by jemiah jefferson, ©1997
I love the way my skin looks; it's glowing ghostly white, incredibly smooth, silky hairs lining the outside of it; my black fingernails glisten red in the light from the stereo. Even my bitten destroyed cuticles are beautiful. I like my arm. I like it.
Albert likes it too. He pulls it down out of the air and kisses it, runs his tongue in the hairs. Humming, smiling, I poke my face over to his for another one of his kisses. He kisses just right. His mouth is very full and he doesn't try to eat my face or drool on me. He just touches his lips against mine, flickers his tongue just a little bit against me; he lets me put my tongue in his mouth instead of trying to fuck my mouth with his. He kisses the way I always imagined boys would kiss, before I'd ever kissed one.
It's Sunday, the only day we get to spend with each other anymore, and so we usually stay in bed until nightfall and then go see a movie or drink coffee or walk around downtown. I work all day on the weekdays, and he works evenings Tuesday through Saturday at the copy shop. I wish we didn't have to work so much. A while ago we were both working the same hours -- four hours a day at the fruit stand -- and we didn't have any money and we couldn't go anywhere, so we spent most of our time curled up in bed together, sleeping or fucking like wild dogs. It's nice to have a little money now, so we can stop eating boiled potatoes and white flour gravy and stolen fruit, three times a day, but I miss the long cold slow afternoons when it was just us, being naked.
He's doing that amazing thing again, where he circles the small, round, sensitive erectile tissue just in front of the entrance to my cunt with his fingertip; at the same time he's gently mouthing one of my nipples. I don't know how he does it -- I can't keep my mind on more than one sexual act at a time. It's not strictly necessary, since I'm still wet from the last time. "You're making a mess," I plead.
"I like making you a mess," he murmurs.
"Quit."
He slides me around, the nylon surfaces of the sleeping bags making sexy sweeping noises, and positions himself between my legs. I'm quivering, gazing up at him through lust-blurry eyes. A sleek tail of dirty-gold hair sneaks into his eyes. "I want to try something," he says.
"OK," I reply.
He takes my knees and hoists them over his shoulders, so that my body is as presented to him as it can be. It's almost scary, this gentle power of his, the effortless strength in his small, skinny little body. "You'll have to tell me if this hurts," he says, carefully guiding his cock into me, slowly angling up until it feels like he's inside me all the way. Then he gathers himself and shoves in farther.
Oh, yeah it hurts. It feels like I'm being stabbed to death. It's fantastic. I'm sure that my internal organs are panicking, having never been bumped from that angle. The groan that comes out of me says it all; his eyes roll back and he gives it to me. "Does it hurt? Does it hurt?" he gasps. "You got tell me if it hurts. You gotta tell me."
Like I could say anything, yes or no, at this point. You can’t talk and moan at the same time. I wonder if something wrong is going on down there; I've never felt this way before. If I can recall, I've had this sensation before; he’ll pick up some new thing and I'll come so hard and feel so good that I'll wonder if I'm broken. He never ceases to give me little surprises.
I wonder about Albert sometimes. He's really hyper sometimes; he drinks too much coffee and just bounces off the walls. He'll take my bike and just ride to Bellingham, coming back at dawn with a garbage bag full of Salvation Army clothes and toys. We had an apartment full of shitty toys that were broken and wear-stained and made stupid noises; a few months ago he gathered his least favorite ones up in garbage bags and took them to the Goodwill in Tacoma. Now all we have left are the ones I like -- the Fisher-Price xylophone and office building with the Fisher-Price people all set in their pegs in front of desks, lots of dolls that I covered with magazine clippings and paint, Matchbox cars and action figures, and the bouncy rocking horse.
He buys and reads all these really stupid women's magazines and studies them carefully, as though he's going to be tested on them later. For I while I thought that he was going to suddenly become gay, but he assured me that he read these stupid things so that he could understand women a little better, and also so he could pick up tips on sex. When he said that I laughed. He looked sad. "I want to become the best lover in the world," he said seriously.
"Why? I just like to bone."
"Yeah, Jody, but I mean, exactly what makes you want to? What kind of boning does a girl like you require? What'll really work?" He shook his head at me and went on looking at the year's best eyeshadows.
Mainly he wears sharkskin pants, cut very narrow, a long-sleeved thermal shirt, a T-shirt (usually the red one from Archie McPhee's), and blue Converse All-stars. He uses peppermint Dr. Bronner's soap and I use almond, so we can tell each other apart by smell. He smokes Kents.
I love him.
We live in the attic of this house that belongs to the parents of one of the guys who lives there. Those guys are all into heavy metal and they have an incredibly shitty band that practices almost all the time. They take a lot of speed and drink a lot of Everclear and they're always fighting with each other, with the neighbors, with their slutty, hookery, spandex girlfriends.
