By this time I’m hard and Tracy’s limp between me and the wall. For a second I feel her stop moving; I wonder if she passed out and I open my eyes to check. She just stares back at me glassy, like some doll or coma victim. It freaks me out for a second, how different her face is now than any time I’ve seen it before, all the sharp and the hard gone, just soft like sleeping. My heart clogs my throat and a little bile stings up bitter because I can’t feel her breath against my neck. But then she turns her head to the side, looks down at the asphalt and breathes in, and everything’s okay again.
That rabid-cat thing comes back into her eyes like she’s remembering something. She rears back like she’s gonna smack me another time, and I say “Yeah” to it in my head, like I’m egging on a fight. I want her to slap me again so I can hit her back. I want her to give me a reason to smash her head into the brick. I want her to do it. When I imagine it, it feels good in all my muscles, like it’s what they were made for, and my teeth press together and I want to bite something till it breaks. She doesn’t hit me though, the bitch. Of course. Instead she looks at me and fucking starts to cry.
Her eyes crumple up and go bloodshot: she looks like a skinny ugly baby, the kind that’s wrinkled, and it’s gross the way her face is just so red and raw. She keeps looking at me and it’s like everything’s stripped off of her, like roadkill with the skin peeled back, too goddamn fucking naked. Throw-up comes up in my mouth again, but this time more. I swallow.
“Don’t,” she says. “Please don’t.” The snot is streaking down into her mouth, and her shoulders are shaking. I reach my hand up toward her, to smash her face or shut her mouth or something, but she flinches back into the wall and sucks her breath in loud like an asthma attack, sudden enough to stop me. I almost take a step back but I don’t. “Please please please just stop, I’ll do what you want just please don’t touch me,” she says, and she keeps looking at me, and it’s like I’m paralyzed by how naked she is; I can’t move.
Then I realize that she’s begging, and I remember who she is, and I see that this is exactly what I wanted this whole time. Ever since she showed up on my sidewalk, Tracy’s been trying to make me beg for everything that was already mine. Now it’s balanced out exactly how it should be. I look up at the smoggy sky and then at her, and laugh.
She stops sniveling a second and watches my eyes, trying to figure out what I’ll do next. I can see the thoughts flash across her sticky dirty face, calculating how she’ll run and what she’ll do and how she can make me beg again. I let her imagine it for a minute, hold on to it like something good in her hands, so she’ll know exactly how I felt when she snatched my shit away from me. Then I rush her.
I slam her up against the wall. I don’t care now that she didn’t hit me again. She’s done enough. The crying starts back up but I know it’s an act: she’s just trying to get me to let her go so she can go right back and steal my home away again. I’m smarter than that, though. I unzip her jeans, pull them and her underwear off her skinny hips and use my foot to get it all down to her knees while my hands pin her wrists back to the brick. Underneath my hands her skin scrapes hard against the mortar; I can feel it. It feels like her skin is mine except the bricks don’t hurt me, only her. Then I’m inside and her wrists and her skin and her hurt all dissolve. They don’t exist anymore; there’s nothing of her that’s real except for the feeling of her around me.
I don’t think about Critter except I know that after this Tracy will have to leave for sure and everything can be like it was before again. Every move I make rocks things back and forth so they finally balance back to normal. The combination of that and how warm Tracy is makes me feel like I’m wrapped up in blankets, somewhere in some big soft warm bed, almost safe enough to fall asleep.
critter
i fell in love with Tracy at the Santa Monica Pier. I can’t ever tell her that. I tried to once and she kicked my ass. Just looked at me through those slitty eyes of hers and said if I ever said that shit to her again she’d break her beer bottle on my face. I kept my mouth shut after that.
