I was often scared, and down, and out of sorts. But I felt more committed than ever to my new life in Portland. I got a tattoo as a testament to this moment in my life when I could feel the decisions I’d made shaping the path I was on, even if I had no idea where it would take me. I didn’t mind the needle as it inked my bicep, feeling in its burn a promise to myself that I would stay the course, figure out how to live and write, and when I did go home, I would be changed and new.
My tattoo was just beginning to scab and flake in thin, black strips when Raina and I went to EJ’s after work to see Scott’s band. Raina fit right in, with her black stretch jeans and bondage belt, and when the guys in the band saw her, they called out to her with affectionate jibes. Scott looked elegant, his long spider legs splayed in his black stretch jeans as he rang out guitar solos and shouted backing vocals while the band snarled through a taut set of old-school punk. He was cuter than I’d remembered, but I was Raina’s friend, and she was there to see him. I lurked by the bar, drinking Bud. When it was time to go, Raina was suddenly nowhere in sight, and I somehow found myself standing on the sidewalk alone with Scott. Once again, I felt drawn toward him, not so much as the result of a specific physical attraction, which was there, too, but as if our frequencies matched.
“It was good to see you again,” I said, sticking my hand out dumbly.
“Likewise,” he said, taking my hand, not releasing it.
We stood there for a long minute, just looking at each other, our hands joined, not holding hands exactly, but not letting go, either.
“There’s a party next door tomorrow night,” he said. “You should come.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask Raina.”
But I knew the invitation was for me in particular, and I felt happy and smiled at him with new significance. We looked at our hands and laughed, stepping back.
“All right, I gotta load out,” he said. “See you tomorrow?”
I nodded, and he smiled at me. His eyes were very blue. I smiled back.
The next night I finished my shift at the café where Raina and I worked, feeling like I was covered in a sheen of oil, and I carefully powdered my nose and reapplied my bright red MAC lipstick. Raina led the way on her bike over the Burnside Bridge and into downtown Portland. This was the farthest I’d ridden on my bike, a heavy vintage fixed gear Shelly and Bryan had helped me find, and I was terrified. I hated bikes after breaking my wrist on one in junior high, but I’d had to sell my car, and everyone in my new life rode bikes, so I wanted to do the same. The bus malls were nearly deserted, and it felt as if the city was all ours as we headed up the faintly inclined streets toward the Portland State University campus, where sprinklers misted the air. We turned onto a single block of houses marooned between a parking garage, the highway, and the school. Punks spilled out of a duplex and shouted in greeting when they saw Raina.
I kept my eyes to the pavement in front of me, feeling shy, and wanting desperately to avoid crashing in front of these cool kids. I couldn’t get off my bike soon enough. Raina quickly got absorbed into the party on the stoop, but I lingered at its edge, looking for Scott but not admitting to myself that I was. I heard a noise from the porch next door.
“Hey, we’re hanging out over here, if you wanna come over.”
I looked up. Scott was sitting on the steps of a single-family house next to a cute boy with pretty doe eyes, also in stretch jeans and black creepers. They were both smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of PBR. Suddenly I didn’t feel so nervous. I drifted over to his house and sat on the steps below him.
“Don’t feed the animals,” he said, nodding toward the party next door.
I laughed. It was a relief to see that while these were his friends, he wasn’t completely ruled by punk. He could think for himself. He and Chris, who was also a musician, had the slightly grumpy rapport of the two old guys from the Muppets, and it felt comfortable to sit there with them, drinking beer and smoking.
Their friend Tony drifted over, carrying a box of cheap wine, forever earning himself the nickname Tony Box Wine. He hooked a dead plant that had been orphaned on the porch into his belt loop and did a silly dance.
“That’s my cue,” Chris said. “I can tell it’s only gonna go downhill from here.”
As Chris drove away, Scott nodded toward his front door.
“Shall we get away from the peanut gallery?” he said.
I laughed and stood to follow him inside.
Scott led me upstairs to his room, where Johnny Cash gave the finger from above his bed, and empty PBR cans littered the floor amid a casual clutter of guitar strings, paperbacks, and orphaned black Chuck Taylors. It took less than a minute for us to kiss. There was nothing cautious or awkward between us, and we kissed passionately for a long time. I was feeling absolutely dreamy when he pulled back. We both laughed. My red lipstick was smeared across his lips and chin. I wiped at the smudge of color.
“I think I might like you,” he said.
“I think I might like you, too.”
“I should go tell Raina. We’ve been hanging out, and it’s nothing serious, but I want to make sure she’s cool.”
“Okay,” I said, nervous at the thought, but liking his directness and the confidence it gave me that he could handle the situation and handle it well. He seemed to have a subtle ease in a world that had perplexed and overwhelmed me since graduation, and it made me feel both safe and curious to see what he would show me next.