Albert gets along with them all right; when he was working two jobs, for about a month, he would get speed from them so he could stay up 24 hours a day. He lost both jobs and quit taking speed on the same day; he got into a psychotic fight, which he doesn't remember, with one of the hesher dudes, and they beat the shit out of each other. Albert sent the other guy to the hospital with a broken nose and a broken wrist, and I watched Allie just crash and lie there in the bed for ten hours, unconscious. When he got up, he had two black eyes and a fat lip that wouldn't stop bleeding and he couldn't focus his eyes; his boss fired him as soon as he got in the door.
Mainly the heshers don't bother us. We go up the back stairs, covered in SLYER and OZZY RULES graffiti, and close the door and lock it. Inside it's safe and we can blast the stereo as loud as we want to drown out the sound of the band practicing.
We have a lot of shit, but almost none of it's important. Mainly there's the bed, a microwave, TV with illegally obtained cable, the hulking misshapen stereo pieced together out of shit he found at Goodwill. Clothes everywhere. Neither of us is particularly neat. I tend to track mud on everything. We have 2 posters -- he has a poster of Evel Kneivel jumping over the buses on his motorcycle, and I have the poster of Robert Smith and Siouxsie that I stole a long time ago and couldn't put up.
I have an easel by the window with a half-finished collage of women's magazine clippings, lint, broken safety glass, and colored pencil shavings balanced on it. It looks really creepy when night is falling in the attic and Albert's not home from work yet and I'm alone in there.
Albert really likes Nirvana, the band. I like them OK, but he breaks his neck to see them anytime he can. That's where he was last night -- he went straight from work to the Sit-n-Spin to see Nirvana and Dead Moon. He says he would have brought me, but he's 21 and I'm not, and I never had to be 21 to see bands I liked before. I can't stand the all- ages clubs here; they're filled with heaving, idiotic 9th graders listening to New Order. It's bleak.
He actually woke me up to tell me about them. I stared blearily into the dark, squinting at the hands at 3 and 9 on the clock, and listened to him rant about what songs they played, who else he saw there, how hugely pumped he is about their new album, blah blah blah. I think I fell asleep on him because I don't remember him finally shutting up and getting into bed to go to sleep.
Now that he's 21 he goes to clubs a lot -- he gets off work at midnight and the first thing he wants to do is drink, go out with his copy shop friends and get fucked up. I generally go to sleep at eleven, after watching MTV or old movies for a while, and when I get up in the morning he's got his face slammed into the pillow, snoring, talking in his sleep. I once sat there and almost made myself late for work listening to him, but it's nothing cool like in the movies; it's mainly just stuff like "I did do it." "Mom, make Ross shut up." "Twenty. Twenty. Twenty. Twenty." I had to pedal like hell to get to work on time, chanting to myself, "Twenty, twenty, twenty," with every move I made.
Well, that was amazing. Thank you, I'm finished.
I sit up and grab my book of Erte drawings off the milk crates melted together that makes our bedside table. Albert is on his back, staring at the poster of Evel Kneivel. The freckles on his face have faded to faint brown marks that look like zit scars. I don't know, maybe they are. "Do you want some coffee?" he asks me distantly.
"Yeah," I reply.
He gets up, taking the blanket with him to wrap around himself. "Hey, asshole!" I protest.
"What? I'm cold, I'm gonna make you some coffee."
I wrap myself in the cold membrane of the sleeping bag. It's cold and damp on my skin. "Yuck. This is all sweaty."
"So's this one. I'm sorry, I sweat. I was working out." He smiles at me, flicking his tongue through his crooked teeth.
"It's still fucking gross." I can barely see the book in this light. It's raining like crazy outside, as usual, and the light coming in the window is dark grey like hard graphite. It's late in the afternoon; he kept on cuddling me back to sleep long after I would have woken up and wandered down to the store to get some chips. That reminds me. "Is there anything to eat?"
"I ate the last of the bread last night," Albert says, bustling with the coffee maker. "I was really drunk and I thought I should eat something."
"So we have to go shopping," I said.
"Yep," he agrees.
"I'm really hungry," I wheedle.
He arches his eyebrow at me. "Go downstairs and ask Johnny or Alex if they have anything for you to eat. They won't kill you."
"They might fucking rape my ass," I say. "Give me fucking heroin or something and then gang bang me. I'm sure they'd think it's really cool. Motley Crue rapes chicks all the time."
Albert laughs. "I wish you could hear yourself."
"And I'd have to get dressed." I look over the side of the bed; sure enough, my black sweater has a big boot print on it.
"That might help you not to get raped." He flashes his body at me as he wraps the warm cozy not-sweaty blanket around himself again. "I'm not hungry. If you're hungry, go get some food. I'll keep the bed warm."
"Never mind," I sigh, and try in vain to find a warm spot in the blankets to tide me over until he's finished making his precious coffee.
Melissa says, "I don't see how you do it all the time. I mean, I think sex is really pretty lame. It's pretty gross. That's the nasty little secret that they don't tell you on TV and in the movies and shit. Sex is totally lame and not worth it at all. I mean, I really love Marty, and he's a great guy, and he gives me footrubs after I get home from work, and if you ask me, that's way better than sex. Have you ever had a footrub? Doesn't messengering mess up your feet at all? No? Hmmm.... well, rest assured, footrubs are way better than sex.
