by Jody Gehrman
I have to concentrate on swallowing so I won’t choke on my tamarind soda. “I haven’t even met him!”
“Right. My point exactly.” She spreads her lips into a grimace and exposes her gleaming little teeth. “Do I have food in my teeth?”
I look. “No. Do I?” She examines mine and points to a spot. I dig with my fingernail until I dislodge the leaf of cilantro.
“Forget about Grady for now,” she says. “If you say too much you ruin everything.”
On the way home, I let Lucy drive, and I find myself gripping my own arm so hard, there are fingernail punctures for hours afterward. She handles the wheel with nonchalance—it’s merely an accessory she can fling around, while her cigarette is the main event.
A cop passes us on the left. Lucy is digging down into the seat-belt hole, trying to find her lighter. The truck veers dangerously in his direction, and I can no longer resist—I grab the wheel and tug the vehicle back to the center of the road, as gently and firmly as I can. I can see the cop car gliding slowly in the lane next to us; he hovers there for a long moment, assessing us in his rearview mirror. Lucy, unhindered by her seat belt, digs deeper into the recesses of the hole, oblivious to the road. By the time she returns to the wheel with the lighter, an “Aha!” of triumph on her lips, the cop is slowing to a crawl beside us. “What’s your problem?” she asks me, and when I nod toward the cop in answer, she says, “Ha! I eat them for breakfast.” After a couple of seconds, the cop moves on. I reluctantly surrender the wheel to her again, leaving traces of sweat behind.
“Lucinda,” I say, letting out my breath.
“What? I’ve got it!”
The car in front of us flashes two bright-red brake lights, and I hold my breath again as she concentrates on lighting her cigarette. At the last minute, she slams on the brakes. She laughs and takes a drag, looking at me sideways.
“You’ve got an interesting driving style,” I say.
“This is nothing,” she tells me, adjusting the rearview mirror so she can examine her eyebrows. “You should see me when I’m drunk.”
Lucy and Arlan are out tonight, and for the first time since I came here, I’m home alone. Buddhist Monkeys has a regular gig on Friday nights at Fanny’s Barbecue Palace. Of course, I’m always invited, but tonight I’m not in the mood to watch Arlan’s talent being eclipsed by Danny’s absurd theatrics. It’s painful watching the handful of alcoholics who constitute Buddhist Monkeys’ fan base being replaced with a full-on crowd when the lame headliners, Honkey Dory, show up. Still, I don’t blame the kids around here for preferring Honkey Dory’s saccharine, top-forty tunes to Danny’s clumsy attempts at social commentary set to the assault-on-the-senses he calls music.
Since I met him a couple of weeks ago, my distaste for Danny has increased exponentially. His concept of the cosmos revolves around three reference points: Mad Max, Black Flag, and shooting up. If you try to steer the conversation away from these three topics, he inevitably stares with glassy-eyed vacancy at a point in space just above and beyond your left shoulder.
As for the other band members, Bill is more likable than Sparky, though by a thin margin. Sparky is enamored with Danny, and because he has no discernable personality of his own, his willingness to laugh at everything Danny says makes him guilty by association, in my eyes. Bill is more a devotee of Arlan, which gives us something in common, at least. He’s also more civilized than the others, but his rodentlike eagerness is a turnoff. Once, I saw him make the moves on a disgustingly drunk college girl who’d just been publicly dumped. Her mascara was still wet and the front of her shirt was slightly vomit-stained; Bill went right up and handed her another drink.
Tonight, I’m determined to take advantage of the only privacy I’ve had in weeks. Soon after I watch Lucy and Arlan drive off in his station wagon, I fix myself a cup of tea and snuggle into the window seat. I breathe into the cup and feel the steam rise against my face in a thin vapor. Outside, the evening sky is deepening its melancholy blue by several shades, and the college kids are beginning their Friday night by clomping downtown in their heavy-soled hipster shoes. The stillness of the house is startling. I can’t remember the last time I was alone.
