’t need to fill silence. Maybe he’ll be okay if I don’t talk too much tonight.
I feel an epic aloneness, a sense that I will never be understood, no one will ever know this damage, nor will they understand how much work it is every day to pretend I understand how people deal with each other, what’s expected of me, to perpetually be learning on the fly and feeling like an alien child. I feel so hopeless that anyone will ever truly love me, because no one will ever get it. I think of Jonathan’s sweet smile and I lose it.
With my right fist I take a whack at my temple, to shut myself up, to stop the stream of thoughts, to calm the anarchy in my mind, stop the tears. It isn’t hard enough, so I take another, with a bigger swing. Checking the mirror to make sure the driver can’t see me, I start pounding myself on the right eye, over and over again until it welts up almost an inch off my face. The sudden stinging stops the tears and I am lost in the pelting sound of my fist on my own cheekbone, disfiguring the flesh around my eye socket.
I’ll tell him she hit me in the face with the mop handle. Then he’ll understand.
Chapter 45
The Piece of Shit at the Center of the Universe
Upper East Side, New York City, December 2004
I CAME UP TO POPPA AND NINA’S HOUSE AFTER THE BRUTAL fight with my ma. They wanted to go visit Nina’s family the second her travel papers came through, and somebody needed to look after Edie, so it all worked out. I’m sleeping in the master bed while they’re gone, giving Edie her pills every day. I go to the fancy grocery store and buy her sandwiches and preroasted chickens that come in nice white boxes, with money she gives me from her little purse.
When they come home I’ll be back to sleeping on the couch in the hallway, but I’m hoping that if I play my cards right, Pop will invite me to stay. For now, it’s my palace to play in. It’s so nice to be able to see the floor, to have some sunlight in the mornings, clean fluffy towels, and a set of huge brass keys.
I’m having fewer rage blackouts and crying fits, except if I’m really drunk, when I might punch something, but being up here is doing wonders for my calm. I want to be good to Edie, make sure she feels comfortable.
I’m in the hot shower now, scalding myself, admiring the tile, thinking about how to get them to ask me to move in for good. I brought the girl I’ve been fucking to sleep over. I’m going to take her out for a dinner I can’t afford once I wash her smell off me.
The bathroom door is open and I can see the living room reflected in the steamy mirror. The girl is wandering naked around the living room looking at my pop’s beautiful books and art scattered everywhere. She’s tall and slender, with a sharp black bob. Her jaw is refined, like an Egyptian statue. She’s an Italian beauty from Staten Island.
I met her while she was go-go dancing at a party. I was dancing with a huge black man in angel wings when she waved me over to her. Wearing nothing but pasties and underwear, she shooed away the boys flanking her, pulled me down on top of her, and kissed me. She said she’d almost forgotten how good it felt to kiss girls.
That night I took her back to my house and we fucked until the sun came up, shaking the walls of the building. I was conflicted when I saw her in the daylight, in her fluorescent leg warmers and Burning Man Hula-Hooper getup, but neither of us could stay away from each other. It’s been a couple of months and we’ve exchanged outsize words neither of us can commit to.
The bedroom door slams suddenly, making me jump. Confused, senses heightened, I call her name. Tension is in the air and I can tell something has gone very wrong. Straining to see around the steam patches, I can make out the shape of a book on the table where she was standing. I realize it’s my journal. I realize it’s probably open to the page where I’m talking about how I don’t actually think I’m gay, nor do I want to be, and how I miss dick. It’s a page full of lies, lies I have been telling myself regularly,
but lies that I cling to. The shittiness of hurting someone brings the untruth of these pages into focus and I throw open the shower door, calling her name.
Frantically toweling my body, I stumble into the hallway and push open the door to the bedroom. She’s half dressed, fuming, stuffing her belongings into her orange backpack.
“Baby . . . what’s going on?”
“Fuck you.”
“What? Why?”
It’s easier to play dumb than to try to explain.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Home? It’s ten o’clock at night. You can’t go home right now.”
She stops speaking, slamming each of her crystals and bracelets into the bag. She’s older than me, and has suspected me of being a mess for a while now. She has no idea.