"I hate all that shit. Kissing and pawing and letting them get under your shirt. My brother used to do that. He used to do it in front of his friends because they thought it was all cool and shit. I had these big-ass boobs when I was a kid and he used to like, snap my bra and grab my butt and him and all his friends would laugh and they'd look at me in the evillest way. I mean, I saw Satan in those guys' eyes. It was fucked up. And it's all like that. I hate it when Marty gets that look on his face... I just know what he's gonna want to do later. And I let him, cause at least he's not mean to me and he bought me this leather jacket, which is really nice. So I don't mind as long as he's not into it all the damn time.
"I can see Berty's different. He's like a goddamn jackrabbit. I know he's one of those horny bastards who just can't leave you alone. My last boyfriend was like that. We would just be in a car driving somewhere and he would put his hand up my skirt, like I'd asked him to do it or something. And he used to make me suck his cock. I hope you don't do that. That's some rank shit, Jody. Lift your chin a little bit so I can see. OK, that's not so bad. I'm a beauty school dropout, just like that song. I dropped out when I got together with Jacob, he was my last boyfriend. You know, the dog. He was just all over me. He was really into big tits. I have no idea why. I swear, if men had tits, the whole society would just dissolve, cause they'd be inside feeling their own tits all day long. It's like having his fucking koala bear hanging off you, and sometimes they dig in their nails and I could just scream. Sometimes I do. Just kidding, I wouldn't scream. They would take that the wrong way. I just let 'em do it, and hope it doesn't take them too long to just get done with it. Okay, I think I'm done, do you want to take a look at it?"
I'm glad I'm not like Melissa. She makes me feel weird. She works waiting tables in the restaurant across the street from where Albert and I used to work, and sometimes we'd come in and she'd make us fresh coffee and give us leftover pie and vegetables to take home and cook. She's an old punk and she's cool, but I'm glad it's not for me the way it is for her.
"Honey, your voice is so different, I wasn't sure if it was you."
"Shame I didn't know that... I could have told you you had a wrong number."
Laughing. Sounding tired through the buzz of the phone line. "So how are you doing?"
"Oh, all right, I guess, I have a job and a house and all that --" I almost say "shit" before I remember that I was talking to my mother, and then I remember again that I used to cuss around her all the time when I was younger, and she never minded. "So, you know, all right."
"Are you still with Allie Daley?" she sounds almost scared.
"Yep," I say.
"Really? You know, I wasn't sure... he never seemed like a very reliable person..."
"That's because Leah drove him crazy with her bullshit. He's a great guy. He has a job, too."
"Really? Now I'm impressed."
"Mom, gimme a break."
"Honey, you know I'm kidding. I liked him. I liked him a lot when he was going out with Leah. I could tell that he was really sweet."
"C'mon, Mom, you thought he was a retard. Everybody thought he was a retard. That's why he had to get the hell out. I just kind of went with him."
A moment of silence. I think I can hear TV. "I wasn't sure what to think when you didn't come back," she begins slowly. "I thought it was my fault."
"Of course it wasn't your fault. It was Leah's fault. And the town sucks. Even you have to see that it's a sucky place to grow up. I never felt like I could amount to shit there."
"Honey, you were going to go to college and be a famous artist. Nobody doubted that for a second."
"This is gonna go nowhere, Mom, if you don't back off. OK? I told you, I have a job. I have a place to sleep that isn't a cardboard box. I have food. I have a person who looks after me and someone who I can look after. Hell of a lot more than I would have had if I'd stayed home. I probably would have ended up on the street in L.A. and I'd be dead by now, probably."
"God, Jody, why do you always have to get so angry?"
I rock back onto the bed and smile at the phone. "I'm an angry youth," I said.
"Do you want anything for your birthday?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know... what do you want? I have a little more money now that I don't have you two around here all the time."
"What do you mean? Leah's gone?"
"She moved out last summer. She's going to get married, you know."
"No, how would I know that?"
She goes on without noticing my tone. "She met some fellow at her new job and they're getting married in June. He owns a sporting goods store. He's a little older, but they seem to get along."
"She probably gives him head," I can't help saying.
"Jody."
"Well, it's true. You gave Dad head, I bet."
"What has that got to do with anything? Jody." She hears me giggling. "How do you like Seattle." Calmly. Derail the insane girl with soothing, meaningless conversation. Like a gynecologist does when they're poking you in the ass with rubber gloves.
"It's OK. It rains a lot here."
"That's what I've heard. What's your job?"
"I'm a bike messenger. I don't get paid shit, but I guess I get paid, which is good enough. They didn't give me any shit about my lack of job history. I get outside, which is good."
"Do you need any money?"
"Yeah, but I'm not gonna get it from you. And I don't really want anything for my birthday from you. And it's months away. So never mind. I got along fine without your - - without any help. I'll be fine."
More silence. "Are you still drawing?"
"I mainly do sculpture and stuff now, but yeah, I still draw."
