by Joshua Furst
How many hours had she spent in her room, blasting Rage Against the Machine and wishing she were somewhere dangerous and real instead of stuck way out here in Plymouth? How many times had she gone into the city to see an exhibit at the Walker with me and been more interested in the folks on the street—those coiled creatures, beaten but somehow not beaten down—than in the totems to the human spirit hanging on the clean white gallery walls? Or driven in with her friends, escaped for a day, to wander through Uptown trying to look cool and smoking cigarettes and dreaming of how great it would be to escape like this forever?
She hadn't been able to imagine at that time how a person went about transforming herself from the thing she was into the thing she wanted to become. But here, this boy Trent stood now like a hooded shaman, his eyes glowing amber, his arm around her shoulder, his lighter held out to show her the way. He spoke in a language that she'd heard in whispers but never fully understood before, words that rattled like keys on the end of a string, slid into sockets and unbolted doors she would have been afraid to open alone. “This country's fucked-up. We have to tear it down and start fucking over.” Words that pulsed and grew and enveloped her mind like those of the saviors she'd embraced before him: the Dalai Lama, Hillary Clinton, Rumi. “We have no idea what's really going on. The media's job is to keep us confused.” He saw through hypocrisy. He shook with outrage. “See, that's what it means—the fucking Second Amendment. When your country's sold you out, it's your job, it's your fucking responsibility, to rise up and resist. To burn the motherfucker to the ground.” Alienation was a galvanizing force in him, and in the few weeks since she'd arrived at Sabotage, he'd changed the rules by which her world operated.
On a Wednesday night, or a Sunday afternoon, they'd head to the Boom Boom Tick Club and hang in the gutter with the other grimy kids, sniffing around for a party to crash, waiting for someone to pop out for a smoke. “Hey, Tim, hey, Flake, hey, Little Tornado, come here a sec. You got a stamp? You already pay? Come here, Benny, I need to talk to you a minute.” Trent knew everyone and Cheryl did too now. She was fearless as long as he was around. There was a whole society, fueled by glue fumes and nitrous and whatever else they could get their hands on, hiding in the ruins of bombed-out buildings or just bumming along the river all night, lurking and scheming and pulling away from the world she'd so recently fled. The bands were mostly local, kids like them, from the suburbs or sometimes from the U of M, thrashing their way through their first, second gig. It didn't matter. The music was just noise. They congregated here, at the all-ages shows, to listen to war cries and manifestos, to embrace the chaos storming through their cells.
The trick was getting in. Trent pressed the back of his hand to Benny's, clasping tight until the smudged Masonic eye on Benny's bloated skin peeled away onto Trent's, a temporary tattoo. They all took a turn at it—Devin, Mike, Cheryl—stealing stamps from whoever was around. Then, flashing their fists under the black light, they rammed through the door and ricocheted into the vast empty space. Stomping boots, butting heads, slamming shoulders and chests, they climbed bodies and speakers so they could dive. They pulverized every cell in their bodies—each other's, their own, it didn't matter whose— pummeling each other, sometimes, out of joy, other times beating themselves bloody with rage. Somebody's glasses would fly across the room and there'd be a stampede to shatter them. A bruise, a welt, a broken tooth. They learned to recognize themselves through pain.
Then, stumbling, limping back to the Sabotage Café, they felt transcendent, beyond the reach of the cops and social workers, unable to be tempted by the born-agains passing out bag lunches from the backs of vans and offering hot soup and candy and pop to anyone desperate enough to climb aboard and take the ride back to Shepherd's House. They'd learned how to reject worldly things on their own and their squalor gave them all the comfort they required. They'd been embraced by the refuse of the world and now they had nothing, were becoming nothing, and dreaming of ways to turn everything else into nothing with them.
And I thought, okay, my job is to stay out of the way. Maybe Cheryl will have better luck than I did. Maybe she's found a better way to be. I didn't believe it, though. Experience had taught me there was a lot to fear.