That one night was different though, I think because she didn’t really know me and when things happen with strangers it’s different than with people you know. Or people who know you, really, is what it is: Tracy thinks she can keep anyone from getting to know her, and she gets pretty pissed when you prove her wrong. But that first night I was just a kid she’d seen around on the sidewalks. I knew friends of her friends in that thing that happens on the street when all the little circles of people link up and make a chain, but no one I knew’d had sex with her and I didn’t know her name. We both hung out in Hollywood, so it was weird that we wound up out at the pier, weird enough that it made us actually smile when we saw each other, start to talk. I’d been sleeping just south of there in Venice for a week, since the rainstorm of Eeyore and Scabius: things got too crazy up on Sunset so I took off for the beach with its rainbow fuckin’ flowers and old dried-out hippies who lugged their shit around in guitar cases. Vacation. After a while I couldn’t deal with the drum circles, though, so I followed the bright lights north to the pier.
It’s at the arcade that we see each other. Some hyper kids are playing that old-school game where you have a bunch of plastic guys all attached to a rod and you have to slam them around so they kick the ball onto the other side. Dumb. For some reason the fact that they’re yelling and jumping and getting all worked up about this stupid ancient plastic-guy game is pissing me off and I’m watching them, trying to narrow down my eyes to points so they’ll turn around, be scared of me and scatter. I’m full-on focused on my goal when Tracy comes up next to me. She doesn’t say anything, but I know she must’ve been there for a minute, because when I finally feel someone standing there she’s already comfortable, leaning back on her heels with her arms crossed, copying my stance. It’s weird, the switch from the feeling of total one-pointed focus on smaller-than-me people who I could’ve made flinch, to looking down and realizing that the whole time she’s been watching me. My center of gravity is gone. I uncross my arms and she smirks. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I smile back.
“Having fun?” she asks. I right away realize what an asshole I look like, standing there staring at a bunch of twelve-year-olds playing whatever the fuck that game is called, and a second after that I realize that not one single girl in seventeen years of my life has ever made me feel like an asshole, ever. I want to be pissed at her but she’s looking up at me with her sly little eyes through her blond stringy bangs, knowing I probably have zero retort, and she’s just so fucking cute I can’t hate her. “Not really,” I say, and it’s almost the truth.
I don’t let her know till later that even right away it’s fun with her around. Which is especially corny coming from my mouth because “fun” has sort of lost its edge for me; I’m not the type of person who runs around the amusement park and goes “Wow!” and is amused. Usually it takes some kind of substance, and even that’s just another kind of normal. But like I said, not one single girl in seventeen years has ever made me feel like an asshole before. It’s kind of fun.
“Well what the fuck are you doing in here then?” she says. “Get out,” and nods toward the open door, framing lights and boardwalk and past them the black of the ocean. I look at her and then the dark and say “Okay.” She leads the way.
There’s not much to do out there: photo booths and whack-a-mole and rides cost money and I don’t have much left today. Sometimes you can just walk around with someone and not do anything, but I don’t know Tracy well enough for that. When we walk by the Ferris wheel I think of hijacking the control booth so we can swing our legs way up at the top and make everyone freak out, but the guy in there is pretty burly, and getting kicked out isn’t worth it. I wish I had enough change to win her a fuckin’ ugly orange teddy bear. Which is weird. The whole thing is weird, how I want it to be a Date, how I suddenly have to Show Her a Good Time like some fifties jocko guy with his ponytailed blond chick out for an evening. Usually
with girls it’s this: hang out, fuck, talk afterward or not. It’s not like I take them to the movies or something. And she’s not even hot or whatever; to tell you the truth she kind of looks like a rodent the way she squints her eyes and is so superskinny. But I don’t know: every time she smiles at me, even if it’s just a closed-mouth halfway smirk, I feel like I earned something.
Luckily I’ve got enough change in my pocket to buy her cotton candy at least. It’s funny seeing her eat it, pink ringing her mouth like dress-up lipstick on a kid. For a minute I see us from the outside in our grimy black and backpacks and piercings with her toting around this Barbiepink ball of fluff, and I laugh out loud in the middle of the boardwalk. She looks up at me with her red-stained face like I’m crazy.
