by Tom Perrotta
“I love this place,” Gretchen said, letting go of his hand to circumnavigate a puddle of pink vomit. “It's so alive. Every time I go home I wonder how people can stand it in the suburbs.”
“You get used to it,” he explained, forcing himself not to stare at the gay couple who brushed by on the sidewalk, arms circling each other's waists. The man in the tank top had a clean-shaven head and appeared to be tattooed all over his muscular body. His companion was blond and boyishly cute, dressed in a brown business suit. “It seems normal when nothing happens.”
“I remember coming here for the first time when I was in college and thinking, So this is what they've been hiding from me all these years. It's a feeling that's never really gone away.”
Now that he was seeing her on her home turf, Dave had a better idea of how out of place she must have felt at the Westview on Saturday night. She was a hipster, bohemian and severe in her buckle-up pilgrim shoes, her black leggings with the ripped knee, her faded purple top, shaped like a dress but too short to be worn as anything but a shirt. She had two golden hoops in her left ear, one in her right, and an armful of silver bangles. She walked fast, head up, scanning the world with a calm vigilance.
“So where are you taking me?” he asked.
“You'll see.”
“After all this suspense, it better be good.”
“Don't worry. You won't be disappointed.”
He nodded, not really caring where they were headed, happy just to be walking through the twilight city with this formidable woman as his guide. The sheepish I'm-from-New-Jersey feelings that usually plagued him during his visits to Manhattan were absent, replaced by a buoyant sense of invisibility, a confidence that for once he had managed to blend in with the natives. He wished Julie were here to witness it, or at least someone from home—Glenn, maybe, or even Zelack—-just so they'd know there was this other side to him, that he was the kind of guy who could walk through the East Village on a Thursday night and look like he belonged there.
Gretchen stopped outside a storefront on Avenue A, unmarked except for a small chalkboard set up on an easel outside the front door. A few feet away, an old bum was singing “Volare” in a soulful voice as he sprayed his chest and armpits with an aerosol Dave assumed was deodorant but that turned out, on closer inspection, to be Raid. Open Mike Poetry Reading, read the yellow letters on the chalkboard. All Are Welcome.
Inside, the place was small and crowded and buzzing with conversation. Dave saved Gretchen a seat at the last available table—a rickety roundtop hardly bigger than a dinner plate—and waited for her to return from the rest room.
It was a scene—serious haircuts, lots of posing, widespread hugging and kissing of new arrivals. Half out of guilt and half out of curiosity, Dave tried to imagine Julie's reaction. Would it have pleased her to be sitting just inches away from a table whose occupants included a regal-looking black woman in a Caribbean-style headdress, and a scowling, potbellied white guy with muttonchop sideburns and a stovepipe hat? Or would the strangeness have caused her to shrink down into herself, lapsing into grim silence, rousing herself only to fan cigarette smoke away from her face as though it were poison gas?
Gretchen didn't look so hot when she returned from the bathroom. The color had drained from her face, and she kept licking her lips and swirling her tongue around the inside of her mouth like something tasted bad in there, so bad it couldn't be ignored. When she reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear, her hand was trembling so badly her bracelets chattered like teeth.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” She forced a laugh. “I always get like this when I read.”
“You do it a lot?”
“Pretty often. Maybe once a month.”
“What are you reading tonight?”
She stuck her hand into her dirty canvas tote bag and pulled out one of those composition books Dave remembered from grammar school, the ones with the cover designed to look like a slab of marble. She set the book down on the table and rapped at it with her knuckles.
“New stuff,” she said. “Love poems.”
Dave glanced at the book. In the white box reserved for the owner's name and address he saw the words Blood Blisters written in neat block letters.
“Blood Blisters?” he asked.
Just then the room burst into applause. Dave looked up and saw a husky, middle-aged guy with long hair and a Hawaiian shirt standing behind a mike stand, his back to a patch of exposed brick wall between the men's and women's rest rooms. His name must have been Pat, because people kept shouting it until it turned into a kind of chant. Pat just stood there grinning, reeling in the ovation with both hands, egging them on for more. Gretchen leaned across the table, an anxious expression on her face.
“It's a working title,” she told him. “You think I should change it?”
Ian hadn't made a joke, but Tammi started laughing anyway.
“You're pretty funny,” she said. “Julie forgot to mention that.”
“I wasn't trying to be funny. I really do think the Monkees are an underrated band.”
“The Monkees Monkees? You mean Mickey, Davey, and the guy with the hat?”
“Mike Nesmith.” He decided not to mention the fact that he'd worn a watch cap from kindergarten all the way through second grade in an effort to be like Mike. “He's a big-time movie producer now. I think he was involved with Repo Man.”
“Didn't see it.”
“You should rent it sometime. Emilio Estevez.”
Tammi took a couple of bites of her taco salad, watching him the whole time with her sharp little eyes. Ian wasn't that hungry, but he felt obliged to saw off a piece of his chimichanga. If he just let it sit there, she'd probably take it as a sign that he wasn't enjoying himself.