"Mr. Davidson still asks about you. He still has your pictures on the wall in his classroom. Everybody was really worried about you for a long time. They were pretty sure you were dead."
"Or shooting smack in L.A. Nope, I've just been here. Look, Mom, it's been nice, but I have to go now. I'll give you a call sometime, OK?"
"Whenever you want, you can call collect, OK? I work from seven to five, and then I'm home. Sweetheart, I really miss you, you know? Didn't we get along all right, at least?"
"Yeah, Mom, you were great. I miss you too, sometimes."
"Let me give you Leah's number."
"No way. You can tell Leah next time I see her that I still hate her fucking guts. I don't miss her one bit. She made my life a living hell, and she made Allie's worse. She can get bent, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure she doesn't want to hear from me."
"No, Jody, it's not like that at all."
"I gotta go," I say, and put the phone back down.
I glue a pigeon feather to the collage.
It's a beautiful feather; I found it on my ride home, glistening like an oil pool in the gutter alongside the street. I screeched to a halt and bent down and examined it; grey feather with beautiful green shimmers where the weak afternoon sunlight hit it. I put it carefully into Albert's Zo bag that he gave me when I started messengering, and hauled ass home.
For once the heshers are quiet downstairs. I think they all went out to see some stupid movie and pick up chicks and buy alcohol. I have alcohol; I have leftover cheap vodka that Albert brought home a few nights ago. I drink it straight from the bottle, letting it burn my mouth numb.
The collage was originally a big canvas I was painting of Albert doing sun-salute yoga in front of the window, but the paint got all fucked up when I knocked it over and I've been painting and gluing stuff over it ever since. It's not like me to spend this much time on an art project. Usually I dash some paint onto a board or a toy and glue something on it, and then I'm done and I can give it away. But this is taking me forever. I'm not sure what I'm trying to make. It's a grainy, dull, mixed up mess. I've tried to make it pretty with lots of glittery shavings of metal and pencil wood, but it just gets uglier and uglier.
I lie back onto the bed and let vodka slip down my throat without touching my lips. Albert is at work now. I can picture him slaving over a hot Xerox machine, his hands dusty with paper dust, planning the night's outing to some bar or another, and the folks he'll see there, and what kind of fun they'll have. I wonder if he's spending all his money somewhere else and he's actually making 20 dollars an hour, and he's spending it all on booze and brainless chicks who eat at Bennigan's.
I've got three years and four months until I'm 21 and we can actually go out together and go to a bar and sit on the same stool and eat maraschino cherries. I have this wonderful vision of it -- smoky and full of red velvet and there'll be a guy who plays the piano and sings requests. And Albert and I can ask for "Kill the Poor" again and again and then finally get so drunk that we sing it for the guy, so he will know what it sounds like.
Knowing Albert, he'll ask for some Nirvana song.
It's getting dark in here. I reach over to turn on the light, then let my arm fall over the side of the bed. I don't have TV or music on or anything. I feel drained and beaten. I wonder if I should go to the copy shop to say hello, but it's pretty far, and I'm really tired from biking all over town today, and he wouldn't be able to stop what he's doing to take a break. His manager is a real asshole that way. Albert told me to not bother going to see him when he's at work -- "It ain't pretty," he said grimly. All the same I wish I could reach out and touch his face and bring him a hot chocolate, make sure he still loves me and hasn't left.
Finally I switch on the TV and watch it for a while with the sound turned down low. I hear the heshers downstairs come in with a hell of a lot of noise -- they're drunk already, somehow -- and I spring up and land on the door and lock it as hard as I can, hoping that they don't think I'm home. Not that I couldn't kick any of their asses by myself if I had to, but I don't want them to even know I'm here. I just want to cease to exist for a while until I know I'm not in the apartment alone.
When he gets back into bed, he hands me a very hot cup of coffee and pulls the warm not-sweaty blanket over us. His legs are really cold and bony, his feet hard and scaly from getting his feet wet all the time in his Converse. "I have something to tell you," he says softly.
"What?" The coffee is black and bitter as hell, even with the piles of sugar that he puts into it.
"Dave shitcanned me yesterday."
"You got fired?"
"He said he didn't like the way I looked. I looked the way I always do. I told him he was a cocksucker dipshit, or something like that, and he actually picked me up by the collar of my shirt and my pants and threw me into the street. That's why I have holes in my pants now. And then he said 'You owe me eight dollars for the shirt' cause he tore it."
"You got fired?"
Albert lights a Kent. "Oh well," he says.
"Rent is due, dumbass, like next week. Were you even thinking about that when you were cozying up to your manager?"
"It was either get fired or quit," Albert deduces. "I was gonna quit at the end of the month, anyway. I fucking hate that place. Look at my hands. They bleed. And I was going to kick the shit out of Dave if I had to look at him anymore. He drives us like we're slaves."
"Couldn't you have waited a little bit?"
"I would never ask you something like that," he protests, blushing angrily. "I would never question you if you did something like that. We have enough money for the fucking rent, all right? This way I'll get unemployment until I can get another job."
