“Those people who tattooed and pierced ten years ago to set themselves apart from mainstream society? ”
“Yeah? ”
“They’ve gotten sucked back in against their will because every slob from the suburbs has a modified body these days, but since it’s all permanent, the originators can’t distinguish themselves from the conforming mass.”
“What’s gonna be next?” I asked.
“Amputation,” Killer said. “It’s obvious.”
“I don’t know,” Troy speculated. “Probably they’ll all become born-again Christians or Goddess worshippers. There’s nowhere to go but out of the body.”
“Well, the leather queens and kings have really changed the world,” I said.
“Yeah,” Killer added. “Now every housewife in America can wear her chaps to the mall.”
“Thank God the grunge look is in,” I said. “Now I can look like a seventies lesbian and be totally on the money.”
“Rita,” Killer whined. “You’re soooo over. Grunge was out the day it appeared in the Style section of the New York Times. The happening thing now are the Crusties.”
“Crusties?”
“Yeah, you know. Those kids on Avenue A encrusted in dirt. They sleep in piles on the corner of Ninth Street.”
“Oh, you mean the ones who say, ‘Could you please spare some change so I can buy drugs?’”
“Yeah,” Troy said. “The pierced-forehead set.”
“But, honey,” Killer added. “Don’t confuse them with Riot Grrrls. They are really sexy. But they don’t seem to be interested in older women.”
“Maybe we should start the Woman/Girl Love Association,” Troy suggested.
“Well, if they stay in this neighborhood long enough we’ll meet them all eventually.” Killer sighed.
“I don’t know why I’m ragging on these kids,” I said. “I mean, I’ve had a tattoo since 1980.”
“What is it?” Killer asked. “A woman on the moon? ”
“Well, just be glad it’s not a women’s symbol. Or Mr. Natural.”
“Well,” Troy said. “It’s not enough to just have a tattoo. It has to be something like computer bars on your face. You know, something dramatic.”
“Well, dykes are doing heroin again,” Killer announced. “That’s pretty dramatic.”
“I guess not dying of AIDS puts a lot of pressure on people.” Troy laughed.
“What do you think is gonna happen?”
“Well,” Troy answered, knowingly. “Everything will be fine and then someone will die and then everyone will go to AA except two people will never go to AA. Something like that.”
Then we watched TV for a while and talked about other things.
Chapter Fifty-seven
It was Troy’s idea to go spy on Claudia Haas. She made a few phone calls with me standing over her shoulder, and amassed a huge amount of information in no time flat. Turns out Claudia was living with her husband and kid in a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. The plan was so easily apparent that I began to worry.
“I’m dead set against it,” I said, unconvincingly.
But Troy was already plotting her adventure and went out with Killer to buy rice cakes and trail mix for the car trip down.
When they left me alone in the apartment I was agitated, nervous. The truth is that I wanted a happily-ever-after with Claudia—not a shoot-out to the death. It wasn’t making a fool out of myself that worried me—I was used to that. The major thing I feared was having to face all that pain. Having to really relive it.
As a diversion, I started reading Muriel Starr’s novel, which was sitting, unfinished, on Troy’s pile of things to take care of someday. By the end of chapter four, I was convinced that this trip was something I absolutely had to do.
Troy came back with maps and a flashlight. She turned out to be the only one among us with a driver’s licence, but no one had a credit card. Then I remembered that Lourdes had about six of them, and surely one or two would not be maxed out. So I called her up and she was surprisingly nice about the whole thing.
“The truth is I have nothing better to do,” she said. And then agreed to use her AmEx to rent a car from Budget Rentals.
I guess we were all feeling lethargic and slightly ludicrous. Everyone around us was complaining that things were hearkening back to the fifties with great rapidity, but from my point of view the nineties looked worse than the fifties had ever been. The main difference having to do with the total absence of enthusiasm, excitement, and hope. False hope is better than none at all. So, whether you had an analysis of why or just went for it—anything seemed like a viable out. We were desperate. Desperadoes waiting in line for an opportunity—and the line went on forever with no one at the other end.
Since everything was on the spur of the moment, we couldn’t get it all together to leave until after dinner on Friday night, so Troy took the car out for little practice spins while we waited for Lourdes to get out of work. Then we picked her up in front of the computer store and the four of us drove out on our way to Delaware.
The traffic out of the city was unbelievable, especially since there was a water main break on the FDR, which we had taken for speed purposes, even though I would have rather just gone through the streets.
Sitting there overheating I caught a little spark of happiness as I hooked into the romantic angle on all of this. Seeking out your lost love.
There’s a special movie star feeling driving through the neighborhoods of New York City on a summer night. Everyone is outside, all those Dominican men with their cotton shirts open and women sitting on stoops and folding chairs. Radios. Water streaming from fire hydrants. Kids jumping in front of the car chasing balls, so you have to be on alert at all times. Everyone’s got a Budweiser. The garbage never gets picked up. Sirens. Yellow lights from hallways, open windows with TVs flickering unattended in the background. Dogs without leashes. Skinny legs on small boys. Pir Agua for the Latinos, and greasy meat on skewers for everyone else.
