The dead bolt clicked and the door opened and Claude shut it softly behind him, his cat-careful movement, so determined not to wake her that he hadn’t noticed she was already awake.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m up,” smoky cloud of words, and he smiled, held out a white deli bag for her to see.
“Then you can have breakfast with me,” he said. “I got chocolate croissants…” and then he noticed Niki on the floor, only the spiky black top of her head and one leg showing from under her wad of covers.
“Well, she’s definitely an improvement over Keith, but you shouldn’t have made her sleep on the floor.”
Daria transferred the cigarette to her lips and gave him the finger with both hands.
Niki mumbled something in her sleep and pulled the afghan completely over her head; both legs stuck out now, patient corpse feet waiting for their yellow toe tag. Claude just smiled that much wider and turned to the cramped kitchenette, one wall crammed with its gas stove and ancient Frigidaire, cracked and pitted Formica and rust-stained sink. He set the croissants on the countertop and opened the fridge door, took out the big Ball mason jar of coffee beans.
“She just needed a place to crash, that’s all,” Daria said around the Marlboro’s filter. “And you’re a pervert.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” he purred and dumped three heaping scoops of the beans into their cheap little Regal grinder, held the button down with his thumb and the machine whirred its gritty racket. The noise of the grinder alone was enough to help some, drawing her further out of her head, away from the dream that was already beginning to blur and fade around the edges.
“Marry me,” she said. “Please?”
“Darlin’, you know I’m strictly mistress material,” and he opened the grinder, poured the fresh and fragrant grounds into the drip basket of the Proctor Silex Morning-Maker. It had recently replaced Daria’s battered old Mr. Coffee, one of Claude’s mysterious and welcomed windfalls. Soon, the apartment would fill with the pun-gence of fine Colombian dark roast; Daria, good Pavlovian pup, felt a gentle flush of saliva, cleansing away the sticky taste of her uneasy sleep.
Niki moaned softly, sat up, and blinked her dark eyes.
“What time is it?” she asked, groggy, slightest rasp, and she squinted into the dazzling shaft coming in through the apartment’s only window, wide and smudgy sash looking west. There were no curtains, no blinds, and the dirty glass did little to mute the fiery November sunset.
Daria glanced at the digital clock radio on the card table. “Almost four,” she said. “Three fifty-seven.”
“Shit. I gotta see about my car.”
Claude was taking mismatched mugs down from the cabinet above the sink. He turned around and waved with his free hand.
“Hi.”
Niki blinked again. “Hi,” she replied.
“Niki Ky,” Daria said, “this is my roommate, Jobless Claude. He’s a pervert and a layabout and an angel of mercy. Jobless Claude, this here’s Niki Ky. She’s on her way to find Jesus in Cullman County.”
“Hi, Claude,” Niki said.
“Cream and sugar?” he asked; he’d turned his back to them again and was busy wiping at the inside of one of the mugs with a gingham dish towel.
“Huh?”
“Cof-fee,” Daria said, exaggerating the syllables, slow speak for the deaf or foreign or half asleep.
“Oh. Yeah, sure,” and then Niki added quickly, “Lots of both.”
“Good girl,” and Claude, apparently satisfied that the offending cup was clean, or clean enough, went back to the Frigidaire, set a pink carton of half-and-half next to the row of mugs.
Daria stretched, toes and fingers pointing, and offered Niki one of the Marlboros.
“No thanks. I don’t smoke cigarettes.”
Daria shrugged and dropped the pack back into the clutter.
The coffeemaker gurgled, rheumy wet sound, and began to drain into the glass pot. When it had finished, Claude filled each cup, added generous spoonfuls of sugar to his and Niki’s, fat dollops of cream; Daria’s he left pure and black.
Niki rubbed her eyes, something little girl in the gesture, and covered her mouth when she yawned.
“Thanks again,” she said, “for putting me up.”
“No problem at all,” and Daria sucked a final drag from her cigarette and stabbed it out in a large cut-glass ashtray, oasis of butts and ash in the middle of the card table’s chaos.
