The New Black

by Richard Thomas

  “You mean Terry?” Adrienne’s asshole clenched. Ma didn’t know. All the girls at St. Julian’s High School swooned over Terry’s tanned wide receiver chest and tennis legs. She heard something being chopped on a cutting board with a steady whack, whack, whack.

  “He’s blind as a bat. His poor mother.” The chopping got faster and faster and more precise. She could slice a carrot into paper-thin pieces in less than thirty seconds. She hated cooking.

  “She’s a whack job, Amy.” Her father hollered in the background. A cupboard door slammed shut. Adrienne heard the refrigerator door make a sucking sound as it opened. She found her pre-work hit and bent spoon in the top drawer of her dresser, but no lighter, she thought. She rummaged around in other drawers where she last saw it and found ticket stubs from a show her father took her to when she graduated high school. It was the Della Davidson Dance Company’s “Ten p.m. Dream,” an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. They’d nibbled calamari beforehand next door. Her football watching, beer-drinking father even sported a silky burgundy tie that matched her favorite maroon dress. She took her father’s elbow as he led her to the front row, so close she felt the dancers’ abdominal muscles vibrate and their snaky necks glisten and strain. She watched them as he watched the music pulse through her skin.

  He liked to look at her pictures of birds too. She’d started drawing turkeys, doves and chickens when she was six years old with accidental skill. Her father couldn’t draw an Easter egg if there was a gun to his head. Where he lacked imagination, she swelled with it. Her talents delighted him and bragged about her to his roofing buddies. “My daughter’s a genius,” he said, while ripping off grubby tiles. He collected her bird drawings and stuck them to the refrigerator door, where they were held in place by metal donut magnets he bought at the hardware store.

  “Her only son. Can you imagine?” Ma’s voice matched the sucking thud the refrigerator door made when it closed. The thing being chopped was gone and in its place, her father’s voice: “Her loser son, still living at home at twenty-nine?” Her father grunted, which was the same as his laugh. Adrienne pictured him in his stretched white gym socks with a spaghetti noodle dangling from a fork, daring Ma to slap his hand away from her butt, which he pinched, when he wasn’t yelling at the TV, drinking Coors light with their orange cat on the footstool near his feet. The skin on his hands matched his face: tanned, calloused and flaking off from working outside in the wind, rain, and dense fog that made roofs wet and slippery. He fell off a ladder and sprained his ankle last year. It swelled like a grapefruit so he managed the office and bid jobs, and farmed out the labor to his friends.

  It was at St. Julian’s High School where Adrienne got sneaky. She’d walk silently behind him on her way upstairs to her room. She’d been meeting Terry and getting high, staying out past curfew.

  “Where the hell you been?” Her father didn’t look at her anymore. He held the TV remote in one hand, raised like an arrow, in the other, a beer. He was a channel surfer. There was a steadily growing gulf between them. Her curves brought popularity, lip-gloss, tampons and boys, but also self-righteousness and danger. She became reckless and reticent. He heard her whispering on the phone well after midnight. He smelled alcohol on her breath. She’d become too pretty for her own good, he sensed.

  “Where?” He asked. He was made of sounds: slurps, moans, burps, and coughs. Startled, the cat leapt off the footstool and ran into the kitchen. She watched varicose veins on his chubby calves travel up to his thighs like a red river. She didn’t have to hide her tiny dot pupils or her droopy, rubbery skin than hung on her face. He watched the football game on TV: “Olson, you pile of shit, you throw like a girl!”

  She fingered a box of Marlboro’s in her pocket.

  “I was out buying smokes.” She waved the box in the air so he could see it reflected in the TV screen.

  “You’re too young to smoke.”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock on a school night, Addy.” Along with breasts, she’d sprouted a shitty new petulance. Her father disliked the distance between them. He gripped his Coors tighter knowing that if he didn’t keep engaging with her, she will have slipped away and it would be too late. Perhaps it was already too late. The amount of rage he felt surprised him.

  Adrienne shrugged her shoulders. She walked briskly into the kitchen where her ma buzzed around in slippers, gnashing her gum and talking on the phone aggressively like the women on The View.

