by Myriam Gurba
I was only a sophomore.
The Sunday of our breakup, I sat cross-legged on my parents’ bed, tracing the pattern on their pussy-colored comforter. Nito was moody because he’d called the night before but I hadn’t been home. In my head, I pictured him wearing that same sour balls face I’d seen on him at Club Ajijic. I rolled my eyes.
“Where were you?” Nito demanded.
I sighed. I twirled the phone cord. “At a party.”
“Where?”
It’d been held in a dirt lot by the dump, but I didn’t know how to say “dump” in Spanish. “In an open space near where they put all the city garbage. I don’t know what you call it. It stinks and it’s dirty. It’s full of trash. You know? All the city’s trash goes there.”
“El basurero municipal?”
That was it. “Si.”
“What did you do there?”
I sucked my gums. “Hung out with my friends, Blaze and Malice. We watched two girls fight. Smoked out.”
“Marijuana?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What a filthy place. And it sounds dangerous. Desiree, I believe you are smoking too much weed.”
Immediately on the defensive, I argued, “Look, marijuana’s all-natural. An herb. And don’t lecture me about drugs. You told me that you wanted to go to the Lancadon Jungle in Oaxaca, get high and hallucinate with the Indians. See the face of God? Remember!”
“That’s different! That’s spiritual! You’re my girlfriend and I don’t want you out acting crazy. Smoking so much marijuana.”
Nito’s audacity incensed me. He was trying to levy an international embargo on my fun.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” I snapped. “I’m not your girlfriend.”
“You have changed so much since returning to America,” Nito whispered.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “I’ve got my gringa life here with my gringo friends. I think it’s best if we stop talking. Oh, and I have a new boyfriend,” I sort of lied.
“What’s his name?”
“Alucard,” I chuckled to myself. Dracula spelled backwards. I couldn’t wait to tell Blaze and Malice about my joke.
“Alucardo,” Nito echoed bitterly.
“Bye.”
I hung up.
A sense of accomplishment overtook me. I smiled. I’d crushed a boy. I was officially a gringa bitch who needed her space. An American by birth, I had an Eskimo’s heart. I wasn’t blessed with the patience to deal with handicapped, macho Bohemians who needed love. Who did Nito think I was? Mother Teresa? No, sir. I was too busy nurturing my OCD, chewing the insides of my cheeks raw, and letting Blaze erode my lesbian cherry to worry about anyone’s hurt feelings.
The Pretty Ugly Club
Unlike most Catholic high schools, Saint Michael’s didn’t have a uniform policy. Our dean, however, sweated to enforce the dress code she updated every September. Similar to the Constitution, the document lived and breathed, and some of our faculty, namely the elderly nuns, saw the need for certain amendments such as Rule #26: “Students must dress in a manner appropriate to and suitable to their genders,” as a sign that a Biblical day of reckoning was rapidly approaching.
Being a good goth under this tyrannical code was truly (pardon the overused analogy) like being MacGyver. I had severely limited resources which I had to blend to make a bang. Not even on Valentine’s Day, a day of love and harmony and martyrdom, did my oppression lift. Second period, over the intercom, the school secretary summoned me to the dean’s office: “Desiree Garcia, please report to Miss Hogan’s. Desiree Garcia, please repot to Miss Hogan’s.” I dragged from Health, through the halls, down to the main office, where I entered the dean’s room and took a seat in an uncomfortable, pleather chair, facing her.
The ogress in charge of discipline sat behind her wood paneled desk, smirking. She popped two white Tic Tacs into a mouth that looked like the hole at the center of a glazed donut and sucked. Her small chin came to rest on the palm of her chubby hand, and she squinted at me. In her raw, smoker’s voice, the interrogation began.
“Where on earth did you get those?”
I smiled self-consciously and touched the black leather suspenders I was wearing. My thumb grazed the silver near my right boob, the buckle being attached to one of the two straps that plunged over my shoulders and met at the center of my back, connecting to a large metal ring. At the bottom of it, a single strap stretched and clipped to my waistband, making the suspenders’ three leather pieces look like a “Y” held together by an “O.”