"Oh, bullshit, you don't know a damn thing about it."
"And you do? You might as well get over it, cause it's done. Unless you want to go down there and beg for my job back like something out of a fucking book. I don't give a shit. So I won't work for Kim's Copies anymore. I'm fucking thrilled."
"I just can't believe you got fired, and then you spent money on seeing fucking Nirvana and getting drunk."
"It's my money," he says.
"It's our money," I correct.
"Is it?" He looks at me hard for a while. "I don't think it is. I don't think you were in that place with that ugly fuck calling you names behind your back all day. I don't think your hands are cracked and bloody all the goddamn time. I don't think you have any right to call me a goddamn slacker for preserving my own sanity. So you can just fuck off."
"You fuck off," is all I can think of to say.
In Bonneville we sat on the curb and waited for a long time.
The Trans Am's scrap, the mechanic said, looking at us funny, two strange looking unwashed punks, high school age, California plates on the car. Starter was crap to begin with and you fried the engine trying to start it. Not worth anything but parts now. Do you got enough money for the tow.
Allie said he did.
We gave him money for the tow, and then trudged across the street to a coffee shop. We sat in a booth, ordered coffee, lit cigarettes, didn't look at each other. His newly-dyed black hair gleamed through the dust, greenish in the sunlight.
After an hour the same mechanic came into the coffee shop and handed Allie two hundred and fifty dollars. For the parts, he explained. Know somebody at a body shop who's rebuilding one of those damn ugly things, and he wanted the doors or some shit. You got all your stuff out of it?
Allie looked at me, and I patted my shorts pocket where I kept my bag of drugs. We told him that we had. There wasn't much -- tapes, a bottle of water, some blankets, and the duffel bag bursting with our clothes.
You kids runnin' away?
So? Allie looked up at him.
Shrug. Nothin'... just curious... where you tryin' to get to?
Nowhere. Just away, I said.
Well, good luck... this ain't the nicest place for it... no coconut trees or nothin' for you to live on. Good luck. The waitress said hello to the mechanic as he left the place. She came over and stared at us.
Allie put two bucks on the table and we left.
It took us all day to hitch a ride to Salt Lake City. By that time I was ready to die -- I'd been up all night, frying on acid, and hadn't slept, and neither of us had eaten. I spent the ride into Salt Lake crying into the sweaty collar of Allie's T-shirt, my sunburnt forehead corroded against the woven cotton.
We got off on another highway entrance, hoisted the messy tangle of blanket and duffel bag, shuffled along the hot darkening road for a while. I was trying not to whine that I was hungry and I wanted to sleep, but I couldn't help it. Allie never said anything. His face was burnt and noble then; he looked like a doomed Okie, greasy and not daring to hope, the muscles in his arm jumping as he carried the duffel bag. The sight of him being so strong made me feel better and I stopped crying and just walked beside him.
After night fell he rolled a joint and we smoked it while we strode along the hallucinatory highway, thumbs held out. I felt a little better after that, but it made me even hungrier. The stripes in the highway were making me trip again and I kept laughing really hard about nothing. I'm sure he thought I was going crazy.
Around midnight, when the cars had started to thin out, a van stopped for us. A guy with long shaggy bleached blond hair stuck his head out the window. Even from where I was, I knew he was tweaking hard. Where ya headed, kids?
Away from this fuckin' place, Allie replied.
The two of them laughed, laughed again. My eyes were so dry. I remembered the Visine that I kept in the fridge at home for when I needed to get the red out before going to school in the morning; I fantasized about those eye drops the way that I starving prisoner imagines huge feasts. Before I knew what was happening, Allie had my arm and he was dragging me into the back of the van.
Back there, three more headbanger guys were crouched, huffing nitrous from whipping cream cans. You guys want some Whip-its? they offered.
We said no, but that we'd like something to eat.
The hesher guys laughed; they'd been tweaking the whole way up from L.A. and hadn't touched the food they brought for their road trip. We're goin' back to Seattle, they said. Where you guys goin'?
Seattle, I guess, I said.
Allie was digging around in the cooler. We had Diet Coke and Sprite and cold deli Chinese food from a grocery store. I thought I was going to be sick, it tasted so good, and was so gross at the same time. Allie got a caffeine rush and started laughing maniacally, and I guess that went over well with the heshers because they started messing with him, punching him and calling him a fucking punk, but in a nice way. As soon as I had licked the paper carton of goo clean, I lay down on the duffel bag and went to sleep. When I woke up, we were in Washington state, everyone else was passed out, and Allie was driving, his pot pipe clenched determinedly between his teeth.
For about six months, we were prostitutes and drug dealers.
Drug dealing was infinitely preferable; we mainly sold drugs to other people like ourselves, that is to say, smelly, homeless punks who slept in the park. Turning tricks was awful, and neither of us was very good at it. Since we sucked at getting tricks so badly, the other kids who were prostitutes in the areas where we were never told their pimps about us, and we never got killed. I think I turned a total of five tricks, ever. I never got fucked, thank God -- I would tell them that up front. I lost a lot of johns that way... but the ones that didn't care were OK. Mainly I sucked dick and gave handjobs or let them rub against me until they came. It wasn't very good money.