We leaned close together in the bathroom mirror, Scott wiping my lipstick from his face, while I tried to clean up the lines where my bright red mouth had smudged. When we were both mostly presentable, he went next door to find Raina while I waited on his porch. A few minutes later, Scott returned and nodded me back inside.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said she kind of figured.”
I knew what she had meant; it felt inevitable, like he and I had been moving toward each other from the first, even if I hadn’t entirely been aware of it until now. We lay down on his bed, stretched out end to end, and kissed until the sun came up.
“I have my period,” I said. “And I don’t want to have sex anyhow.”
“That’s okay. We’ll wait.”
I liked that; we would wait, as if we were already working toward something more than a drunken fumble or a one-night stand.
When we lay still in the cool early-morning air, we stared at each other, barely able to stay awake but not wanting the night to end. I felt something new, a mix of excitement and comfort that I liked and wanted to experience again. As his eyes fluttered closed, and I could feel myself losing him to sleep, I leaned forward and kissed him again. He smiled, his eyes still closed, and kissed me back.
We had drifted off to sleep for an hour or two when I woke up suddenly. Something was falling onto my head. It happened again. Handfuls of change—dimes and nickels and pennies—were sprinkling down on us from above, thrown from one of the next-door apartment’s open windows directly through Scott’s open bedroom window.
“What the fuck?” Scott said, already sitting up and leaning out his window, not caring that he was naked. As his head and shoulders disappeared behind the curtains, I heard laughter coming from somewhere nearby.
“What are you guys doing?” Raina said. “Come have breakfast.”
“Fuck off,” Scott said, laughing. “We’re sleeping.”
He came back inside and brushed the change onto the floor. As he pulled me close to him, I felt again that something had already been decided, that he and I had already become a “we” in our own eyes and the minds of our friends.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Raina stayed with Chris last night. They wanted us to go have breakfast.”
“Oh,” I said, glad to feel less guilty about where I’d ended up, if that’s how these things went. “Do they hang out?”
“They have,” Scott said. “He says her tits are too small.”
“Rig
ht,” I said, thinking how cool Raina was, and how stupid boys were, feeling glad that maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t my problem anymore, at least for a while.
Late that afternoon, Scott and I got up. He made me coffee, and I drank it black because he didn’t keep milk in the house, just the staples: coffee and beer. It was nice sitting there, talking in his sunny room, where the books scattered amid the detritus of the rock lifestyle—A Confederacy of Dunces and Faust—pointed to his humor and intellect. Scott looked at his sheets and laughed. I followed his gaze and felt myself blush. My tattoo had shed. There were black flakes of skin, along with loose strands of my reddish brown hair, which was always shedding, and a red spot of menstrual blood on the sheets. He picked up a single strand of my hair. “I could make a voodoo doll,” he said.
And just like that I wasn’t embarrassed anymore. He was only two years older than I was—twenty-two to my twenty—but he was assured and easy around me in a way that made me feel less on guard than I normally was with guys. I liked him. I really did. More than that, I was feeling something I’d never been inspired to feel before—I was already falling in love.
We put my bike in the backseat of his car, and he drove me to my house and pulled up outside. Suddenly, I was nervous again. He kissed me and kissed me.
“I’ve got practice,” he said. “But I’ll call you later.”
“Please do.”
Just like that, I wasn’t nervous anymore.
“How was your night?” Raina asked when I got upstairs, her tone suggestive.
“Good. Scott’s cool.”
“He’s a pain in the ass,” she said, laughing.
“Maybe,” I said, not letting her kill my happy butterflies.
Scott did call that night. I wanted to see him as soon as possible, immediately even. I was sure he’d find some reason not to like me, and I felt that if I could just be with him, constantly, maybe I could distract him enough to keep this from happening.
“I’m beat,” he said. “I think I’m in for the night. What about you?”
“Oh, yeah. Me, too.”
I hid my disappointment, lowering my head as if against a strike, as I prepared for him to blow me off.
“Are you working tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.”
“Maybe I could come by before practice in the afternoon?”
I was overjoyed until the next afternoon arrived, when I was so nerved up I couldn’t sit still. I fluttered around my room, cleaning this and tidying that, and primping long past the point where it actually made any difference in my appearance. A guy I really liked seemed to really like me, too. And he was very much in my new world, which was making me happy enough to think that, maybe, I wouldn’t move back east just yet, as I’d been planning to do if things didn’t look up.
I led him upstairs without making eye contact, trying to acclimate myself to his presence. I sat down on my bed, and as he sat down near me, I couldn’t quite look at him. I felt as if I were being pressed under a magnifying glass, and I was sure I’d come up short. There was no way I was pretty enough, smart enough, cool enough, not to disappoint him.
“Hey, don’t get all weird on me,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I’m just nervous, that’s all.”
“Don’t be nervous. It’s just me.”
He leaned over and kissed me. He smelled familiar, like shaving cream, and Old Gold cigarettes, and his own smell, masculine and kind. He didn’t back down, but he wasn’t rough. Gently, with just enough smart-ass humor, he coaxed me open, petal by petal. By the time he had to leave, we were laughing and talking like old friends.