Caught there in the last glory of the day, Niki’s skin seemed to radiate its own light, perfect silken complexion, balanced somewhere lustrous between almond and ginger. Daria knew her own skin was as unremarkable as her face, not pale enough for goth, despite her vampire’s hours, but certainly no color to speak of. A few poorly placed freckles scattered beneath her eyes, and she still got zits on the days before her periods. Niki was wearing a ratty Cure T-shirt she’d pulled out of her bubblegum-colored gym bag, frayed sleeves cut off at the shoulders and the collar stretched shapeless, and she still looked exotic.
Daria accepted the coffee Claude held out to her, white mug and the molecular formula for caffeine printed on one side. The handle had broken off a long time ago, and so she held it cradled in both palms, which was really better anyway. The heat was almost painful, soaked quickly into her hands and flowed up her wrists. She closed her eyes and breathed the rich, slightly bitter steam, felt it working its way seductively into her aching sinuses.
“But you weren’t born there,” Claude said, and Daria realized that she’d missed something. It didn’t matter; Claude would entertain Niki Ky, had already moved in on her like a kitten with a fine new toy. Claude would play the proper host while Daria brooded and sipped her scalding coffee.
“No,” Niki said. “I was born in New Orleans.”
“I have friends in the Quarter,” he said, and Daria opened her eyes, stared across the brim of her mug at the giant poster of Billie Holiday hanging above her stereo. Lady Day watching over them like some beautiful, tragic madonna of heroin and the blues. Bee-stung pout in grainy black-and-white, enlarged too many times to retain integrity, resolution, black-and-white flowers in her hair. Eyes that let nothing in and gave nothing away. Claude had brought the poster home with him one night, had carefully mended a tear along the bottom edge with Scotch tape, and she’d never found out where he’d gotten it.
It made her think of nothing now but Keith. Keith and his needles and his strong and certain fingers pulling music from the strings. From her.
“Since June,” Niki said, half-sighed answer to a question Daria hadn’t heard, and then, “But it seems like years, you know?”
This late, Keith had probably already made his connection, would have scored for the day and fixed. Was either laid up in his roachy little apartment or hanging out with the bums and punks and other junkies who used abandoned railroad cars, condemned and empty buildings, as shelter from the cold and cops. She held the mug to her lips, swallowed quick before the coffee had time to cool inside her mouth.
Another hour and Mort’s shift at the machine shop would be over.
Claude laughed, soft boy laugh, almost as comforting as the coffee, and she tried to let it all go for now, plenty of time later, the rest of her life, to worry about Keith Barry and Stiff Kitten and the haunted places in her sleep. Her croissant sat neglected on an apple-green plastic saucer in front of her, pastry dusted with powdered sugar and cocoa, and she didn’t even remember him setting it on the bed.
“Does it bother you if people call you a stripper?”
“Christ, Claude, does it bother you when people call you a faggot?” and it didn’t come out like a joke at all, sharp edges and acid where she thought she’d only intended to slip back into the conversation.
Claude was staring at her, his face gone stony hard and any surprise or hurt guarded safe behind a piercing what-the-hell-crawled-up-your-ass-and-died glare. Good question, good fucking question. Niki had looked away, quick glance down and picked at her own croissant, ha
lf-eaten and the gooey brown insides showing.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me. I am a stripper.”
“I’m sorry,” Daria said, meant it but there was no way to sound enough like she meant it.
“And that’s Mr. Faggot to you,” Claude said sternly, mock-severity that lifted the tension just barely enough that she could slip beneath his barbed-wire gaze, could at least look away.
“I really do need to call about my car,” Niki said. “I have no idea what time the garage closes.”
“Yeah, sure,” and Daria pointed at the clunky old rotary phone sitting on the floor next to one of the stereo speakers. “Help yourself.”
Claude finished the last of his coffee, stood up, and walked back to the sink with his mug and saucer. Niki set her own dishes out of the way before she pushed aside the afghan and the Peanuts sheets and scooted across the floor to the phone. And again, Daria found herself watching her, envying the subtle alliance of movement and unaffected elegance that made the simplest action seem graceful. She tried to imagine Niki Ky on some seedy, barroom stage, rehearsed bump and grind, bogus passion, through a haze of cigarette smoke and colored lights, but there were too many contradictions. All the strippers she’d met in Birmingham had big hair and nails like the talons of predatory birds, silicon tits and makeup caked like spackling paste. Drag queens without the sense of humor.