The dastardly ring had been the main reason I’d picked the sadomasochistic contraption. It had a sturdy appeal, like something a dominatrix could lift me by before throwing me onto her Catherine Wheel.
“I got these in LA,” I responded. “These,” I cleared my throat, “were a reward.”
“A reward?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you see the honor roll? My name was on it. My parents rewarded me with a hundred dollar shopping spree. You know, an incentive? I begged my dad to take me to Melrose. Where all the cool shops are. Near Hollywood. My favorite store there’s Retail Slut. My dad, he waited outside while I shopped.”
The dean shook her head back and forth and back and forth. She sucked her mints and shook her head some more and puckered her mouth.
“Am I getting detention? Trash duty? You know, technically, I’m not breaking any rules. The dress code says nothing about bondage suspenders.”
“Bondage suspenders?” she echoed.
I nodded.
The dean looked at me gravely. “I don’t think punishment will help. Just go. Get back to class. And keep up the good work. The honor roll.”
I nodded and left, and with that exchange, the dean and I developed an understanding. I had tacit carte blanche to go forth and dress as dreadfully as I wanted to, as long as I almost but didn’t quite break any of her thirty-one rules.
Blaze loved my suspenders.
She fondled the buckles and yanked me by the silver O-ring like a butch should.
A butch.
That’s what she was, although I was ignorant about the proper terminology back then. I was a femme and a dutiful one, too. I stroked Blaze’s ego when it got hurt, like when guys yelled from their monster trucks, “Paa-aaat! What the fuck are you! Make up your mind!” and threw empty beer cans at her.
I knew better than those dumb boys. I knew what Blaze could do. She was dangerous with her fingers and her tongue, and intuition told me to keep her away from St. Mike’s other alterna-girls, the mod who rode her dented Italian scooter to school, the born again Christian who wore jeans under her dresses and listened to religious heavy metal. I forgot about the public high school girls, though. My threat ended up coming from there.
Hannah Hills. She was the one who stole my Blaze. The humiliation slew me. My lover boi dumped me–the gothest girl in the county–for a blonde John Lennon fan, a paisley enthusiast who stank like bargain bin patchouli.
By Santa Bonita standards, Hannah Hills was famous, a local celebrity, the type of looker people in small towns fawn over because it’s not a stretch to picture them on the cover of Seventeen. Our own skunkish Grace Kelly, fusty old white broads probably imagined phoning their friends and telling them, “Oh, before she won that Oscar, she used to cut fabric down at The Craft Barn! Ain’t that a kick?”
When news spread that Hannah had “turned gay,” guys had their own reactions. “That piece of ass?” I heard a jock lament. “What a waste! Gimme half an hour with her.” He pumped his meaty hips. “I could bring her back…”
Blaze brought Hannah to campus to make a point, show her off. With her new trophy on her arm, she climbed the concrete steps by the student lot. Blaze and her blonde glided past the closed attendance window and up the breezeway and, because school had let out about twenty minutes earlier, campus was fairly empty.
The varsity cheer squad practiced on the outdoor stage. The janitor, Henry, pushed his squeaky cart up the hallway, pa
st a row of lockers. Gaping from a wood bench near the news kiosk, I watched my ex parade Santa Bonita’s prettiest honky past the chapel.
At Blaze’s locker, they stopped. Horror of horrors, a make out session began, and I had a perfect view of their profiles. Tongues darted into the wrong mouths, and I could tell by how cheeks were undulating that they were dancing around in those wet cavities like tortured earthworms. Spit collected and glimmered at their lip corners, and Blaze put her hand on Hannah’s slender hip, holding it there, steady, gentle.
This felt like a cutting gone all wrong. The razor had slipped, gone in too deep. I was losing too much blood. I was being drained. I watched Hannah pull away from Blaze and bat her eyelashes. Blaze wiped her wet mouth with the cuff of a dead man’s cardigan. I looked at Hannah’s t-shirt. The Imagine album logo.
Imagine.
I imagined killing Hannah, ripping out her hair, yanking her teeth out one by one with pliers, making a necklace out of them. I hated this Aryan maiden. She had a tan. I was so devoted to my subculture I covered my face with veiled pillbox hats intended for old crones to wear to their husbands’ funerals. I wore gloves even. In California. And who was I dropped for? A bitch who collected tie-dye.