“All right, I’ve got to go to practice,” he said.
Instantly, it was as if the afternoon of closeness hadn’t happened. My heart cracked a little. I was sure that once he was gone, he was never coming back. I wanted to keep him close, and I knew that to tell him any of this would make me seem needy and lame.
“Okay, have a good practice,” I managed to squeak out.
Don’t ask him to come over later. Don’t ask him to come over later.
“What are you up to later?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I have the night off. I might do some writing.”
“I’ll call you later. Maybe I can come over after practice.”
And just like that, I was glad again. By the time I walked him out, I was exhausted from the constant abacus of adjusting my emotions, trying to stay one step ahead of my insecurities, but I was also ready to be happy, almost.
Scott and I started dating, and suddenly, the whole city became my family. He was a central figure in the city’s small, tightly knit punk-rock scene and took me everywhere, introducing me as his girlfriend to all of his bandmates and friends. Dozens of bartenders and bouncers and strippers and musicians, and the guys and girls who hung around the scene, looked out for me, and I loved the instant feeling of belonging.
My relationship with Scott unfurled almost effortlessly. After we’d been hanging out almost every night for nearly two months, I went to see Scott play at EJ’s. I’d already grown accustomed to the routines of band life. I was used to hanging around after he played until all of the bands were done, and he’d helped load out the gear into the band van before we could leave. Given my high level of anxiety, it was a relief for me that we had quickly gotten to the point where I could assume we were going home together. So, on this night, I ordered a beer as his set ended. As Scott finished loading gear, I followed him onto the sidewalk in front of the club, already looking for his car.
“Hey, Sarah, I need to talk to you for a sec,” he said.
My adrenaline spiked. This is it. He’s breaking up with me. I knew it was too good to be true. I knew I’d do something stupid and scare him off.
“That’s cool,” I said. “I totally get it.”
I started to walk away. I knew better than to get upset or fight him on his decision. Any display of emotion on my part would only turn him off more. He grabbed my hand and pulled me into a little cubbyhole in the side of the building, leaning in close to me.
“What’s up, crazy?” he said, looking down at me with a tender smile.
“You’re breaking up with me, so I figured I’d find my own way home.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, laughing, but not meanly.
“You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“I just wanted to stay alone at my place tonight. I’m totally beat. I’ve been at your house every night this week, and I need to catch up on my sleep.”
“Oh,” I said. I was relieved, but not completely. I still had that fear that any time apart would be enough for him to realize he’d made a mistake and end it.
“Are you cool with that?”
“Of course,” I said, forcing myself to rally.
“I don’t have practice tomorrow night, so we can hang out after work.”
Adjusting to the emotional intimacy of a relationship wasn’t easy for me, and the more I liked Scott, the harder it got. I didn’t know how to be, or who to be. It never occurred to me to be myself. Not that I was ever faking it exactly. It was sort of like how makeup didn’t hide my freckles but made them more manageable. I was just trying to be my more manageable self.
Weirdly, Scott seemed to like everything about me. He even loved my freckles. He claimed he’d inherited this from his mom, who had a thing for his dad’s freckles.
Having weathered some trauma as a kid, Scott was the kind of self-reliant person who assumed most people were jackasses, and he was better off taking care of himself. (My eleven-year-old self had finally found her kindred spirit.) But when people gave him a reason to trust them, he was incredibly loyal and fun loving.
He’d had more of everything than I’d had: more sex, more relationships—including two girlfriends he’d lived with—and more of the basic kind of life experience I was trying to catch up on fast. He had a modest job but always had enough money and made me feel that he was happy to tr
eat me to breakfast or a beer. While I worried about whether or not I’d be a good, published writer someday, he was already a really good guitar player. Everyone in the city’s punk scene seemed to know him and want him in their bands and at their parties. But he never took himself too seriously, and he’d be the first one to throw on a fluorescent green wig and ham for the camera with a face that joked: “Aren’t I pretty?”
The only thing I seemed to have that he didn’t was a college diploma, as he’d dropped out of Evergreen after his first year. I was actually embarrassed for having gone to college, convinced that my new punk friends would think I was a snob, and I edited it out of my brief life history. Scott told me I was nuts, and that he was proud of me for being intelligent. All of his love and healthy self-esteem couldn’t help but have a good effect on me, and he started to wear me down with the idea that he wasn’t leaving anytime soon. I started to feel the same way and began to think about putting down real roots in Portland.
One night, after Scott and I had been dating for a little more than two months, I was at EJ’s, waiting for his band’s set to begin. I was at the back of the club, drinking a longneck Bud and playing Guns N’ Roses pinball. As it blared “Welcome to the Jungle,” I dug in hard, my arm muscles tensed, straining to keep the ball from the gutter. Scott came up behind me and stood close, nuzzling against my neck.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 14