In my old life, I’d grown used to days on end of virtual solitude. Even when I worked at After Hours, I was isolated inside my cubicle, with nothing but the low, compulsive hum of office life between me and silence. On weekends, I sometimes went out with Derek; we’d dine on lentil soup and organic juice at his favorite restaurant in Mill Valley, where the faint smell of ginger and dirt always clung to the air. Or my mother and I would spend the obligatory meal in one another’s company. As soon as we’d finished eating, though, we’d flee, both of us taxed by the accumulated weight of things we were too tired or frightened to say.
This summer my loner facade has been under siege. Since I’ve started living with Lucy and Arlan, every day begins and ends with the sounds of other people—the toilet flushes, coffee beans are ground, a tray of ice cubes is being twisted until it cracks, someone is yelling at someone else to bring them cigarettes. Sometimes I sleep by myself in the living room, listening to Lucy and Arlan have sex; more often, Bill or Danny or Sparky or all three are snoring somewhere nearby, collapsed on the floor in various shapes. I live in a hive of human sounds, filled with the buzz of other peoples’ needs and impulses.
The Land of Skin is active tonight. As it gets dark, I unwrap my binoculars from the wool sweater stashed deep in my backpack. I feel a little dirty as I crouch closer to the window and begin to focus. The hairy fixture of Purgatory Corner appears in life-size detail, his baseball cap perched backwards on his head, his stringy brown hair parting to reveal large, fleshy ears. He’s yelling something at the Goat Kid Hovel, and I open the window to hear better. “Get a life!” he bellows. “Goddamn disturbance of the peace!”
Across the street, the Goat Kids are attempting a barbecue of sorts. A cacophony of distorted guitars is pulsing from their windows. Out on the lawn, there’s a group of seven or eight of them clustered around a trash can half filled with debris. One of them douses it with lighter fluid and tosses a match in. A cluster of flames emerges suddenly, like a devil they’ve conjured. The flames increase in intensity, turning the Goat Kids’ faces gold. I hear the guy on the porch scream a half scolding, half admiring obscenity from across the street, but they’re too enraptured to notice. Someone carrying a package of hot dogs emerges from the house, and several of them dangle the dogs close to the flames. By the time they’ve managed to impale one or two on sticks, the flames have died down to embers.
I watch for a long time, lost in the familiar pleasure of it. I fold my legs under me and press my binoculars to the glass. I look for Raggedy Ann, but she’s not there. I feel half guilty, as if her absence is a direct result of my failure to look for her lately. I think of Magdalena and all those I watched with such vigilance back in San Francisco. Something in me longs for the beige of my apartment, the uninterrupted hours spent in anonymous bliss, soaking up the details of other peoples’ lives.
Some time later, I hear the scratch of a lighter behind me, and I turn so quickly that I feel a pain shoot down my neck. Lucy’s lighting her cigarette, standing there in her little red T-shirt and a barely-there skirt, with one boot tapping against the carpet. “So,” she says, and little puffs of smoke emerge from her lips as she speaks. “You’re one of those.”
I stand up and try to force my binoculars into my backpack.
“Don’t,” she says simply, but I’ve spilled the contents of my bag now, and am busying myself stuffing shirts and underwear and packages of gum back where they came from. “Anna,” she says. I meet her gaze, and she smiles. “You’re blushing,” she tells me. “You’re so lovely when you blush.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” I say.
“I’m not.” She comes closer, and I can smell the smoke on her, the sweet, fruity smell of her shampoo, and her breath laced with gin. “I would never do that.” For a moment, we
just stand there, very close. Her face is tilted upward slightly toward mine. I can see the dark red lipstick, and the place where she went just slightly outside the lip line, to make her lips look even fuller. There are tiny marks where she plucked her eyebrows. Her eyes are so dark, and she’s watching me so intently, that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand erect. I look down.
She takes a step back and falls onto the couch, her limbs spreading in a way that tells me she’s drunk. “I don’t humiliate people I like,” she says. “But I don’t mind telling you—watching is a form of rape.”
I sit, and concentrate on cinching my backpack closed.