“So explain this to me,” she said. “Tell me what's so great about the Monkees.”
“Forget it. It's not that important.”
“Come on,” she said. “Don't be like that. I really am curious.”
“Really?”
“If you don't tell me, I'm never gonna know.”
She was teasing him, he could see that, but not in a nasty way. She was flirting, actually. Ian had been out of circulation so long he'd almost forgotten how to play the game. But it was starting to come back to him. The rules, the tone you were supposed to strike. He was having a better time than he'd expected. Tammi wasn't a beauty—she was short and solid and athletic-looking, with an open, freckled face—but she wasn't an airhead, either. It was nice being with a woman he could talk to.
“Well, here's the thing,” he began. “The Monkees were a product. Some businessmen came up with an idea for a TV show, and then they went out and invented a band to star in it. They were just supposed to be actors. Figureheads. Studio musicians were going to take care of the music. The whole point was that they were going to be controlled. Because this was happening at that point in the late sixties when rock ‘n roll was starting to turn dangerous. The Beatles had gone from being these cute moptops to singing about revolution and LSD, and the powers that be were trying to put a lid on all the crazy energies that were floating through the air. That's what the Monkees were supposed to be about.”
“Huh,” she said, gazing past him in an attempt to make eye contact with their waitress. “I had no idea.”
“But the great thing is, the Monkees didn't go with the program. They rebelled. They insisted on playing their own music, and even started to write their own tunes.”
“Wasn't there a fourth one?” she asked distractedly, still trying to flag down the waitress. “Besides Mickey, Davey, and Mike?”
“Peter,” he said. “Peter Tork. Do you know the song ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’?”
She didn't seem to hear him.
“You want some coffee?” she asked, covering her mouth to stifle a little yawn. “I always get sleepy when I eat Mexican.”
Dave had never been to a poetry reading before and found the whole process much more engrossin
g than he ever would have imagined. It was way better than the musical open mikes he was used to attending, where a parade of earnest, guitar-strumming folkies plopped themselves down on the wooden stool to crank out yet another cover of “Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Fire and Rain” or —God forbid—” Greensleeves.”
Here, you never knew what was going to happen next. One person would recite a poem or two—sometimes from memory, sometimes from the page—and then Pat would stand up and call out someone else's name. An odd sort of suspense filled the room as the audience members glanced from table to table, waiting for a poet to heed the summons.
Some of the readers looked like poets and some of them looked like regular people. A handful of them looked like nuts, but Dave found out pretty quickly that it was useless to try to judge sanity, or even talent, from the reader's appearance; all you could do was wait for the words. It was like going to a big party and meeting lots of strangers in quick succession. That was all the reading was as far as Dave could tell—people standing up in front of other people, most of whom they didn't know, and saying, to the best of their ability, “Here I am. This is what I'm all about.” Some were great and some were terrible and most fell somewhere in between, but none of them lasted for more than three or four minutes, so you could even convince yourself that the terrible ones were actually sort of interesting.
The guy in the stovepipe hat read something he called “The Ballad of Jack and Charlie,” which he described as “a philosophical dialogue between Jack Kerouac and Charles Manson,” an idea that sounded good to Dave but that turned out mainly to be an excuse to talk really fast and say the word “man” a lot (“Listen, man, speed is just another word for life, man, and that's what those bastards refused to understand”). A woman of about forty with a beautiful cascade of graying hair stood silently behind the microphone, head down, her hands pressed together as if in prayer. Then, after maybe a minute had passed, she looked up and made a visual sweep of the room, apparently trying to make eye contact with each individual member of the audience. When she finally spoke her voice was calm, the voice of an adult reasoning with children.
“Why do I frighten you?” she asked. “Because I see through your lies, or because I am a woman-loving woman?”
That was her reading. She curtsied sweetly, a little girl who had just finished her piano recital, and scampered back to her seat. The woman in the headdress read a series of what she called “subway poems,” brief, vivid portraits of people who happened to sit across from her on the D train—a pregnant Puerto Rican teenager with a leashed ferret sitting on her shoulder, an overweight transit cop sucking on a grape Tootsie Pop, a construction worker reading Penthouse right there in front of everyone. A wiry, troubled-looking man in hiking shorts, sandals, and mismatched tube socks read something he called “My Confession,” a laundry list of things he'd done to hurt other people:
I farted and blamed it on you,
I defaced you with my jism,
I only pretended to like your dog …
Gretchen was twelfth on the roster, and Dave watched her pallor intensify as the big moment approached. The eleventh reader was a skinny, tense-looking, college-age woman with bad skin and angelic red hair. She scuffed her way over to the mike, mumbled a sentence that included the word puberty, and began to read.
As soon as she uttered the first line, Dave realized she was the one. It happened sooner or later at every open mike he'd ever been to. Somebody got up and reminded you of what the whole thing was about. In the poem she was a kid at the seashore, lying with her face to the hot sun while her older sister covered her from the neck down with bucket after bucket of wet sand, erasing her body one part at a time. It wasn't the story, though—it was the words she told it with. Dave could almost see them emerging from her mouth, little bubbles of language, the individual letters glowing on the air for a fraction of a second as though written by the hot tip of a sparkler.