Since Malice’s loyalties were with her big sis, she dumped me, too. The double breakup included no friendship alimony, so bit by bit, I worked at rekindling my ties with a trio I’d casually chilled with at the beginning of freshman year but who really became my homies post-divorce.
Laura was this group’s ringleader. She was half Puerto Rican, half Costa Rican, big-boned, big-eyed, and manic depressive. Back during freshman year, Laura’s ups and downs had bought her a whole month’s time at this famous state mental hospital by the sea, and she’d emerged from the visit with an aura of worldliness bestowed on her. This One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest variety wisdom combined with the audacious shit that came out of her mouth were why we chose to follow her.
Sue, Laura’s blonde but not as clever sidekick, had gone to the same nuthouse the same year but for a shorter stay and for a different reason. Sue got sent away because she chased a whole bunch of allergy medication down with whiskey supposedly because she was real disgusted by herself. According to the rumor mill, Sue’d gotten the hots for her own dad, and when she went out to help him on his ostrich ranch one hot October weekend, she got him drunk, seduced him in the barn, and told him, “I’m gonna make you a grandbaby.”
Now how could anybody know a detail like that? “I’m gonna make you a grandbaby?” The story smacked of fiction, tall tale-ishness, wispy cotton candy gossip, the stuff of legend. Regardless of whether or not it was true, Sue was our school slut. The only thing guys had to whisper in her ear was, “You look like Alicia Silverstone, that girl from Clueless,” and they’d have her spread-eagle in no time.
Candace rounded out the gang. She attended St. Mike’s in spite of her Mormonism, and though she was a sweet, sweet girl, Candace was awful for my OCD. Zit pustules covered her chin and pinkish Braille clusters spread around her lips in whole paragraphs. I got this idea that if I stood too close to her, her skin troubles would spread to me. To avoid falling prey, I carried a decontamination stash around in my backpack.
Everyday, during all my odd periods, I excused myself to the restroom, hauling my kit with me. Standing at the sink furthest from the door, I unpacked my cotton balls, my bottle of rubbing alcohol, and my bottle of witch hazel. I held my fluffy white tufts over the basin till they dripped with tonic and then swabbed my face with their astringent power. Coolness licked my cheeks and chin, and I felt the bacteria teeming in my pores zapped.
I vowed never to become a human petri dish like Candace, and while I did remain zit free, my skin turned positively Saharan. A molting process began. Cracked, the top layer of my face lifted and sloughed off in flaky chunks. Hiss. I was a snake. A reptile. A new, smoother me slithered forth for all St. Mike’s to see.
Now, given that two of my three new buddies were certified lunatics and the third belonged to a sect that wore holy underwear, they weren’t much put off by my quirks. They enabled my madness, giving me reassurance when I asked, “Is my face turning lopsided?” or “Hey, did I just bump into a leper?” Instead of mocking me when I couldn’t help but bunny twitch my nose, they sputtered, “Aw! How cute! She’s ready for Easter!”
According to the Chinese calendar I had hanging above my bed, 1992 was the Year of the Monkey. For me, it was the Year of the Crazy Girl. I watched us attack people on TV talk shows, heard about us aiding and abetting our husbands’ sex crimes. In Hollywood, we rose to power as madams. Amy Fisher became our queen.
One afternoon, on my front porch, me, Laura, Sue and Candace took turns reenacting the shooting of Mary Jo Buttafuco. We did it democratically, making sure each of us got a chance to ring the doorbell and shoot our nemesis point blank in the face, and later, at Laura’s house, we created Amy: The Long Island Lolita, a five-act play starring Barbies. The love story ended with Skipper, shorn bald, slurring, “I’ll always love my Joey…no mattah what.” In the background, a pink Corvette rocked. Ken, with his pants around his ankles, plugged away at brunette Rocker Barbie, a.k.a. Amy, in the backseat.
So inspired were we that when Laura’s front door opened and then slammed shut hard, we all gave a start. Laura’s mom, looking haggard and bedraggled, stomped into the den. She leaned against the wet bar and scowled at the Barbie Dream House that sat on the floor. A long day’s work at Take It E-Z, the retirement home where she nursed the living dead into their graves, had really tuckered her out.