  The sun dropped into her tenderloin apartment like a dried, rancid apricot, bringing night. She spotted her lighter on the floor next to the trash. She leaned over and grabbed it. It was out of fluid, but when she tried it anyway, a low flame appeared. A cat meowed.

  “Terry’s not a loser. He’s ill. How would you like to be blind, hmm?”

  “Wow, ma. That’s awful,” Adrienne said. The bathroom where she was raped was light blue with no windows. She reached for the soft brown belt on the floor, next to her Lucite stripper shoes. A gray pigeon stood on the single window ledge in her studio apartment. Her hands began to sweat.

  “I’m going to bring them my famous broccoli casserole. You should come with me.” Adrienne grabbed the belt and tied it around her forearm. She pulled it taught, gripping it with her teeth. Her best wormy vein surfaced inside her left elbow. The sweat from her hands transferred onto the worn leather where there were tiny dots of blood. She pictured diced sweet yellow onions and the hard shell of orange melted cheese on top. Terry would peel the hard cheese layer off and chew it with his bleached Chiclets. He would shake ma’s hand with his tennis doubles grip. When he asked about Adrienne, her ma would lie. She’d tell him, “She’s waiting tables and taking World Religions at City College.” But that was four years ago. It was the story she liked to tell the neighbors. The needle hit the vein nicely and delivered the juicy black heat from Adrienne’s belly up to her neck. She levitated from her chest to the top on her head. Butterflies came to mind. She took a dull pencil and drew some on a post-it.

  “If you get on BART now, you can make it in an hour.” Her ma’s voice turned smoky and silver. The chopping sound was back but softer, like a slow finger tapping on water in a bowl. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Adrienne, are you still there?” Her cheeks warmed and her eyes drifted like a plant leaning towards sunlight.

  “I can’t go to Oakland tonight, ma. I have to work.” The space between them stretched far and wide as the Pacific Ocean.

  “Come over for dinner tomorrow night. Spend some time with your father.”

  Her ma’s breath was heavy and slow like hers. There was no more gum noise. She heard the oven door close and a timer tick. She felt comfort knowing the casserole was inside and the cheese would spread like butter and the chopped broccoli sizzled, as planned. She heard relief in her ma’s mighty exhale. She exhaled too.

  “I can’t. I have to make rent for this shitty rat hole apartment.”

  “Okay, honey. We’ll see you on Sunday.”

  Adrienne felt elegant and weightless in her tall, thick black motorcycle boots. They were heavier than she was. She chose a fishnet top to cover the purple red scars that lined her forearms. Her hair was pulled back in a neat, shiny bun. She hadn’t washed it in days. When she was high, water felt like nails. Besides, the high rollers liked the tight bun. It read ballerina. Well groomed. Middle class. Her boyfriend, Dennis liked it too. “You look like a French lingerie model,” he’d said. They lived together in a dinky apartment on Hyde Street where they listened to trance techno music, counted pigeons and slammed dope. Dennis looked at least forty, with crooked lines around his mouth and creased eyes. But he was twenty-eight, like her.

  She checked her mailbox on the way out and found a red envelope from her father. She shoved it in her costume bag and walked the few blocks to Market Street Cinema, past the garbage that blew over the sidewalk and into the gutter. Fog drifted in and circled her like
wet smoke. She gave a light wave to the homeless guy who always tried to sell her stolen perfume. Pigeons picked through the trash and carried off chicken bones in their beaks. Three pigeons in the trashcan; three grams of dope per day.

  On the floor at the MSC, she saw her regular customer, the man in the white shirt, sitting in his usual spot. He was good for a hundred bucks. He sometimes brought her a single red carnation, which she thought was cheap and sad, but she smiled and thanked him and later tossed it into the gutter on Market Street. He glanced at his watch. She climbed over the crossed legs of a guy in a stocking cap, to get to the man in the white shirt. A familiar hand touched her bare stomach as she walked by.

  “Sorry.” She bent in half to lean in for a closer look. Dennis had a swollen, bruised eye that she could see, even in the dark and he was bleeding from one corner of his mouth.