I chase her around the room until I realize she’s serious about leaving, at which point I jump into my jeans, which I have a hard time peeling up my wet skin.
“Baby . . . let’s talk about this.”
“Fuck you!”
There’s a violence to her words that makes the hair on my arms stand up. I understand where she’s coming from. I’d be livid, too. I feel a breeze come through the window, a chill floating on the summer night, and it brings a fear with it, a sense that if she leaves I’ll be all alone, scared. An instinct propels me toward her.
She stomps out of the room and down the stairs, likely waking my sleeping grandmother. I hiss at her to be quiet and she gives me the finger. I can’t find my shoes, so I chase after her without them, struggling to run down the stairs and get a wifebeater on at the same time.
Barefoot, I chase her down the cold sidewalk, trying to coax her into at least speaking to me. She is crying. This is awful. I try to touch her, but she will have none of it. She waves her big Italian bones at me and swats me aside like a fly.
I chase her three blocks down Lexington Avenue like an insane person, begging now for her to at least look at me. I don’t know where the hysteria or the urgency comes from, it’s certainly not being in love, but something in me is frantic about her leaving.
I chase her into the subway station, where she blazes through the turnstile without glancing back. Pockets empty, I leap over. The soles of my feet are black with filth, and the idea of that coming home with me is nasty.
On the platform, trapped, she slaps me. She tells me I’m a lying piece of shit, that I never should have told her I loved her. She’s right. But I tell her she’s wrong. That I do. I need her to love me and the only way to have that is to love her. So I act as if.
This is my life, always acting as if: as if I understand why people do the things they do, why they say the things they say to each other; acting as if I have any understanding of how to take care of myself, like I know what’s important; acting as if I’m not a complete fucking alien on this planet, learning its social customs at a scramble.
It takes twenty minutes for the train to finally come, during which she ignores my pleas to speak to me. The riders are unabashed about giving me side-eye because I’m barefoot. I sit next to the now weeping girl and implore her to give me another chance. I beg and beg until I realize that it’s hopeless. This is the end of this one. I fucked it up.
In a last stab at chivalry, I walk her from the train to the ferry station in silence and watch her board without turning around. She doesn’t say good-bye.
It’s almost midnight as I watch the boat pull away into the night waters, carrying her back to her island, away from my excuses. She saw through me, she saw my garbled intentions. She didn’t want to be a human towel to stop my bleeding. Good for her.
Chapter 46
Sleep Is My Cocoon
New York City, 2005 through 2006
SLEEP IS MY COCOON. SLEEP IS MY SAFE SPACE WHERE I GO to be sad. Sleep is a slippery bath of no feeling, where I go when my heart feels heavy. Heartache is confusing for me. Emotions are confusing for me.
I am the fixer. Ma goes up in flames, I put them out. She sets a bomb, I diffuse it.
Ma doesn’t believe in emotions. She never has. She believes in heart and soul but as objects, as actions, not as fragile, amorphous states in flux. When I get a pang of something, it overwhelms me. I shut it out. I grit my teeth and tighten my grip on the bow, braced for a tossing.
I rail against it with the full force of my body, I smash my bones into hard surfaces, trying to slam the bad feeling out like a coconut from a tree. My knuckles are flat and my heart is no less confused.
My mind is becoming a circus, a constant roiling of ten acts at once, some in the spotlight, but six always in preparation. I am preoccupied when I talk to people, trying to ensure that my tightrope walkers don’t fall and the trapeze swings just right for the handoff. It makes me flighty and a little distant. Charm is never the issue. I can make them smile. But I can’t connect. To connect would require me to stop, to sit still, to just be here, to be comfortable. I am profoundly uncomfortable. All the time.
But I have no words for this. That is not a sensation that has ever been allowed. I don’t even know what it is. I just get angry.
Love becomes a salve. A girl who will listen to all the different acts, who will hold me, who will tell me that she thinks I’m brilliant when I tell her of the jugglers and acrobats and sword swallowers.
Inevitably, the carnies get fucked up to blow off steam, they get aggressive and mean, they use my brain as a punching bag; my head becomes a battered crash pad with a dilapidated couch and broken windows. I try to tape them up with caffeine and an alarm clock, to battle the chaos with an attempt at order.