“By the way,” she says, and she takes an extralong drag off her cigarette. “How can you go through life without smoking? Don’t you feel impovish—” She pauses and wraps her mouth around the syllables more carefully. “Impoverished?”
“How so?” I ask, glad that she’s changed the subject.
“You’ve been robbed of your prime smoking years!” She takes a cigarette from the pack and hands it to me. “Go on. Try one.”
“No thanks,” I say.
“You like to watch? I’ll take you someplace. Tomorrow. Saturday.”
“How come you’re back so early?” I ask.
“I got tired of their shit,” she says, running her fingers through her hair. Her legs are parted and I can see the red of her underwear. “I live in a jungle of perverts.” She pauses, gives me an eerie, knowing look. “You’re as bad as them, aren’t you.”
I can feel my cheeks growing hot again.
“Don’t blush. It’s only cute the first couple times.” I stare at my hands. “Oh, don’t listen to me.” Her voice softens and she slips from the couch to her knees, crawling across the floor until she’s sitting at my feet. “Don’t let me hurt you—I always hurt people, dammit.” She looks up at me, and her eyes go so liquid I think she might cry. Instead, she sneezes. Then she rests her face against my leg and takes a long, pensive drag from her cigarette. “I should be more like you,” she says, sighing smoke.
“Like me?”
“More…Shirley Temple. All those little-girl curls.” She looks up at me quizzically. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Same as Arlan,” she says. I blush again, and I look out the window, hoping she won’t notice. “Good God,” she says. “You’re blushing at that?” She pauses, and I can feel her watching me. “You like him, don’t you.”
“Who?” I say, still staring out the window.
“There’s my answer,” she says, chuckling. “Don’t worry, everybody worships him. Except me. That’s why I get to have him.” She lays her head down in my lap again, like a sleepy child. Her cigarette has burned down to the butt. She flings it at the window; it hits the sill and lands in the carpet. I watch it for any signs of smoke, but it’s dead. “He’s all mine,” she murmurs. “Because I don’t give a shit.”
She starts snoring softly. I can feel her breath in hot little gusts against my thigh. It takes a while, but eventually I fade to a thin, tentative state of unconsciousness. I dream I’ve got a warm animal sleeping in my lap. At first it’s a cat, but when I pet it, the thing raises its head and I find myself staring into the face of a bat with dark, leathery ears and black, black eyes.
Saturday night, Lucy directs me to a depressing section of Seattle; it’s got much of the tawdry, faded-carnival feel of Fisherman’s Wharf, only it looks less successful at separating visitors from their money. We park the truck and she pulls me into a concrete building with a sign, Déjà Vu: Hundreds of beautiful women and three ugly ones, printed in bubble letters across the front. We walk in the door and find ourselves in a very disorienting corridor, lit with blue and ending in a burst of raucous color. There’s a guy behind a counter sipping a Slurpee through a straw and touching his stiff, gelled hair with one hand.
“Hi,” Lucinda says, lighting a cigarette.
“Twelve-dollar cover, ladies,” he tells us, releasing the straw from his pouty lips just long enough to get this out.
I expect him to be surprised or curious about two young women walking into Déjà Vu on a Saturday night, but he is clearly much more enthralled with his Slurpee than with us or the logic that brings us here.
“Is Lorna working tonight?”
“She is later. You a friend?”
“You could say that.” Lucy smirks. “Do we really have to pay?”
“Wednesday’s amateur night,” he informs us. “No cover then. Tonight’s twelve dollars.”
“Look, we’re not going to stay long. Just…come on. Please?”
He chews the inside of his cheek and examines us with glassy eyes. His expression reminds me of someone watching late-night television. “If you stay past eleven, I’ll have to come collect.” He shrugs and goes back to his Slurpee, which is evidently our cue to go in.
The explosion at the end of the corridor opens and swallows us: streaks of pulsating, colored light, music impossibly loud with a bass beat that makes your stomach wobble, white teeth turned neon in pools of black light, red booths shiny as patent leather. We wander through this storm of stimulation. No doubt our faces show we’re confused, like nocturnal animals stumbling into excessive sunlight. We make our way to a couple of chairs near the corner.