  “What are you doing at my work?” The white shirt customer now had a thick blonde gyrating on his crotch. Timing is everything.

  “I was trying to bring you…”

  “What?” Dennis uncrossed his legs. His fingers were long and graceful. He hid his face in his hands. Adrienne leaned in and hissed in his ear. He smelled like bleach, dirt and night. His eyes were badly swollen.

  “You are never supposed to come into my work.”

  “I need…” Adrienne peeled his hands away from his face and remembered the birthday card from her father. She tore open the envelope and found eighty dollars. He’d written: “Hope Your Birthday is Ducky” on top of picture of a fluffy green duck she drew when she was about nine years old. It was her “duck phase” her father liked to remind her. She smashed forty crisp dollars into Dennis’ sweaty palm. A leggy redhead whispered to a customer next to him, then glanced in her direction. It was obvious they were arguing, and it was making customers tense. The white shirt customer smiled at her. She smiled big. She smiled rectus. She smiled Cheshire. The vein in Dennis’ neck bulged, the same way it did when he came. She moved her chest up to his bruised eyes, like she was about to dance for him.

  “Get the fuck out of my work.” The white shirt customer motioned to her to come over to him. She walked towards him and leaned in to kiss his cheek. Most nights, after work, Dennis took her money and met their dealer. Then they got high together and Dennis played guitar on their dingy brown sheets.

  “Promise me you’ll never come into my work,” she’d said.

  “Promise.”

  The numbers were good at the MSC. She gave five or eight hand jobs a night and left with seven or eight hundred bucks, enough for six grams. If she only did her share, she and Dennis could stay blazed for a couple days. The next night, she’d come back to work and do it again. And the next day the exact same thing. Never mind the bruises on the backs of her knees. She felt light and graceful on stage. Six years of ballet as a little girl kept her toes pointed and her arms loose. And there was her techno trance music where she got lost on stage.

  She had three songs to get naked. The first one was frantic and unrelenting. She walked on stage slow as caramel, traveling to the side. Back and forth. When the beat got faster, she slowed down even more, pulling her shadow across the length of the stage towards the pole. She grabbed it with one hand and slid down the pole to the floor. She spread her thighs wide and gazed into the black space of the audience. Her chin dropped. Her eyelids closed. Her mouth went slack. Then she caught herself. That was the good thing about techno. It was a loop so she could start right where she left off. She used the pole as leverage to lift herself up to stand. The white lights could trigger a migraine, but this was no migraine. This was blindness.

  She remembered Terry’s megawatt smile and million crunches abs. He snuck her into the boy’s bathroom after cheerleading practice. The plan was to make out and try his dope. “‘Walking on Sunshine,’ Addy,” he said.

  “What?” She asked with one hand on her hip. Terry pulled her into the blue bathroom stall and removed his smooth brown belt from his plaid shorts. They dropped down past his knees. He looked slimmer than usual.

  “You should’ve used ‘Walking on Sunshine.’” He wrapped the belt around her forearm. The dope was brown and gritty but when the fire heated it, it blackened like bubbling vinegar. Terry’s arms were so veiny he didn’t use the belt. He just flexed. “‘Walking on Sunshine’ is the best song for a cheerleading routine,” he said.

  He stuck the needle in her arm and it stung. The bathroom wasn’t blue. It was mint green and freezing. She shivered. “‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and the Waves.” The dope was a warm liquid kiss inside her skin. She nearly slipped back onto the toilet. He caught her. She laughed.

  “No. We’re using ‘New Attitude’ because it’s slow enough for flips.” He turned her around to face the toilet with her back to him. He yanked on her underwear.

  “Wait,” she said. She snatched a condom from her makeup bag and ripped it open with her teeth. She dropped the condom. It fell onto the floor. She reached down to pick it up but there was orange piss and curly black hairs where it landed.