“Laura! I hate dose new beaches dey hired!” she whined. “Frech out of ehigh eschool!” She kicked off her white shoes and set her stethoscope by a bottle of gin. “Dey duhn know hwat dair doin’! Dey duhn know how to even echange Depents!”
“Aw, poor Mommy,” Laura cooed. “Why don’t you change into something more comfortable and fix yourself a snack? We’ll put on a show for you!”
Her mom shrugged, “All eright.” Off she humped to her bedroom.
About fifteen minutes later, Laura’s mom returned wearing nothing but a long thin t-shirt. It had a frog with sexy lashes waving a Puerto Rican flag, the slogan “100% Boricua” below it. In her right hand, Laura’s mom was clutching one of those Happy Meal collectible cups I’d so coveted when I was little. Hers had a faded violet Grimace on it and was three-quarters filled with clear liquid.
“Sit down, Mommy!” Laura said. “Take a load off. Hit it, girls!”
Laura’s mom melted into the couch, and on the chipped coffee table, we staged a performance of our play. At first, we thought our audience hated it. Act V closed and Laura’s mom sat wordless. Then, she began to cheer. I noticed her drink was half gone.
“Otra!” she insisted. “Otra! Encore!”
We gladly re-staged our magnum opus for her, and the second time it ended, Laura’s mom urged, “Cam here, my gairls! Cam here!”
We gathered around her on the couch, her short tan legs not quite reaching the floor, and she passed her glass to each of us. She watched us gulp our small reward, a toxic sip. I winced as my swallow went down, and Laura’s mom looked on me dotingly, a mother hen.
My throat burned. I wasn’t at all used to vodka.
Candace’s house wasn’t as fun as Laura’s. There was no liquor cabinet, no Ronald McDonald cups filled with funny stuff, but we still hung out there sometimes, regardless. Candace insisted.
Since her mom suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the lady never got out of bed. In fact, none of us ever actually saw her face. Just her feet. Her presence was like that of the Mighty Oz. Candace would go ask her something, and the rest of us would hover by the door, hearing the conversation, the door open enough for us to glimpse framed Bible verses on the wall, the Book of Mormon on the dresser, the palest feet and calves ever poking out at the foot of the bed, resting on a delicate quilt.
We had fun with Candace’s mom’s yearbooks. Candace hauled them out one day, blew the
dust off one’s jacket, cracked it open. She held the book up and displayed a page to us, and she pointed to a black and white senior portrait. It was a young man who looked like a pigeon in a suit.
“Guess who that is,” Candace prompted.
I squinted and read the boy’s name aloud, “Vincent Fournier. So?”
Candace cleared her throat. I noticed a papule on her neck. I had to go swab my face. Immediately.
Candace sang, “School’s out for summer!”
I forgot about my ritual.
Me and Laura and Sue shrieked, “Alice Cooper!”
“Yup. My mom went to school with him. Look what it says in his senior notes.”
We quietly read them to ourselves.
“Jesus Christ almighty!” said Laura. “His dream came true. He really did become a major recording artist. That poor fucker, though. He looked like the biggest dork ever.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “He sure did.”
We passed the yearbook around, each of us touching Vince’s picture, hoping some of his star power would rub off.
Home a few hours later, I swabbed my face with astringents for a good thirty minutes to make up for what I’d skipped at Candace’s and then some. Once my skin felt too tight, I screwed the cap back onto my rubbing alcohol and left the bathroom and went to my bedroom to hit the books. I worked hard to keep my grades up in order to keep my parents off my back, and for Mom and Dad, decent marks meant nothing below Bs. Also, they expected me to go to a good college so I cheated a little at math to get the kind of GPA the University of California was scouting for. History and English weren’t problems, though. I enjoyed doing that homework.
Stretched out on my carpet, I opened The Scarlet Letter and read, fantasizing that Hester Prynne was a young Mexican girl who wore a black sweater with a red “M” on it. The phone rang.
“Desiree!” my ten-year-old sister, Libertad, yelled out. “It’s Nito!”