I told Troy to just take the regular streets until we got to Jersey, but she wanted to take the Drive because she said she liked to merge.
So we ended up in the middle of incredible congestion somewhere around South Street Seaport. Between the cars and the cabs and the tourist buses, you couldn’t move a muscle. Plus, all those Americans and their families dodging in and out. Thank God for South Street Seaport. Now, when Americans come to New York they have a place to go. Everything is the same as their luxury malls back home and it keeps them together in one spot.
“So,” Troy said, cigarette hanging out of her mouth like the guy actor in all those serial killer movies.
“So? ” I asked.
That was a provocation because we all knew Troy had fucked up already and we were still in Manhattan. So then she had to jab back at me by reminding us about the whole purpose of these travels.
“So, how did Claudia Haas get from here to there?” Troy asked as we waited out the crush.
“I told you. She got married six months after we broke up.”
“Who’d she marry? ”
“Some guy. Some guy she met in sophomore economics. Some guy from a fucked-up family with a real income. You know, someone normal. Who knows? She was only twenty-one.”
“You think that’s young?” Lourdes asked incredulously.
“Look, not one of the girls I grew up with got married at twenty-one. We’re talking the mid-seventies here. You have to think back. We’re talking the days when there were no more proms in the high schools and boys had to take Home Ec. You know, the last gasp of consciousness before the disco years.”
“You know what ruined it all?” Killer said, wiping the sweat from her face. “That moment that Sha-Na-Na stepped on the stage at Woodstock. That was the beginning of fifties nostalgia and the end of everything new.”
“I’m sick of nostalgia,” Lourdes said.
“Not me,” I said. “I have nostalgia every day. Usually for some moment an hour or
two before when I felt okay.”
“Well, I’d like to see some Joni Mitchell nostalgia,” Killer said. “Fuck Led Zeppelin.”
“You’re right,” Troy said. “College girls in the seventies did not get married at twenty-one. Most of them are just getting married now.”
“Sounds like a panic marriage to me,” Lourdes said. “I know about that.”
“Why, are you married?” I asked.
Chapter Fifty-eight
We sat there stewing in the heat and Troy smoked a couple more butts.
“Claudia’s still with that guy,” I said suddenly.
“Maybe she’s the kind who falls in love forever,” Killer answered.
“But that’s the whole thing,” I said. And at that moment all the pain started coming through. Like it started in my upper arms, a kind of sharp anxiety, and the saliva in my throat went stale. It turned.
“If she could stay with that guy all these years, well, it seems logical that if no one had bullied us the way they did—I mean, if we had had somewhere to go—we might be the combination who were still together.”
I was really angry now. But I was quiet. Killer and Troy know me so they knew to say nothing, but Lourdes doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall.
“Don’t be too dramatic,” Lourdes said, puffing out the window. “You’ll never know what Claudia would have been if she didn’t have a reason to get married. Besides, straight people have problems too, you know. If my mother ever caught me in bed with a boy she would have thrown me out on my ass.”
“Yeah, but,” I said, getting really furious, really fast, and absolutely hating her. “You would still have had something. You would have had an idea. You would have had an image of young love, an image of romance, of just the two of you against the world. You would have had a friend or a romantic adult who looked at you and saw Romeo and Juliet, instead of just the two of you totally alone looking at each other and seeing nothing.”
“Okay,” Troy said. “You’re not going to believe this but I think we’re almost out of gas.”
“I told you not to go to Budget,” Lourdes said.
Killer started fiddling with the radio.
“Pull into that Esso station over there,” she said. “I remember it from when I was a kid.”
“Esso? ” I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. It is called Exxon now, Killer. Where the hell have you been? ”
“I don’t usually ride in cars.”
“You’re just the consummate New Yorker, right?” I said, still mad at Lourdes. “You call the R train the RR train and you call the L train the LL train and you call Avenue of the Americas Sixth Avenue, and you remember where Klein’s used to be.”
“We’re definitely in need of gas.”
Troy pulled onto a side street and we started driving around looking for a gas station.
“The thing I want to know,” Killer said, “is what Claudia thinks about you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“I bet homosexuality and you are linked forever in that girl’s heart.”
“Hopefully she’s not the only one who feels that way.”
“Oh-oh,” Lourdes said. “We have an ego here, out of control. Somewhere east of the Cherry Street projects.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
“We’re stuck in Chinatown,” Troy said, having transplanted us into the same kind of chaos but with a completely different cast. Shopping bags of vegetables everywhere you turned. Dirty fish on melted ice.
“West Side Highway,” Lourdes ordered. “Take me there immediately.”
“Chinatown,” Troy said, suddenly in some form of reverie and not at all bothered. “Is this the way to suburbia? I can’t figure out how to get there.”
“Obviously,” Lourdes snorted.
“I mean, I don’t know how to get out of here.”
“Same difference.”
“No,” Killer said, back on her own track. “What I mean is that, okay, this girl Claudia opted out of the whole deal because she could not imagine a world where there would ever be a place for a queer vision of herself. But, as Gomer Pyle said, surprise, surprise, surprise.”