My list of New Year’s resolutions is long and strong. But every year it has the same shit on it. I can’t get a jump start on progress because when I get close to a shift, the carnies start shouting at me about how shit is going. They tell me people are whispering about me; they tell me I don’t have a home, that I’m alone in the world; they tell me I’m a fraud, that all I know how to do is be a hustler.
At first they use the cover of darkness. They come in at night when it’s all quiet except for sirens, when I know I can’t call somebody. These fucks don’t need long to kick up their filthy feet and get comfortable. They perch like mangy gargoyles behind my eyeballs, gatekeepers to my thoughts, filtering what information I get and how I get it. They tell me what’s worthwhile, and the only things worthwhile to them are the things that cause sharp sensations: love, pain, alcohol, heartbreak, coke, fucking.
It’s not long before I find myself in a deli, staring at a fridge door, desperate for a drink, but unable to move my arm to open it. I’m shaking, quaking from the inside. I can only shuffle myself to a seat and whimper to my mother that I need some water. I recognize how bad it has gotten that I’m asking my ma to accompany me on a walk. Years later someone will tell me this is a massive panic attack. Years after that I’ll figure out I am having daily and nightly panic attacks, but it won’t be for a long time. For now, the carny gargoyles run this show. And it’s a cruel set list.
I have absolutely no tools to deal with any such things. I have been raised like a gladiator, to fight and be strong, to weather storms and survive onslaughts. But I was never taught to be fragile. I was never taught that you are born fragile. I think of it as a failure. This is my failure.
Carnies hate one thing more than any other: to be ignored. Oh no, you must dance with them, listen to their song, clap along, scream when they frighten you, or else they’ll dig their fucking claws in and shred you. So I become more and more occupied with trying to appease them. It makes me do shitty things to other people, people I love. I find myself neglecting them, not seeing needs that are plainly in front of me. I reach for salve anywhere I can get it.
Oh, you think I’m beautiful? Great. Let’s fuck. It’s okay. We don’t have to tell my girlfriend because that’s love, and this is just for the gargoyles. Just to keep them quiet.
I don’t tell anyone anything except my journals.
The pain n
umbs me. My heartache spreads from the chest out like novocaine. The numbness is frightening, tense; it shortens my breath.
Anything to feel something. A cigarette to feel my lungs. A shot to feel my throat. Punch a wall to feel my nerves. Six coffees to feel my brain, my eye sockets. Coke to feel my heart beat. Scream to feel myself, buried in there. Music so loud my ears hum.
I go to dance class late at night. I stand at the front and let the music pulse through my whole body, throwing my bones around to heavy hip-hop beats in a dark room filled with sweating people. I give it my all. I dance like I’m never gonna move again. I lose myself in it. I throw all my rage into movement and I hope it turns into something good.
I don’t want to break my hands. I don’t want to get pregnant. I’m not an addict.
Tears come out of me in convulsions at the end of long nights pouring toxic shit down my throat, pining over people who don’t want me. I black out and fuck people in stairwells and backseats, not because I have to, but because I don’t want to wake up with them. I leave the cute Rollerblader boy in his bed, the R&B singer gets an hour, the photographer leaves before breakfast because he knows what’s up.
I’m trying to prove to myself that they think I’m sexy. I dance my soul out on club floors and let them come to me. I never believe that they will, but when you have low standards inevitably someone will answer that question for you. Easy sees easy. Desperate sees desperate.
I don’t want to be gay. I don’t want to let go of the fantasy of myself as normal. I can’t deal with how much I feel when I’m with women. I want them to sweep me up and protect me and promise me forever. Dudes feel so wrong, but maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be? Fleeting? No. I know this.
Chapter 47
Blue Pea Dies
New York City, January 2007
POP WOULD NEVER LET ME LIVE WITH THEM. HE SAID THE vibe in the house was “too fragile,” what with Edie needing quiet. We were prone to huge, door-slamming fights and he said he didn’t know where he’d put me, which was baffling. Apparently, I’m “a big personality” and there wasn’t room for that up there. We fought bitterly because of it. Eventually we compromised with my setting up an office on the ground floor.
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