The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  I looked at the Actress. I was afraid to touch her face. I wondered if men had felt this way about me. I’d spent hours on my makeup on occasion. What girl didn’t? We spent all our time trying to find someone who wanted to wake up next to us every morning, and every night we painted ourselves to look as much like someone else as possible.

  Now that the Actress was standing in front of me, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t kiss her without kissing her lipstick. I thought she was sexy because she was raucous and crazy, because when she laughed the whole room shook, because she was hilarious and loud and irreverent, not because she was perfect.

  I loved her because she was so entirely human. It sounded stupid, but this was a revelation for me. I’d tried to be perfect as much as every other girl in the world. I’d stood in other people’s bathrooms, peering into mirrors, poking at my face, poofing out my lips, sucking in my stomach, pushing up my breasts, razoring my legs until they were plastic-smooth. Wielding tweezers like surgical instruments.

  When I was a kid, my mom had regularly announced that we were “not far descended from the apes.” My first memory of her involved a waxed upper lip, and a shriek of pain as she pulled the wax off. I’d wondered what the hell she was suffering for. Monkeys were cool. Not so, as I got older. I wanted to be not a monkey, but a mole rat. Pink and hairless. I knew people like this. People who had no body hair at all, or silken blonde legs and arms. I, on the other hand, was apprehended by my mother while shaving my entire body at the age of twelve. I’d lathered my upper lip, and taken her leg razor to it, thinking I had the perfect solution to the fact that, in my seventh-grade PE class, a boy had told me I had a mustache. And really, I didn’t. Neither did my mom. Paranoia was part of our personality.

  Despite the fact that my postfeminist brain had been raised on Simone de Beauvoir, Camille Paglia, and Erica Jong, I’d still done a hell of a lot to make myself into whatever I thought a male ideal was. It had taken a lot of work. And the work really never ended. Sometimes I felt like one of those toys where you turned a crank and long spaghetti strands of clay grew furiously from colanderlike heads. Part of the appeal was that those strands could be plucked, squished, and put back in the jar to use again. Not so, hair. The stubble advanced like a lame militia crossing hard terrain: slowly, but surely. I didn’t want to imagine my insides as one big ball of hair, like a two-story sphere of string. I didn’t want to be a roadside attraction. I wanted, albeit secretly, to be a Barbie doll.

  Yet, here we were. We were so not Mattel plastic. The Actress and I stood in Vic’s bedroom, totally imperfect. And that was the point. That was what was great about it. Here we stood together, and love was possible anyway, despite everything that was wrong with us. It was a minor miracle. Maybe it was a major one.

  We were human. We were a mess. And we were kissing. It’s always weird to kiss a friend for the first time, and this was no exception. It was weirder still because she was a woman. But we got through it. And even though it didn’t seem that I was really attracted to girls, I could accept that love was larger than that. I could, at least, sleep with someone I cared about, even if she did happen to be female. I could care about her more, because of it.

  We got our clothes off, and we left the bright lights on. Here we were, together against all those guys we’d fucked in the dark, against all those times we’d hidden our flaws and failures, because we thought we wouldn’t be loved if we let them show. We left the lights on, and we looked at each other, and we made love.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER I put on a pair of overalls without a top and meandered into the kitchen. Zak was there, standing under the glare of the fluorescents, staring vacantly into the fridge.

  “Hey,” he said, without turning around.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” said the Actress, in her big, booming voice, emerging from the bedroom, wrapped in a towel.

  “Oh God, who are you?” Zak flipped around. He’d been expecting only me. Instead, I was wearing lesbianic overalls and hanging out with a half-naked woman.

  “You must be the famous Zak,” the Actress said. “I’ve heard all about you. I’m going to go and get fried rice. Want some?”

  “Sure,” said Zak, looking from me to her and back again.

  When the Actress got back, the three of us stayed up half the night, laughing hard together at the kitchen table. Even though I knew the Actress and I weren’t going to conduct some wild love affair, it was nice to know that we still enjoyed the hell out of each other, and that after our clothes went back on, we were still friends. It wasn’t very often that that happened.