SHE CALLED TO TELL ME I was a bad mother. She remembered one day when she was ten years old and I'd yanked her arm almost out of its socket as she was about to cross the road. Yes, she'd seen the car speeding toward her, but so what? I didn't have to pull so hard.
“But every mom does that,” I explained to her. “It's one of the things they teach you in Parent School.”
“That doesn't make it right,” she said.
She remembered how I'd made her practice her violin for one full hour out of each day, even though she sighed and complained every time. “Couldn't you tell I hated it, Mom? Did it never occur to you that I was tone-deaf?”
“You never told me.”
“I did tell you, and anyway, you're my mother. You're supposed to be able to notice these things.”
“I notice things, Cheryl. I notice all sorts of things.”
“Yeah, but half the time they don't exist … you know, Mom? Your world, the way you see the world, it's fucked-up. It doesn't work.”
“All I ever did was try to provide you with the things I thought would make you happy. And protect you.”
“I don't want to be happy,” she told me then. “I don't want to be protected. Not by you.”
Is this when she exploded? Is this when that bright restless girl I used to know turned her will to fight against herself? I'm not sure. I lost her for a while after that.
The haunted voices I'd fled when we moved to Plymouth returned to blot out what I could see of her. They'd changed over the years; they'd thinned and lost their richness, lost their complexity; they'd screamed themselves hoarse in their search for me. I could no longer make out what they were saying, but through their wailing nonsense, I understood they were angry at me.
I suspected that Cheryl had pointed them in my direction. To shut me out. To sever our bond. She knew it was one of my jobs to listen. Maybe more acutely than was good for her, she knew I'd been cursed with too much empathy, that I was liable to be overwhelmed by the sorrow washing over me. But she also underestimated how hard I'd fight, how primal my need for her would be.
For weeks I heard nothing. She didn't call. She sent no coded messages. She found a way, somehow, to push me from her mind. That's the part that scared me. She'd been my shield and my reason, my touchstone, and without her I didn't know what to believe.
When I was in her room, I could almost make her out. I stayed there virtually around the clock now, lying on her bed, lying under her desk sometimes, sitting on the floor with my legs straight in front of me, holding my body incredibly still. If I found the right spot and turned my head the right way, I could block out the voices and, for brief intervals, catch bits and pieces of where Cheryl was hiding.
On the West Bank. The buildings nondescript and gray, bleached and chalky. It was all pale roads and sidewalks and parking meters— two in the morning and everything was dead underneath the trees. And Cheryl, walking down Washington Avenue, had bulk and mass. The dust in the air gravitated toward her, clung; it mixed with her sweat and caked her skin with mud.
Her boyfriend was speaking. There was violence in his voice. “All these fucking money-grubbing lawyers, reading the bylaws and finding the fucking loopholes. You know what they had to do? Fucking they had to change the fucking name. As long as it was Kentucky Fried Chicken, they still had to give free meals to the homeless. It was in their charter or whatever the fuck it's called. But if it was KFC, fucking they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. It was like a whole new company. So, see? Capital wins again. Not even the Colonel can ward it the fuck off.” His bony arms swung loose as he walked. Turning the corner, he jumped and slapped a street sign. “It's true. I'll show you the web site sometime.”
They were heaving themselves into a massive dumpste
r out behind a fast-food restaurant. Standing on slick black bags. Buckets of chicken were lodged in the corner. Cheryl picked one up and found it was still warm.
“Federal law,” Trent said. “Everything gets thrown out at the end of the day. Perfectly fucking good food. But no, they can't give it to people who need it. Fucking that would be fucking anti-American.”
They plopped to the ground, and as they headed back across the river toward Dinkytown, they dug in, gnawing on drumsticks, ripping the skin off of thighs. They sucked the meat from the carcasses, and when they were done, the bones flew behind them and rattled on the pavement for stray dogs to fight over.
Then she'd disappear again in the din of voices.
She was testing me. Gauging how complete my submission would be. I couldn't call her, not if I hoped to keep her. Robert, I was sure, was tracking my calls, trying to discover where she was through them and drag her home before she was ready.