Allie got fucked pretty regularly. He was awfully cute, and the other bumboys would fall in love with him all the time. He was a heartbreaker -- all slim and pretty and boyish and straight-acting, and young gay boys couldn't resist him. Older gay men -- a lot of whom looked like my teachers in high school -- couldn't really resist him either, especially with how distant he was all the time; an ice queen, a princess, his little pale body dotted with bruises.
During that time, and only during that time, Allie and I didn't fuck. Neither of us was interested. That was work, what we did when we first got up, what we did until we could find someone with drugs that we could take and then spend the rest of the night drinking coffee or cheap wine and walking around. We were always together unless we were looking to score, and I tried to always get it over with as quickly as possible so I could be with him again.
Hustling didn't come naturally to me, but I was startled to see how easily Allie gave into it; he was just not there while this was happening to him. He would just retreat into himself and you could hit him or cut him with razor blades and he wouldn't respond. I guess his mom and dad used to hit him constantly when he was growing up, and the other kids called him Punching Bag and would beat him up at school. I remember hearing about him when I was in first grade or something and he was in fifth; he went to a different school and was a new kid, but the news of his fame had spread. He was the kid that anyone could beat up. I was terrified that I would lose him altogether, that it was my fault that he became this inert Barbiedoll so that he could get out of town with me, but when we were alone together, prowling through the damp and windy streets, he would smile at me and put his arm around me and tell me how much I was saving his life. I really grooved on that, being a lifesaver.
The owner of the fruit stand was a hoary old Jewish guy named Mr. Morton and he offered me a job one morning when I had been standing there, half asleep, sniffing the oranges and neatly piling them back onto the display. I told him I'd only work there if Allie could work there, too, and he told me, sure, he can work here too. After a week Mr. Morton was bringing us home for dinner with Mrs. Morton, and we'd sit in their brown dining room and eat matzoh ball soup and corned beef and all that shit, grinning like wild jackals and eating and drinking everything in sight. We told them everything about us. I think it was them who found my mom, and gave her my phone number. They wanted us to live with them, but we wouldn't. We did finally let them give us two hundred bucks so I could get some human clothes so I could get a better job than what they could offer us. I spent thirty bucks on a bike and four on a helmet, and got the bike messenger job. We ran into the heshers again one night in a record store, and they told us about the attic. We thought we had it made.
I still get calls and letters from Mrs. Morton, usually with ten or twenty bucks tucked inside, almost as if embarrassed. I don't mind. We use the money to buy drugs.
Albert smokes pot every day before he goes to the copy shop, he tells me. On Saturdays I often wake up to him taking massive lungfuls of smoke and blowing them out the window, his green copy-shop shirt stretched tight over his heaving shoulder blades. "I'm preparing myself for my workday," he gasps, coughing, tears streaming down his face.
I used to get high before messengering, but now I only do it occasionally at work. I like to do it at lunchtime. The other messengers and I huddle in an alleyway and smoke joints, then we all go out and grab bags of leftover bread from the bakery in Pike Place Market. Then, the afternoon rushes past in a pleasant haze of numbers, streets, and envelopes, or it drags on endlessly, tiredly, full of fantasies of baked potatoes, bed, and good music.
We've also discovered mushrooms. They always seemed like hippie shit to me, but everyone does them up here, and in a lot of ways they're nicer than acid. I can trip all night on shrooms and still go to work the next day, for example, so we often eat mushrooms on Sunday night and then go for a walk.
Also, when we can get it, we smoke opium. Albert's last job, doing food service at U-Dub, got him some of the weirdest drug connections. We get opium from this weird goth chick who was student there; we don't know where she gets it. Albert thinks she grows it. I wouldn't be surprised. I like opium, and we don't get it often enough to go nuts when we don't have it. If I have my choice I want to just start smoking opium every day when I turn forty and just never stop smoking it. Also Albert looks so cool when he smokes opium -- he just leans back and his sea-colored eyes get a mist over them and he says things like "I regard you in the highest esteem" which he is just not capable of doing at any other time.
We were both tweakers for a while; we live above a huge mountain of crystal meth, and for a long time it was just easier to take the heshers' offers than turn it down. For a long time I couldn't messenger without it; I wasn't strong enough, and I had no stamina for biking all day long. I didn't bike in California almost at all -- I walked, sometimes skateboarded, but my bike there was in bad shape. When I stopped taking crystal, some time before Albert stopped, I found that my muscles weren't as quick as they had been while powered by speed, but my muscles had hardened so that I could actually handle it. Sometimes I fantasize about how fast I was then, like an arrow shot from a bow; I took the wildest chances and risks on my bike and always got away with them. If I tried that kind of thing now I'd get run over in an instant.
I come back from the store with Doritos, two liters of Dr. Pepper, a bag of carrots, and two packs of cigarettes. Albert is face down in the dim tangle of sleeping bags, breathing quietly. I decide not to wake him up, but the sound of the plastic bag opening rouses him and he raises his face and looks at me. His face is red and puffy. "What's the matter?" I ask, taking off my helmet.