  “So. You don’t do things halfway,” Zak said when she was gone.

  “I’m not gay,” I said, sadly. “There are all these wonderful women out there, and I can’t have any of them.”

  “Oh well. More girls for me,” Zak told me, and patted my back. “I didn’t need you as my competition. Life is hard enough.”

  We spoke for a while at maximum volume about Sartre and existential loneliness, and then I crawled into my hut and Zak followed me. Eventually we passed out, tangled up. We did this on a somewhat regular basis, post-deep conversation. We always woke, hours later, our limbs pins and needles, our arms trapped beneath each other, sleepily murderous. Whichever of us was in the wrong bed would stagger across the kitchen and into their hut or bedroom, respectively. This night was the same. Chaste as usual. Damn it. Or not damn it. Who could tell? Zak and I getting together could have been nightmarish.

  “I love you, you know,” I called, across the kitchen.

  “You, too,” Zak said, but I couldn’t tell if he was just talking in his sleep.

  ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

  In Which Our Heroine Meets Jimi Hendrix…

  MY MOM CALLED ONE MORNING in September to inform me that she had a new plan. “I’m sending your father to sea,” she said. “If I can get him on a boat, things’ll improve.”

  My parents hadn’t lived together for years, but they were still married, and my mother hadn’t had any new relationships since their split. My dad was brilliant and lunatic, and hard as hell to get over. There was no way she’d ever get him on a boat, not if he didn’t want to float away, but it was a nice idea.

  He’d apparently gotten worse in the months since I’d last seen him, planting a forest’s worth of pennies in his backyard, so that he’d “have something to look forward to,” and stringing his trees with bubblegum so that in the winter they looked like they were blooming with bright blue cocoons. The house I’d grown up in—according to my mom, who’d visited—was bedecked with shrines, and there was a tree growing into the living room.

  The last time my dad and I had talked, he’d called me because he’d heard that I was dating Donatello. He wanted to inform me that he knew more about the world than I did, and though he was “not racist,” he wanted me to know that black people were “not like you and me.”

  “Thank God,” I’d responded, uncharitably. I was out of compassion. My classmates bonded over the irrationality of their stewards, telling me their parents were crazy, by which they meant that their parents wouldn’t buy them a car. I kept my mouth shut. My dad was crazy in a very uncool way. He wouldn’t acknowledge his mental illness, and his years of denial had tapped my reserves of empathy. We’d never gotten along very well to begin with, and even though part of me wanted him to be the rational person he’d never been, the rest was resigned to living with our stilted, gnarled relationship, one that caused him to yell unjustifiable parental maxims periodically, and me to inform him that I was now an adult and could do whatever I damn well pleased. Mostly, though, we just didn’t speak.

  On the same call, he’d tried to institute a long-distance curfew, something I’d never had, even when I’d lived at home. My dad, from what had become his survivalist encampment in Idaho, thought he had a mystical power over New York.

  “You’re three thousand miles away,” I’d informed him. “You won’t know if I come
home at night or not. I could stay out forever, if I wanted to. And maybe I will.”

  He’d been to New York once, in the early sixties, when he’d been in the Navy. He’d ridden up and down on the subway all night, from the Bronx to the Battery, and never left the train. “I got the experience plenty,” he’d said. “I got the deal. It’s full of lazy homeless people and psychos. You don’t need to go to New York. You’re a small-town girl.”

  I’d gone, of course. Now, a year and a half in, I wasn’t just living in New York, I was New York. Even more so, since I’d started my Yes Year. Everyone I saw, on every street corner, on every subway, had become someone I could love. I’d fallen hard for eight million people.

  Like all the other citizens who’d come from nowhere to this, the great somewhere, I felt like I’d finally found home. I could relax into the hum of the trains under the asphalt, the steam rising from the manholes, the goth clubs downtown and the clip-clop of the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. Every day, I wadded up and lay aside more of what I’d really come from: a crazy father who raised sled dogs in the desert, a lot of sorrow I wanted to forget.