All I could do was wait, locked in her bedroom, and strain for further glimpses of her. In the back of her closet, I found the baby-blue cashmere sweater that I'd given her on her fourteenth birthday. “Jeez, Mom, just what I've always wanted,” she'd said. “An old-lady sweater.” She only wore it once, and then just to please me, careful to choose a time when we were far away from anyone who might get the wrong idea. Still, once was enough. It had belonged to Sarah and it connected the two of them together. My thought was to put it on, but it didn't fit. The best I could do was lie on her bed and snuggle up tight with it, listening, watching. Sometimes Gremlin hopped up and balanced on my hip; he helped me search.
There she was, holed up on the second floor of the Sabotage Café, sitting cross-legged in the Wreck Room. The cardboard box they called a table buckling under the weight of empty bottles. Old copies of City Pages strewn everywhere. It might have been noon, or three in the afternoon. The two windows hid her from whatever was outside; one was boarded up, the other slathered in dull black paint, pinpoints of light streaming in and mapping constellations across the walls: the surfboard, the ice cream cone, the vacuum cleaner. A different universe.
She liked the darkness. She liked being nowhere.
She wielded a razor blade, cutting slits in the cuffs of her army jacket so she could stick her thumbs through when she wore it. It was tattooed with patches now, a mohawked skeleton smoking a cigarette, a smiley face with a bullet through the brain, the logos of bands that had died before she was born, the Subhumans, the Germs, the Slits and the Cramps; their names alone expressed her aspirations.
Or she'd be drinking from a bottle of cheap whiskey, bracing herself for the stick of steel through her eyebrow or her nose, the double hoop snakebite through her lower lip.
She was transforming herself, letting Trent transform her. “It's about ownership,” he explained. “You can let them fucking own you, you can shop at the places they want you to shop and believe the fucking things they want you to believe, help them fucking build their fucking empire, all that bullshit, be a fucking drone like fucking everyone else, or you can, you know, fucking fight the power. It's like that Clash song, you know?” He crooned, “I came here for a special offer / a guaranteed personality.”
Her lip was twisted around his fingers, pulled taut like dental floss, and he was stabbing at her with the stud. The rest of her body went chilly and damp and then there was a pop and a sudden burn, a surge of adrenaline as he pressed again, harder this time, forcing the stud out the other side.
There were things she was supposed to do after that—douse the wound in alcohol, twist the stud twice a day, stop herself from toying with it while it healed—but she forgot. Infection crept in. She didn't mind. She sort of liked it, actually. The mild warmth, the itch were somehow comforting; they reminded her of how far she'd come.
I was scared for her. She was becoming feral.
Rooting around in her closet, I searched for evidence of the girl she'd been before. The shelves were filled with distressed jeans, tattered, threadbare t-shirts, Catholic schoolgirl skirts and ripped tights in black and blue and sometimes blood red. Watching me, Gremlin twitched his ears. He leapt from his perch on her desk and dug through the old shoes and bedding on the floor, revealing a black trash bag in the closet's corner. The bag distressed him. He wouldn't stop clawing. When I pulled it open, I uncovered aspects of her earlier selves: an old North Face jacket, the cords she'd worn during her anti-leather phase, all those t-shirts with their quaint ideals—Keep Your Laws Off My Body, Race for the Cure, Free Mumia. I piled them next to the sweater on the bed. Something told me that if I could arrange these items in the correct configuration, I'd be able to coax her back to me. I buried myself in them, breathed in the scents embedded in their fabric—incense and perfume and patchouli oil and that other smell, that complex essence of her.
And there she was, kneeling in the Wreck Room, her arm braced flush against Devin's as they waited for Trent to drop a lit cigarette into the seam. It was a game. Who was the toughest? Who would flinch first? The three of them watched as the cigarette burned down to the filter, leaving a blister of singed skin on each arm.
She did whippets.
She sniffed glue.
She popped Valium, Percocet, whatever she and Trent could steal from the dorm rooms of the undergraduates gullible enough to let them in.