It’s weird how fast you can spill everything to a person if you think they’re listening. That’s never happened to me before, the spilling part or the listening part either, but somehow I recognize them both right away. It’s crazy: Tracy tells me just about nothing about herself or where she came from; I don’t know if she’s got brothers or sisters or what her hometown’s called or anything. Normally nobody talks about that kind of stuff, I guess, but this night isn’t normal and I wind up walking along the lit sidewalk, telling her every single thing that ever happened to me practically. Next to the ringtoss she grabs my hand—well, not really grabs, more like our hands brush each other and she just hooks on—and all that shit they say is supposed to happen happens, like my chest gets all tight and my throat chokes up, and it’s like wanting to fuck someone but different because I keep seeing her face and thinking how right it looks.
Right about when my fingers start sweating she says “Let’s go down to the beach.” You can bet I’m happy about that, but it’s not even what you think—I just want to be with her in the dark where it’s quiet and I can pretend she’s the only other person besides me. So much of the time I wish everyone would just fuckin’ disappear, and the only reason why I don’t really wish it is that then I’d be alone. But now all those fuckers could die and I wouldn’t be lonely. Two birds with one stone.
You can’t go down steps or anything to get to the beach so I turn around and start backtracking to the parking lot— you can walk straight onto the sand from there. But she’s like “Where are you going?” and when I tell her she looks at me like I’m stupid and walks right to the edge of the pier. You can’t tell how far it drops in the dark or even if it’s solid below; it could be water or cesspools for all I know and I’m not about to just jump. But she looks over her shoulder at me with a face that says What are you waiting for? and then she’s gone. I’m not gonna walk through the parking lot after that.
It’s kind of a fall, to tell you the truth. When I hit the ground my ankles jam up into my knees which ram into my hips which shove my breath hard through my chest and out my mouth. But I land on my feet, so I can swallow the ache and fake it. I amble up behind her like I’m taking my time.
Halfway down toward the water there’s a place where the side of the pier is hollow and you can duck in, tucked away from the waves. It’s like a wet wooden cave in there, all salt water and soft logs. You’d think it’d smell like trash or something rotting but it doesn’t, it smells like sea and tree trunks, and it makes me want to take off my shoes and put my feet in the sand like some hippie from Venice. Which I don’t do. The light from the pier bounces off the water and into our little hideout, waves mixing with the yells from above us, and Tracy’s face is bathed in the gray-yellow glow like some underground angel and all of a sudden she’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anyone be beautiful before. It’s weird.
When she asks me if I have a bag, oh my God I’ve never been so happy to have drugs on me in my life. Which is saying something. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself: it’s perfect. I’ve got a needle, too, only one but she doesn’t care and when she sinks it in the smooth pale skin inside her arm I have this flash like I’m going inside her. It makes me breathe loud enough to hear for a second but by then it’s already hit her, she doesn’t care, I can act like an asshole as much as I want and she won’t notice the rest of the night. She hands it over to me and I could just about tell you it was better watching her get off than doing it myself, but that’s only almost true.
After that I kiss her. It’s like water, the feeling of it, and also like sleep, the kind that comes when you’ve been up three days and your head finally hits a pillow and you can practically hear every single cell sigh relief. Obviously you could also say that it’s like junk, the way it floods in and makes things better, but it’s different. It’s not just the silk-blanket numb, the Bubble-Wrap protection from everything sharp; it’s something realer, more alive. She makes me naked even though I’m still in all my clothes, the cuffs of my jeans getting heavy wet cold from the sand, and her hands feel like they’re erasing every lie I ever told even though they’re just hooked into my belt loops. When she reaches down for the zipper I realize I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean, give me another couple minutes and I’m sure I would’ve, but in the sugar rush of kissing her I forgot there was anywhere else to go. I’m not used to getting distracted like that: I have to admit I usually skip to the good part. But it’s like all of her is the good part, her mouth and her teeth and her skinny ribs under my hands and our skins melting, and we’re not divided into good and bad at all.