  In my experience, the mentally ill were like black holes, into which you could pour everything you had, only to find that they’d been off apprehending aliens in the desert of their dreams and hadn’t been listening to a word you’d said. I was paralyzed with guilt over my dad, and helpless to help him. I had a nightmare that someday he’d hop a train (he’d been known to do things like that, though now he hardly left his house) and appear on my doorstep, demanding care, demanding housing and feeding and attention. In my brain, he was like a character out of Beckett, popping his head occasionally from under a garbage can lid, calling for something muddled and humiliating. I loved him, but I couldn’t save him. I knew that much. I tried not to think about it. Every time I saw a homeless person, I thought of my dad, then cast the thought from my mind, ground it into the sidewalk like a cigarette, and walked quickly away, resisting the temptation to look back. Whatever was following me would just have to stay in Hades. I drank from Lethe every other day, and it never had the desired effect.

  AFTER I GOT OFF THE PHONE with my mom, I ran through Astor Place, late for class as usual, and tripped over a guy sitting on the sidewalk. My first instinct was fury. Didn’t he know you weren’t supposed to sit on the sidewalk? Then I felt guilty. I’d kicked him. Worse than that, I’d fallen on top of him, and all his belongings. How would I feel if I was camped out and someone bitchy fell from the sky on top of me? I set about my fastest apology, not making eye contact.

  Maybe I could eradicate my guilt and still make it to the screening of Five Easy Pieces I was supposed to be at in three minutes. The class was focusing on 1970s cinema, and I was over it. We’d watched Shampoo the week before. The week before that, it had been The Stuntman. There was nothing wrong with these movies. They were good movies. There was nothing wrong with the class, either, other than that it was taught by a man who’d come of age in the seventies, wishing himself wilder than he was. Everything we watched was about the journeys of lost men, who tore the clothes off the paper dolls they screwed and didn’t even care enough to dress them again before going out to stare across a forbidding landscape, waiting for a truck or a train to take them away. I was tired of lost men.

  I had just opened my mouth to say my impersonal “sorry,” when the guy I’d tripped over spoke to me.

  “Shit. You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, smiled politely, and pushed myself up from the sidewalk.

  “No shit,” he said. “I like your eyes. I like your hips. I like the whole thing. I could marry someone like you.” He looked up at me, wide-eyed. I didn’t look away in time to save myself from caring. He had black curls. He had a dirty face. He had fatigues. And then, eye contact. I’d been feeling fragile after talking to my mom, and so I’d been pretending that he wasn’t really a person. Now I was screwed.

  I didn’t have much money. Not enough to make a difference. He wasn’t like a child in Ethiopia, not someone I could adopt as my own, sending my four dollars a month and buying myself a peaceful existence at the same time. He was in front of me, living in New York like me, and I didn’t have anything more than five bucks and my afternoon. Well. So much for Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson, movie vagrants, the entirety of the 1970s.

  “Wanna come get something to eat?” I knelt down, and put my hand on his shoulder. I watched myself do it. I knew I shouldn’t, knew that I’d end up miserable, because that’s the way these things always went, and I did it anyway.

  “I’m good.” He put his head down.

  “Well, I’m hungry,” I said. He wasn’t much older than me. Gutter punk. That’s what Vic would’ve said. And maybe so. Maybe he was just holding out for something to be given to him, like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. But I was a shitty Santa Claus, and I didn’t know many people better than me. It wasn’t a good living, begging. He wasn’t even begging. He was just living on the street, and being tripped over.

  “Come on. I owe you. If I hadn’t fallen on you, I would’ve fallen on my face,” I said, knowing, even as I said it, that the same was true of lots of things about my life. People had helped me, maybe not in the ways I would have liked them to, but still. I wouldn’t have been where I was without support from plenty of places.

  He looked up again. His skin was dark. He was handsome. He was my age.

  “Correct,” he said, smiling to reveal a missing tooth. “You don’t wanna look like me.”

  The remaining teeth were white and suspiciously straight. Braces. He was someone’s son, and I was someone’s daughter, and I thought that if I could save him a little bit, the saving would transfer to my life, too.