"Can I have some?" His voice is all wet and choked up. He takes the orange dusted chips into his wide rose mouth in one bite, which I've always envied.
"What's the matter?" I ask him again.
He seems embarrassed. "I didn't think you were coming back," he confesses, crumbs dropping out of his lips. "I cried myself to sleep."
"Oh, Jesus, Allie."
"You looked really pissed," he defends himself. "I honestly thought you weren't coming back. I mean, you are the kind of person who'll just leave. I've seen you do it. You're the kind of person who'll... I mean... You'll just drop something precious to you and not even look back. You'd never even think about me ever again."
"You really think I would leave you? I went to the grocery store."
Albert shakes his head, his hand snaking back for more chips. "I don't know," he said. "I never know."
"You don't know shit, then. You're all I have. All I've ever had. You're the only thing that means a goddamn thing to me, you stupid fuck." I get into bed with him, rubbing my rainy legs against his bare, warm ones. "I just knew you weren't gonna go to the store for me, and I was hungry."
"You didn’t ask. If you had asked, I would have gone. I wouldn't have gone all the way to FoodWay, but I would have gone to get you something to eat."
"Bullshit," I grumble. It's gone dark, totally dark. I turn on the TV for lighting purposes, wait until Albert is finished with his mouthful of Doritos, and then kiss him on the lips and cheek. "What's on TV?"
"I don't know. Want to get high?"
"You have pot?"
"Of course I have pot. I ran into Nicholas last night and he gave me a bag for free to finally pay me back for those doses I gave him last summer. It's not the best, but at least it's from Oregon." He roots around in the dark until he finds his sharkskin pants. "See the holes in my knees? Fuckin' Dave. It probably gave him a boner to humiliate me in front of the other vassals." He packs his short bong with a thimbleful of marijuana that I can smell from here. "Maybe it's not so bad. Here, you first."
I take a bong hit and lie back on the bed to hold it in. He takes one too, and we lie there together, seeing who can hold his breath for the longest.
I guess I like Nirvana OK. I don't get all hot and sticky about them like he does; I kind of like their lyrics. It all seems so self-conscious to me, a little too close to the metal stylings of the guys downstairs. Give me straight punk anyday -- the Vandals, Black Flag, D.R.I. Albert's always been a little more erudite about music than me. He's the one who got me listening to rap music and surf music and stuff.
His music collection: a lot of Miles Davis, a lot of local 7"s, N.W.A, techno, Black Sabbath, Nick Cave, ska bands from southern California, and tubs of mildewy vinyl easy listening which he buys at Goodwill stores.
My music collection: more techno, the Smiths, Violent Femmes, the three Star Wars movie scores, every Black Flag album, goth mix tapes that Melissa made for me, punk, punk, and more punk.
We still have all the tapes that we brought with us when we ran away, with the exception of the Pogues tape that we were listening to when we first got together on that sweaty Sunday afternoon; that tape fell out of Albert's coat pocket when he was turning a trick and when we went back later to look for it, we found only a lake of lazily curling magnetic tape trailing through the rainy, cigarette-butty gutter.
Albert had black hair for the first year we were here; it obscured his looks, he thought, not wanting to be arrested for the abduction and statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl. He wasn't any less pretty with dark hair, but it made his face different; paler, narrower, more paranoid. I was happy when he finally cut it off and let it grow back his natural dark blond.
He did it so that we could look more like each other. It worked, too. My blonde dye-job grew out so that I was two-toned; first brown and blonde, then brown and Kool- Aid Cherry red. Melissa cut off the last of the reddish parts and now it's just dark, suede-short all over except for a long mop in the front that I usually part sort of in the middle and tuck behind my ears. I grew some in the last two years, and now I'm the same height; I outweigh him by twenty pounds. We both have slight beer pudge, but it looks better on him, I think. I often steal his clothes, and he went through this phase last summer where he would wear my dresses. He never got beat up for this, but he did lose his job as a waiter. He looks cute in a dress. He has short curvaceous legs covered with fine dark blond hair, and he always sat with his legs open so you could see that he wore black Hanes underwear and often carried a bite mark on his upper thigh. He even wore a dress to a punk show and jumped into the mosh pit, skirt flying up. When I saw him again he wasn't wearing the dress anymore, just his undershorts and boots, and his chest was covered with blood from a split lip. I told him he couldn't wear my dresses anymore, that he would just have to buy his own. That was the end of that.
I think the heshers are afraid of him.
I am home from school, this time with a real excuse -- I have a fucker of a cold. I'm in the living room sketching, watching afternoon cartoons turn into afternoon sitcoms, drinking hot water with lemon and honey, waiting for Mom to come home so she can rub my chest with Vicks VapoRub.
Front door opens and my sister is coming in, talking a mile a minute. The smell of her perfume makes me sick to my stomach. "Mom? Mom?" she calls.