She crushed Ritalin tablets under a CD case until she'd rendered them into a fine dust, then she and the boys—even Mike this time— took turns doing lines until sunrise.
And that's just the stuff I can bear to mention.
There was nothing she wouldn't do. There was no order, no rules, except those Trent or Mike or, rarely, Cheryl or Devin made up—for the next three days, no one's allowed to speak, we'll only point and grunt, and every time anyone says a word out loud, everybody gets to hit him—and these rules were made to be broken, to be shattered as proof that rules inevitably constrict the human spirit.
At Tattoo U., the dingy storefront parlor on Fourteenth Avenue, she studied the designs tacked across the wall. They were all inadequate, striving for beauty or for a refined, stylized sort of ugliness. A mermaid, a rose, a black widow's web, a pot of gold, a sacred heart, an elaborate gothic alphabet. She wanted something harder on the eyes, something that would make people look away in shame.
“What if I wanted, like, a splotch?” she asked the guy behind the counter.
“A what?”
“Like a, you know, just solid black ink.”
She'd been thinking for weeks about what she should get, comparing her every idea against the binary code Trent had wrapped around his bicep; he'd translated it for her, a poem by Arthur Rimbaud called “The Drunken Boat” that she hadn't been able to follow completely, but from what she picked up seemed to relay, in nightmarish detail, the shattering of souls at the end of the world. Her ideas ran more toward the bar code on the neck, the chain around the wrist, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the toxic waste symbol, or words, maybe, EVERYONE KNOWS THIS IS NOWH ERE or QUESTION EVERYTHING or just WHY? in heavy dark letters snaking down her leg. They all felt like clichés. A copyright symbol on the shoulder had seemed pretty fresh for a while, but then she saw the same thing on a shaggy college kid in a retro-seventies sun visor, dribbling a hackey sack on his foot as he stood on the steps of the U of M Mall.
“Solid black ink?” the guy asked.
“Yeah.”
“Like a starburst or something? Like that?” He pointed at a cartoon of an Aztec sun god.
“No, just a splotch.”
“I don't know. Did you bring a drawing?”
She grabbed the pen off the counter between them and fished a scrap of paper out of her back pocket, a flyer for yet another all-ages show. “Here,” she said, scribbling indiscriminately. “Like this. But totally black inside.”
“That's gonna look like shit.”
“So?”
He glanced at his coworker, who was daubing his towel at the lower back of a strawberry-blond girl with glittery lip gloss. “
So we're artists here.”
“If it's what I want …”
The guy held his palms up as though he were helpless.
“If I'm willing to pay, I should be able to get whatever I want. I mean, what about the customer's always right?”
“I don't know what to tell you,” he said.
For a while, she glared at him and tried to come up with a new line of argument that would force him to give in. If Trent were there, he'd have known what to say, but all she could think to do was scowl and gnaw at the ring in her lip. The guy wasn't breaking. He went back to the comic book he'd been reading.
“How 'bout a moth?” she said. “Can you do that?”
“Sure. Where do you want it?”
After half a second's thought, she held out her forearm, the one she hadn't scarred with invective against me. “Right there.”
But when the guy finished drawing on her arm, the moth he'd etched looked more like a butterfly. She told him, “That's not a moth. Moths have furry antennae. Do you think I'm another one of your fucking sorority girls or something?”
He chuckled. “Sure. Okay.” He drew some fur on the butterfly's antennae.
“So, if you'll change your precious art just 'cause I tell you to, doesn't that make you a hack, really?”
His needle paused an inch above her skin. “What?”
“I mean, if you were an artist, wouldn't you just do whatever the hell you want and not let me decide how it should look?” She'd found the correct logic, but it didn't have the same fire coming from her as it would have from Trent. He'd have broken down the capitalist system and shown the guy exactly what kind of cog he was by now, but her tone of voice was off, anxious and timid. “You know what?” she said. “Forget it. But listen, can you at least fill in the wings?”