  THE FIRST BOY I EVER really fell in love with was a hitchhiker. I was fifteen or sixteen. He was nineteen. He had a knapsack that contained three pairs of socks, a toothbrush, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The Hitchhiker was skinny, sexily ragged, and a perfect rendition of the beatnik boy from out of town we’d all been waiting for. We didn’t want to bone him. We wanted to be him.

  We were girls, but we wanted to be train-hopping hobo drunkards. Not that I’d ever hopped a train. Or carried my belongings in a bandanna tied to a stick. Or done anything more than clean up the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill vomit of my high school compatriots. I’d only gotten halfway through On the Road before I’d become bored. I’d dogeared it for status, underlined a few random passages, and carried it in my book bag, pretending I’d read it all. This was not that hard to do, considering it seemed to be the same damned story from beginning to end. The Hitchhiker was much more interesting than Kerouac. He had wild brown Botticellian curls and no ability to protect himself from the elements. He had a tender, slender build. He looked as though he needed feeding. My girlfriends and I met him at the only all-ages club in Boise and immediately became overwhelmed with lust. We liked to pretend we were older and sexier than we were. At sixteen, some of us did, in fact, look like adults. Some of us, me specifically, had just gotten possession of breasts and hadn’t learned how to use them yet.

  The Hitchhiker needed a place to stay. He did not seem to be trying to sleep with any of us. I may have been wrong about that, considering that I had been, for years, the token titless tagalong. Given that the breasts had only recently materialized, I was still being left out of the adult dealings of my then-best friend, a girl who’d had, from sixth grade on, an unfair C cup. This was the friend that the Hitchhiker was most interested in. She looked twenty-five. I looked nine, or at least I did next to her. I sat at the edge of the room, nibbling potato chips and wishing that someday a Hitchhiker would be interested in me.

  My girlfriends and I took him to my house out in the middle of nowhere, because it was a given that my parents were the only ones who weren’t paying attention. My dad, however, suddenly had a notion of parental responsibility, for the first time in years, and decreed that the Hitchhiker could sleep over only if he s
lept outside on the trampoline in the rain. Despite the fact that my dad was, even then, riding a unicycle over a canyon of crazy, he disliked people he thought were lost. We got around the decree by staying up all night in the living room watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and reading books of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry out loud. My dad crouched at the top of the stairs until dawn, armed to the teeth, a vigilante in his own house.

  Later, the Hitchhiker stuck out his thumb and went home to Seattle, and he and I started exchanging letters, his typed on an ancient Underwood. They were my first adult letters, and the feeling of opening his crumpled envelopes to find his equally crumpled lines was so brilliantly romantic that I fell head over heels. I tossed aside the fact that he’d given his copy of Tropic of Cancer not to me, but to my best friend. I knew that I didn’t have anything to compete with but my brain, and so I labored over my responses, drafting and redrafting, obsessing over ink and paper color.

  For the next six months, I devoured his articulate, poetry-strewn missives, until one day I got one from a different address. He told me he was in a mental hospital, having become severely depressed and agoraphobic after being mugged at knifepoint. I wrote back to him, and got another letter, saying that he was too afraid to leave his bedroom. This guy—who’d represented total freedom to me—was now housebound. Though I continued to think of him every moment, I never wrote to him again. I didn’t know what to send. A get-well-soon note? There was, to my mind, no getting well. He sent me one last letter, wondering when he’d feel better, wondering what was wrong with him, and then I heard that he’d attempted suicide. I never heard from him again. I went into silent, guilty mourning for the things I’d imagined him to be.

  Now, whenever I saw a young guy sitting on the street, I thought of the Hitchhiker, and usually, I turned my face away. I didn’t give them money; nothing I had could help them. On this day, though, this guy looking up at me, his eyes so clear and rational, the rest of him so lost, something changed inside me. Maybe it had to do with love. I’d been looking and finding it everywhere, though it was never quite the romantic ideal. That didn’t mean I couldn’t give some out. I was privileged, really, even though I was broke and working my way through school. Even though I bounced checks on a regular basis. Even though I never slept. Two hours a night was better than the nothing he was probably getting. I was still loved by people all over the place, and I was lucky.