“The phone book’s right over there,” she said and pointed to a sloppy stack of magazines and comics by the bathroom door, “if you need to look the number up.”
“They gave me a card.” Niki was already digging through the pockets of her army jacket. “If I haven’t lost it.”
Daria sighed, looked at her wristwatch, and swung her legs over the side of the bed, bare feet flat against the chilly hardwood. Off toward the tracks, toward the other end of Morris and work, she heard the whistle of a freight train, a desolate, empty sound, and she sat and listened to Niki arguing with the mechanic, Claude running water to wash dishes. And the steel wheels, razor wheels on steel rails, as the sun went down again.
3.
Daria had been nineteen when she’d fallen over backwards into her first band.
She was living in a Southside firetrap with a guy named Pablo, had worked day jobs flipping burgers and sold blotter acid on the side to keep a roof over their heads, Ramen noodles and Wild Irish Rose in their bellies. Their apartment had been on the topmost floor of a building that might still have been habitable when her grandmothers were her age. Rats as big as puppies, and they’d slept with all the lights on to keep the roaches off the bed. When it rained, the roof was little better than a colander, rainwater seeping through a sagging foot of plaster and rotten lathe, pigeon shit and mold, before it dripped from the ceiling and streamed in murky rivulets down the walls.
Pablo had played bass for a band called Yer Funeral, three punker holdouts with identical Ramones haircuts who covered the Sex Pistols and the Clash and made everything sound like crap. The singer and guitarist, a painfully skinny cokehead named Jonesy McCabe, had lived in Manhattan in the early eighties and claimed to have given the ghost of Sid Vicious a blow job one Halloween. Carlton Hicks on drums, and they’d opened for marginally better bands on the local hardcore circuit, two or three shows a month and the rest of their time spent picking fights with rednecks and skinheads, fucking their girlfriends; counterfeit anarchists scrounging bedlam in the sunset days of Reagan’s America.
Daria had never asked Pablo to teach her to play, had never had any particular interests in music or anything else creative. Sometimes she’d talked about college; she hadn’t dropped out, and her SAT scores had been decent enough, but there was never any money, never would be, and although there were loans, the thought of owing Uncle Sam twenty or thirty thousand for an undergrad degree had finally soured her on the idea. So she worked at McDonald’s and Arby’s and sold her cheap blotter, stamped with dancing rows of rainbow-colored Jerr-bears and so weak that even high school kids who still thought cigarettes were cool had trouble getting a trip off the stuff.
But the more bookings Yer Funeral managed to worm itself into, the more serious Pablo became about his music, and he’d actually begun to practice, hours spent sitting around their apartment rehearsing his bare-bone rhythms. And she’d learned that unless she paid attention, he ignored her altogether.
It had started as a joke, yeah, Dar, let’s see what you can do, let’s hear what you got in there, and Daria holding his silver Gibson while everyone laughed and made their punker boy pussy jokes. But there had never been a single moment of awkwardness. The instrument had seemed to belong in her hands, had almost seemed built for the span and stretch of her fingers, like something that should have been there all along.
And whenever Pablo was asleep or off screwing around with Jonesy and Carlton, she’d sat on their one chair and played, fuck the chords and notes, had listened hard to the bass lines on Pablo’s pirated tapes, and it was always so goddamned obvious, fingers here and here, then here, until she’d simply merged with the recordings. She had quickly discovered that the bass was capable of other sounds besides the all-the-way-up, tooth-grinding throb Pablo hammered out of the thing, sloppy attempts at discord that always dissolved into a noteless spew of ear-splitting low-end noise as he got drunker and cranked the blue gain knob higher and higher.
Two weeks, and she had figured out all of the songs in Yer Funeral’s set list; so little variation in punk bass lines, anyway, almost everything on the bottom two strings. She’d deciphered most of the knobs on the cabinet and the bass itself, had grown puking sick of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones and the Clash, everything fuzzy and flat through Pablo’s junker stereo, and she’d begun to just string notes together like popcorn or plastic beads. Pictured them as fat brown blocks of different shapes and sizes to be stacked any way she pleased. And Daria had realized that she was writing her own songs, things that might become songs, and she would shut her eyes and stand before the thumping rig, imagining the drums and guitars, the singer’s wordless voice, all tied together with the warm chocolate rhythms she coaxed from the Gibson.