“Yeah, the world has changed,” Lourdes said.
“Thanks to people like us,” I said.
That shut us all up, because it was so true. And sitting in traffic somewhere on Mott Street, us four little dykes were suddenly proud of ourselves and the work that we had done to make this world a better place for everyone else.
“Gee, you guys are the best,” I said.
“Well, it hasn’t changed that much,” Killer added. “I just remembered everything homophobic that has ever happened to me.”
“Oh, every minute of every day? Don’t think about that now. We were having a weepy moment of delusion.”
“Well, it’s half true,” Lourdes said. “Every night now when Miss Thing turns on the TV she has to see you. Every day when she opens up the newspaper there is some sign of you. Every time she goes to a dinner party, something about you, Rita, just happens to come up. You and the military, AIDS and you, you in the movies, you on Roseanne. Try as she might, that bitch cannot get you out of her mind.”
“Finally,” Troy said, pulling into a beat-up station at the end of Fourteenth Street right by the West Side Highway.
There were desperate crackheads running around without shirts or shoes. There was the usual army of working girls flashing plastic tit and lots of dykes lining up across the street to get into the Clit Club.
“Is it midnight already?” Killer asked. “Well, we’ll get to her street just in time for the milkman and the paper boy.”
“Cash or charge?” the attendant asked and we all looked at Lourdes.
“You know I’m good for it,” I said rather unconvincingly, and then wondered if I had become one of those people who used other people for their credit cards.
“Whatever,” she said just when I had anticipated a snappy comeback.
So we sat in the car waiting for the attendant to come back and all looked out the windows at the lesbians hanging out in front of the club.
“It’s a new generation,” Troy said finally. “Our kind are old meat. They’re not better or worse. Just new.”
“They’re freer,” Killer said. “But not enough.”
Then the attendant came back with a pissed-off attitude.
“I had to take away your card,” he said, handing back the two broken pieces of green plastic. “I can’t give you the gas until you pay.”
We sat there in the car for a moment or two, each looking out one of the windows. The bouncer at the Clit Club was making men stand on line. One man for every seven girls. A bunch of guys in suits showed up trying to get in. We knew there was no way they were going to get in. This was the only place on earth where they were not going to get in.
“I guess I don’t really need to go to the suburbs,” I said.
“Well, we’d better take the car back so Lourdes doesn’t get in trouble,” Killer added, softly.
“I’m already in so much trouble, it really would not make a difference.”
The suits across the way could not believe they weren’t getting in. They couldn’t get over it.
“Look at those girls,” Troy said. “They are so young. When I was that age I promised myself I would never be conventional. My life would never be predictable. I would never stop noticing people and their places, streets.”
“Your wish came true,” Killer said.
“Let’s take back the car and go have a beer,” I said.
“Okay,” everybody said, but they said it sweetly.
Then Troy got the car back to the lot with the needle on empty.
APPENDIX
Good and Bad, by Muriel Kay Starr
CHAPTER ONE
“David’s tongue is like the butcher’s,” Rita told Claudia on the phone. “You remember, the one on Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights?”
“Mr. Braunstein,” Claudia said. “Bu
t do you mean that bloody raw cow’s tongue he always seemed to be slicing on the counter? The wooden counter? He gave us pieces of baloney. They tasted so waxy and sweet. Like warm chocolate pudding made from scratch. The pudding was grainy, like the meat.”
“No,” Rita said. “I mean the tongue in Mr. Braunstein’s mouth.”
“Like The Sign in Sidney Braunstein’s Window? It sounds like the title of an off-Broadway play.”
“Oh, how is the play going?”
“Oh God, you want the latest career news?”
“Of course, you know I want to know everything that happens in your life.”
“Well,” Claudia said. “One weekend only, in the basement of the Village Gate. A cute TV sketch about the US Open. First, let us settle the question of the tongue.”
“Okay,” Rita said. “I remember going into the butcher shop with my mother. You know it is one of the few memories I have of her.”
“I know,” Claudia said. “But I don’t know the part about the tongue.”
“He had this incredible mouth,” Rita told her. “Sexy and huge. I remember I used to watch it, dripping with saliva. Coated in slime. This is when I was still in the stroller, probably sitting there drooling myself. His tongue was enormous. Greasy. It was chewy. That’s what David’s tongue is like, since you asked.”
“What is the daily husband update?” Claudia asked.
“Oh, God, I feel so bad for him. David works harder than anyone I know, but he just can’t get a break. You know how hard it is for white men to get jobs in academia these days. It just breaks my heart. It’s weird, but now that we’re married, I feel everything that happens to him as though it was happening to me. I wonder if that will happen to you when you get married.”
“I don’t know,” Claudia said. “I just don’t feel a need to get married yet. I just don’t have a good reason. Hey, don’t you have to go do work?”
“Oh God,” Rita said, realizing the time. “I’m glad you know my schedule. I gotta get out of here.”
“Where are you tonight? Becker or McAdams?”
“Becker gave me a week of nights.”
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