She pushes ahead faster than I would, but it’s fine: the normal equipment problems junk causes are miraculously not in attendance and mostly I just care that she’s close to me, I don’t think about order or speed. She unbuckles and unbuttons, lets my clothes fall to the soaking ground and keeps her T-shirt on; I run my hands under it like it’s sixth grade except this time I know how to unhook her bra. She’s so tiny underneath: my arms circle around her like our little cave surrounds us, like the ocean wraps around the whole pier and even the city, and the whole time I’m inside her. She’s the only person that exists besides me. I don’t have to pretend.
The next morning I wake up sandy, dried-up ocean caked in my eyelashes. The beach is full of burned-out coals and green glass bottles; the pier looks empty with the Ferris wheel paused and the lights dimmed down, like a play set or a skeleton. Tracy’s still asleep next to me. It’s the first time I get a good look at her, really, without her watching. She must’ve lost her T-shirt eventually, because she’s curled up in her bra and I can see her tattoos. India ink, mostly, and crappy. She looks different in the light, paler, her back scratched up and full of zits. Her body is all white and scabby red and bones, but I know I must love her because instead of being grossed out I just think she looks like some kick-ass alley cat.
I don’t want to wake her up because I know when I do it’ll be the weird thing of what’s going to happen next. Usually that thing only lasts a few minutes because I say I need some coffee and take off. But I have a feeling Tracy’s more like me than I am: probably she’ll be the one needing coffee, and I kind of want to drag this out forever. If I have to let her sleep the whole time it’s okay as long as we both can still stay here.
What’s crazy is when she wakes up she sticks around. I keep waiting for her to do all the shit that I do: throw her eyes over my shoulder like she’s looking for something, stop talking, start making excuses. Or else play the girl part and get all clingy, although I kind of know that isn’t gonna happen. But she doesn’t do any of it. She just pulls on her hoodie, yanks my stocking cap off and wipes her eyes with it, and says “Come on, let’s get a donut.”
We wind up hitching all the way back to the Winchell’s on Hollywood. I can’t believe the two of us get a ride looking the way we do but we do, and end up winding down Sunset, taking the curves too fast in the back of some rich guy’s Escalade who probably thinks we’ll go home with him but is too sweaty and shy to ask. All through Bel-Air and Beverly Hills I think about holding Tracy’s hand and don’t do it. But she comes back with me, all the way back to Winchell’s, and winds up sticking by my side when we hit my normal side
walks and I introduce her to my friends and then finally I let myself think, Maybe she’ll stay around for a while.
I don’t make predictions about people, except I can tell when someone’s gonna be an asshole. What I mean is I don’t expect anything from anyone, not ever, really. You can’t. At some point everyone will always fuck your friends or hit you or hit you up, steal your shit when you’re sleeping, suck your energy like a vampire or lie. Including me. But everything’s been different so far with Tracy, so like a dumbass I let myself think maybe she’ll be different that way too. To tell you the truth I guess I’ve got some kind of stupid hope that comes from somewhere in the same vicinity as that fifties jocko win-her-a-teddy-bear shit. I mean, I can’t deny it. But I’d never tell her that.
For a while we do it everywhere. I never knew L.A. was so big. We get to know practically every underpass beneath the 101: Franklin, Gower, Sunset, Western, Santa Monica also known as historic Route 66. We duck just behind the guardrails two feet from the road and if we want to talk we have to yell above the cars. Mostly we don’t want to talk, though.
It’s amazing how a person can make a place feel different. I thought asphalt and concrete all looked the same till Tracy started taking me places and I started noticing things like smells and potholes and how each place we go is specific in a way I couldn’t even describe to you, except to say they’re all exactly themselves at exactly those moments in a way that is secret and ours. The other thing that’s crazy is that the whole thing makes me start using words like amazing and secret and ours. A month ago I would’ve heard that and called myself a corny naive little shit. I mean, it’s not what you’d think, all soft-focus lenses and movie bullshit, where the guy gets the girl or vice versa, and everyone laughs about how adorably awkward they are, and at the end you sniffle in your hanky and clutch the hand of whoever’s next to you. It’s not like that. It’s just that we both have these edges that’ve always scraped up against everyone around us, but somehow with each other they line up so they fit together perfect and no one gets cut.
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