And then Pablo had smashed up his hand, had been drunk and fallen, tripped on a crack in the fucking sidewalk and tried to break his fall with his right hand. One week before Yer Funeral was supposed to open a big show, Battle of the Bands thing, and there were rumors that a scout from IRS would be coming down. When they’d gotten back from the emergency room, Jonesy had been waiting for them on the front steps of their apartment building, and when he’d seen Pablo’s hand, ridiculous swollen fingers like splinted sausages and the shell of fresh white plaster, he’d socked Pablo in the jaw and broken two front teeth.
Next day, after he’d heard that Jonesy was seriously looking for someone to replace him on a not-so-temporary basis, he’d volunteered Daria. She’d told him to fuck off, but he’d begged, and Jonesy had finally agreed to let her sit in on one practice. Yer Funeral had rehearsed in the garage of an abandoned Chevron station, concrete floors gritty oil-dark and darker pits where the hydraulic lifts had been. Pablo had sat alone in a shadowy corner, sucking beer and looking sullen and anxious; Jonesy and Carlton had exchanged doubtful smirks as she’d tuned and adjusted the strap to fit her shoulder.
Then Carlton had started off, no warning, three loud beats slammed from his foot drum before Jonesy leaped into the New York Dolls’ “Chatterbox,” spitting the words at the mike and his graceless fingers ripping madly at his guitar. Daria had only missed a beat or two, and by the time they reached Jonesy’s solo, both drummer and singer were grinning. Daria had never looked up from the bass, never once taken her eyes off the strings, had chewed her lower lip until it bled, until the song had ended and Jonesy was laughing like a hyena and Carlton had kept repeating “Gawddammit, girl,” over and over. Pablo hadn’t said a word, had popped the cap off another bottle of Sterling and watched from his patch of gloom.
Daria had followed straight through Yer Funeral’s entire borr
owed repertoire, had ended with “Rockaway Beach,” and her fingers had been numb, fingerprint whorls scraped raw and smooth. No breath left in her, gasping and her arms gone to slinkys, her sweat standing out on the garage floor around her feet, bright droplets and splatters unable to soak into the oil-and antifreeze-saturated cement. And Jonesy had slapped her on the back, big, stupid boy gesture of affection or camaraderie, fraternity, and then he’d hugged her tight, and Pablo, drunk off his cheap beer and confusion, knowing that this whole thing was getting way out of hand, blowing up in his face, but not sure why or how to stop the explosion, had mumbled something not entirely to himself.
Jonesy had asked him to speak up, come again, and Pablo had stood, slight reel and sway as he stepped toward them.
“What the hell difference does it make,” he’d slurred. Jonesy and Carlton had looked back at him with blank faces, not following; Daria had kept her eyes on the grungy floor, on her rejected sweat and abused fingers.
“No freakin’ scout wants to hear a cover band anyway, man. Punk’s dead and you guys are pissin’ up a goddamn rope.” And then he’d staggered off to take a leak, to hunt down the toilet even though the station hadn’t had water since it’d closed.
“Hey, fuck you, man,” Carlton had shouted after him. “You fucking wanker. You’re just pissed ’cause your old lady made you look like shit.”
Pablo had ignored him, had disappeared through a darkened doorway (the door torn off long ago, propped useless somewhere nearby) into the darker lobby. A second later, he’d cursed, had given up his search for the toilet, and they’d heard the metal-through-fabric zrrrip, the wet spatter of Pablo’s piss on the lobby’s tiles.
“Fuck him,” Jonsey muttered as he’d lit a cigarette and stuffed his Zippo back into his shirt pocket. “That was some amazing shit, Dar.”
Daria had wiped her face on the tail of her T-shirt, the clean ocean smell of her sweat mixing with the lingering gasoline stench, hydrocarbon phantoms, and she’d finally smiled. She had been good, damn good, and what’s more, it had felt good. Had felt wild and alive and had consumed her, every fiber of her mind and body, in a way that not even the best of her infrequent orgasms had ever come close to doing. She’d been only dimly aware of a door slamming somewhere, the rust-bucket growl of Pablo’s Impala outside the garage bay doors, the angry, hot spin of rubber on asphalt as he’d peeled out of the Chevron’s parking lot into the night.
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