"She's not home from work yet," I snuffle.
She turns behind her and faces out the door. "Well, god, come in, it's OK," she's saying to someone outside. "Nobody's gonna, like, kill you or anything." There's a boy in the doorway, hanging back and peering inside like he's scared a bear is gonna come charging out. I've seen him before. He's not my sister's usual type -- she's strictly a Homecoming King/golf jock kind of gal. But she did graduate, so maybe... He's short, shorter than her in her three-inch heels, and totally grimy. Greasy blond hair and tight pale jeans with stuff written on them in blue ball-point, upside down; combat boots, a greenish T-shirt that says 4AD on it. I saw him at a show this summer -- Oingo Boingo -- and I had thought to myself, what a dreamy boy, he looks like a real fuckup. And now he's in my house. Too weird. "Who's that?" I ask nonchalantly.
My sister drags him in. "That's my sister," she says to him, with a kind of curl to her lip. "Jody, this is Allie, he's my new boyfriend." She half-hugs him and grins at me.
I'm staggered. "Really?" I say. "Him?"
"What? I don't feel like dealing with your childish shit today, Jody."
"I didn't do anything," I mutter.
"Hi," says the boy softly. He's stoned, I can tell. His eyes don't quite focus. It's either that, or he's had a lobotomy -- you'd have to have one to want to go out with Leah Blake, the world's most vicious barracuda. I don't understand it.
"Ignore her, she's got the world's biggest superiority complex. Let's go to my room and listen to Prince," she chirps.
"All right -- Prince," echoes the boy, grinning. His eyes light on me again and the smile fades from his face, replaced with preoccupation. I want so badly to jump up and shout RUN! to him, but I just look back down at my sketchbook and frown, feeling a hot rush of blood to my face. I hope I'm still tan enough so that it doesn't show.
I listen to them listening to Prince and then having sex. It's pretty gross. My sister learned everything about how sex is supposed to be by watching pornos at the frat house she hung around her sophomore year of high school, so she does a lot of screaming and emoting, as if trying to convince herself that she's having a good time. It can't be that great. I got dry humped once and though it was kind of intense and sexy, I never once said anything and neither did he. I just don't know about this sex thing -- I mean I'm 14, I know what it's all about, and I think about it all the time, and I want to have sex, but listening my sister faking orgasm after orgasm really makes me reconsider.
I bet he's got a nice body, though. He's got your typical punk bod -- skinny as hell and really wiry, probably covered with bruises. I know it's sick, but I think bruises are kind of sexy. I'm a big fan of hickeys. I'm always jealous of kids at school with hickeys; they know we're all looking at them, wishing we had somebody who would bite our necks hard enough to leave a bruise.
I finally get sick of it and go into my room. I turn on the Stooges really loud and then cover my head with the pillow, but I'm still thinking about that boy, only two rooms away, naked and fucking someone who damn well ought to be me.
He's worked me out of my clothes and I'm now lying on top of him, covered in several blankets, the heat from his body rising up and transferring through my body and then recirculating back down through us. He is pretty stoned and he keeps repetitively twisting a lock of his hair through his forefinger and middle finger and thumb, staring past me into the darkness of the room.
If I watch him do that for long enough I start to mirror him, tucking my forelocks behind my ears again and again. When he catches me at this he laughs, bending upward at the waist to kiss me. I draw circles around his nipples with spit. Mahogany eyelashes shade his eyes like a veil drawn over an Erte girl.
We're listening to Nick Cave, sexual and dangerous, loud enough to rattle the windows at the downbeat. The deathmetal band downstairs might as well not exist. To hear each other speak, we have to press our mouths against the other’s ear. "You're stoned," I say.
"And?" A smile leaks across his face.
"Nothing. I'm glad you're here."
"I'm glad I'm here, too." I wish I could hold onto this marvelous peace forever. All the scents are right, the Home Shopping Channel rotates and sparkles on soundless, Nick screams and growls as though metal hooks are tearing through his skin. I hold Albert's penis in my hand, pulling on it gently, trying to make him hard. It's working, slowly. He keeps his eyes closed, still smiling angelically; when I bite him on the neck, his penis leaps up against my fingers. "Pain Boy," I call him. "Pain Boy likes pain."
"Only when it's you."
We're reshuffling, hardly any dopehead fumbling, and he's between my legs again, his cock poking up against my stomach, tilting back toward his. His eyes are open now, green in the woozy moving TV light, watching me curiously. As if not attached to his observing face, his hands slide all over me, urging me to do something that he doesn't even know about. "Do you want me to fuck you?" I ask against his ear.
He makes an "I don't know" sound, then giggles.
Of course he does. I just like to ask him. It reduces him to the consistency of a teenage girl. It's kind of thrilling for me. I wiggle the two of us together, then kiss his forehead for a long time, just sitting still.
We lie that way for a long time, watching the Shopping Channel and their endless parades of capodimonte and goldtone accessories, occasionally pausing to kiss each other. His erection waxes and wanes inside me for a time before we do any moving. My mind wanders away and I rein it back in again.
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