The bass beat shifts: vintage Madonna blasts from the speakers and a male voice pumped from within a smoke-colored Plexiglas booth urges us to give it up for Sasha, this year’s statewide winner of the Hardbodies of America contest. Sasha leaps onto the stage. She wears a bright white nurse’s uniform, starched, seductively tailored, a stethoscope dangling between her enormous breasts. She is rather short, in spite of the un-nursey spiked heels, and she dances with the aggressive, crisp athleticism of the more gymnastics-inclined cheerleaders, the ones that do flips from the top of human pyramids. Before long, her nurse’s uniform comes off with an efficient flick of the wrist. Velcro, I think to myself. Ingenious.
The more naked she gets, the more fascinated I become. I am authentically perplexed by the sheer spectacle of her body: thighs ropy and taut as suspension cables, concave belly, breasts so large they should be ponderous, yet they are firm—rigid, even. Not real, I tell myself, which I find stupidly reassuring.
“You like to watch? This place is made for watchers,” Lucy whispers into my ear.
The waitress comes around to take our orders, but they don’t serve anything except soda, so we pass. Lucy chain-smokes, and I sit there, half fascinated, half fuming. She wouldn’t tell me much on the hour-long drive down, and I’m sick at the thought of being marched through a moral drill. If she intends to show me the error of my ways, she’s got it all wrong; this place has nothing to do with me. I’m an anthropologist. These people are perverts.
But as I survey the crowd, I have to admit, they don’t look much like perverts. They look bored. Sasha, the number-one hardbody in the state, is now doing things with the pole center stage that imply her limbs are made of rubber. She twists and turns round that thing with the agility of an ape and the grace of an acrobat. Yet the crowd stares at her with the same listless, numb eyes the boy at the counter showed us. She’s up there practically removing her own bones from their sockets, and what does this crowd offer her? Apathy. They might as well be cows, gazing at the same pasture they’ve seen every day of their lives.
An hour passes, measured by the transformation of one pop song into another, and the continual stream of cigarettes passing from Lucinda’s lips to the ashtray. The dancers replace one another seamlessly, each with her own icon: the businesswoman, the Catholic schoolgirl, the Parisian vamp. They all have huge, gravity-defying breasts; they’re all leggy and lean from the rib cage down. I can feel my face slipping into the passionless shape that matches that of all the other faces in the audience—the vacant eyes that seem to broadcast you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
Right around eleven, Lucinda turns to me and mouths over the riotous wails of Mick Jagger, Let�
�s go. She jerks her head toward the exit for punctuation. Just the thought of fresh air tugs me from my stupor. Yes, let’s. I nod back at her. She pockets her pack of Camels and her Zippo. We make our way through the maze of zombies and head back down the eerie, blue-lit corridor, past the Slurpee guy, toward the black, scuffed-up door with its metal bar that need only be pushed to obtain freedom. I fixate on that metal bar, and the night air that circulates beyond it. But just as Lucy places her hand on it and starts to lean her shoulder against the door, it swings open more suddenly than it should, and she nearly collides with a girl who was on her way in. I’m shocked to see a tall, tanned version of Lucy in a tiny spandex dress. Her hair is dyed a garish red and her makeup is thick and exaggerated, but her eyes and mouth match Lucy’s so precisely, they might be clones.
“Holy shit,” the girl says, her eyes going wide. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, Lorna,” Lucinda says, forcing a casual tone. “We just stopped by.”
“Mom send you?” Her eyes dart toward the Slurpee guy, slide past me, before resting again on Lucinda. “Come out here,” she says, stepping back into the parking lot.
We start to follow her out, when a pack of five or six overdressed, fortyish men intercept us on their way in. They reek of cologne and cigar smoke. “Hey now,” the one in the lead says, enunciating sloppily. “This is what I’m talking about! Are you the beautiful ones, or the three ugly ones?” The men behind him explode into gales of laughter. I watch Lucy and the redhead give them identical withering looks. We move past them, out the door, and though it takes me a couple of breaths to clear my head of the smoke and the stink of cologne, the air outside is delicious.