  The dope made her queasy. She threw up Diet Pepsi and gummy bear bile and the sweetness mixed with the piss and soap smell. She tasted dope at last: burnt vinegar and warm ash. A dark shadow moved across the bathroom. The room turned blue. She flushed the toilet and the sound was so loud, as if monsters lived in the pipes inside the walls. Terry laughed. He didn’t use spit when he put his cock in her ass. He didn’t use lube. She didn’t feel it or see the blood until later. Speckled lights twinkled behind her eyes. Prism zigzag lightening blurred the edges of the walls, of the toilet, of Terry. She saw her drool trickle from her open mouth.

  “Don’t.”

  “I don’t want to get you pregnant,” he said. Her thin spit was a rainbow thread hitting the toilet water, soft and certain.

  Later she’d bleed on toilet paper. Sit on ice. Sleep on her belly. Buy more dope from Terry. He wasn’t very good at shooting her up, but Dennis could find a vein in a garbage can.

  On stage, at the MSC, the second song began. It was more manic and fast than the first. It was trance party music where a woman wailed about ecstasy and a little bit of you and me. Adrienne removed her slinky black dress. She stepped out of it like a spider discarding its skin. Her black bra was next. She tossed it to the one man sitting up front. Her pale skin and glossed red lips and sharp cheekbones shimmered under the white lights. She stepped on her dress and tripped. She fell down onto her knees. Her black thigh-high stocking covered the tracks on the backs on her legs but they were needle sore. She slid forward and felt the hot lights pierce her neck. Her tiny swollen hands touched her small breasts. Her chest was flat as an open road. Men loved that about her. She removed her black thong for the man in the white shirt and tossed it in his direction. He removed a twenty from his pocket and set it down on the stage, where she could see it. She crawled closer to him to let him know she saw the twenty. She removed his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. She took his face in her fingers and wiggled it across her skin beneath her fishnet shirt. She felt his pointy nose and wet mouth brush against her nipples. She felt his slick forehead leave a greasy film on her ribcage. She loosened her bun and allowed her black hair to smack her cheeks. She watched the man’s expression slide from guilt to anger as if she’d just become his eleven-year old niece.

  “There’s more where that came from,” she said, tossing him her best pre-pubescent smile.

  “You should have used the song I suggested.”

  He said, “You should come talk to me after this song.” He placed a single red carnation on the stage in front of her. She didn’t look at it, but she knew it was there.

  “One more song and then I’ll come,” she said. Her fingers lingered on her abdomen but she wanted to scratch her arms. The itch was back.

  “He said: “You have the best breasts.” She stared up at the lights that opened her like a bone. She was lighter than air.


  Antonia Crane

  teaches teenagers creative writing in Los Angeles when she can convince them to log off of Facebook. Her work can be found in Akashic’s The Heroin Chronicles, Soft Skull Press’ Johns, Marks, Tricks & Chickenhawks: Professionals & Their Clients Writing about Each Other, The Rumpus, Dame Magazine, Salon, PANK, Black Clock, Slake, The Los Angeles Review and other places. Her memoir Spent is forthcoming by Barnacle Books/Rare Bird Lit in 2014.

  FUZZYLAND

  RICHARD LANGE

  Big Mike insists I try on his ring. I tell him that’s okay, but he’s a pushy bastard. He bought it in Reno or won it, which makes it lucky or something. I wasn’t listening; the guy’s stories go nowhere. He wears the ring on his pinky, but it slips easily over my thumb. He laughs to see that and piles lox onto a bagel.

  “You’re going to miss me,” he says to the waitress.

  Upon his retirement next month, I’ll inherit some of his accounts. It’s supposed to be an honor. This deli, for example. I’ll be stopping in once a month for the rest of my life, pushing flatware and dishes and, say, did I mention our special on toothpicks? Unless I screw up, that is. Which happens. Ask any salesman. Buy him a drink. Greek tragedies, man. One word too many, one wayward glance, and we are up shit creek.

  The owner slides into our booth. My read is he’s a little skittish coming out of the box. His hand is soaking wet when Mike makes the introduction. I’m cool though. I don’t grab a napkin or go for my pant leg. He and Mike pick up where they left off last time, and I put it on automatic. Not that I’m missing anything: golf, golf, golf. It’s a gift knowing when to smile or nod or raise my eyebrows without really having to listen, but I worry sometimes that it makes me lazy.