That sweet girl is gone, Jenny
Lost like those sunburn summers.
You buried her
And dug me up instead.
The applause that followed was spontaneous and enthusiastic, and the poet blushed with pride and embarrassment. Dave looked at Gretchen, eager to get her reaction, but her face was pinched, a bit too purposefully blank. He forced himself to stop clapping. When the ovation died down, Pat wandered over to the microphone and said, “Our next reader is Marlene Fragment.”
Dave figured he must have counted wrong, until he noticed most of the heads in the room turning in the direction of their table. Gretchen rose unsteadily from her chair, her teeth clenched in a determined smile.
“Marlene Fragment?” he whispered.
She reached down to retrieve her composition book, and answered him with a small, helpless shrug.
“I gotta tell you,” Tammi said, threading her arm easily through his as they left the restaurant, “you are one cute man.”
Normally, Ian didn't appreciate it when women referred to him as “cute”— it was a compliment they paid him with annoying regularity—but he decided to let it pass. This date was working out much better than he expected. There were women—perfectly desirable women—who had precisely the opposite effect on him. A half hour in their presence and he'd find himself drained and muddled, tongue thick, head full of cobwebs. All he could do was chalk it up to chemistry.
“You're pretty cute yourself,” he said.
“Ha.” Her laughter was loud and jarring. “Liar.”
“I mean it.”
“I used to be cute,” she told him. “Then I turned eleven.”
She reported this as though it were an amusing biographical fact, but Ian heard the pain beneath the quip. His own good looks had announced themselves early, as had his musical talent, and he'd felt himself throughout his teens and twenties to be a powerful and magnetic presence in the world. Only lately, as he sensed his own luster beginning to dim, had he realized how lucky he'd been not to have grown up with his self-confidence already shattered beyond repair.
“Maybe cute isn't the right word,” he conceded. “What do you think of appealing?”
“I'd prefer ravishing if you want to know the truth. But these days I take my compliments where I can find them.”
They climbed into his car and looked at each other. Their plans had only gone as far as dinner, and now dinner was over. It wasn't even nine o'clock.
“So,” said Ian. “Where to?”
Tammi's hands curled into fists and uncurled into hands again. She seemed suddenly shy, tentative.
“I don't know,” she said. “Whatever.”
“Your call.”
She stared down at her lap, rubbing the hem of her skirt between her thumb and forefinger. Then she looked up.
“You like going to malls?”
“Sure,” he said, starting the car.
“I know it's not the most exciting place in the world, but sometimes it's nice just to walk around with someone.”
“I like malls,” he said, releasing the emergency brake and shifting into reverse.
“Not everyone does,” she informed him, in a solemn, almost melancholy voice.
She bought a sleeveless denim top at the Gap. He bought a Van Morrison CD at Sam Goody and a cinnamon bun that they ate together sitting on a bench. Without asking, she took his hand as they browsed the upper level. She told him about her work as a delivery room nurse, the odd privilege of sharing a sacred moment with people who were pretty much complete strangers.
“Most of the time you don't know where they live, what they do, or even if they're nice people. But there you are, wiping the brow of this suffering woman, waiting for this little life to come squirting out.”
Ian stopped in front of a store called Exclusively Shirts that was holding a “3 for $10 Sale!!!” Judging from the merchandise in the window, though, even that didn't qualify as a bargain. He thought about footage he'd seen of babies entering the world, the shocking size of the head, the torrent of flui
ds that accompanied the birth. It seemed so messy and low-tech, out of synch with the rest of late twentieth-century America.
“You know,” he observed, “it's a lot like playing weddings.”
The air inside the Second Avenue station was dank and stuffy. Breathing it, Dave thought, was a lot like inhaling despair, an idea that never would have occurred to him if he hadn't just attended a poetry reading.
“Come on,” Gretchen said impatiently. “Could you at least try to be a little more specific?”
“I liked it. You have a way with words.”
“A way with words?” she repeated. “Is that the best you can do?”
“I don't know much about poetry, Gretchen. I'm not the best person to judge.”
“I'm not asking for an expert opinion. I just want to know if you liked my poems.”
Dave rubbed his finger over the thick red paint on the support beam he was leaning against and tried to think of something honest and complimentary to say. It was hard, though, because he hadn't really understood her poems. She had said they were love poems, but they weren't like any love poems he had ever come across. Instead of flowers and moonlight, Gretchen wrote about pus and tumors, warts and organs. In one poem, a woman receives a package in the mail on her thirtieth birthday, a box containing a human liver. In another, a woman pops a blood blister on her finger, only to have her body deflate and crumple to the ground at her lover's feet “like a balloon from yesterday's carnival.”
He thought about telling her the truth, saying that her poems baffled him, asking her to explain her purpose in writing them, but he had a feeling that this wasn't the reaction she wanted. She was watching him closely, biting her bottom lip, looking anxious and expectant.
