by Dana Czapnik
And then, on page 89, where there was a full-page color picture of Lauren with her acoustic guitar playing onstage in the gym during the fall talent show, was a small note in the margin in handwriting I know so well. “Shine on you crazy diamond.” Percy writes that in my yearbook every year. How many hours of my life have I wasted staring at those words, wondering if he harbored secret feelings for me? And it meant nothing. It meant less than nothing. That must be what he writes in everyone’s yearbook. That’s his go-to line. And it isn’t even an original.
So what did I write to Lauren Moon? For the same reason I opted not to get back at Brian Deed, I opted to write something pleasant. And innocuous. Something I wouldn’t ever regret writing. And generally, I might be too tough on people. Maybe a fake sheen is important to keep relationships lubricated. And to not give others the opportunity to think I’m weird.
Lauren, it was great being in English class with you all these years. I hope you keep singing. Enjoy Brown.
—Lucy
I couldn’t find Lauren to give her back her book and I had a free period, so I went to the darkroom. It was the first chance I’d had to develop the rolls I took at Max’s Art vs. Kmart demonstration. I’d gone with the school’s Olympus in hand, full of doubt and curiosity. I’d never been to a demonstration before, let alone one with a slew of naked people. I’m not sure if I wanted to participate in the protest so much as I wanted to be able to say I was at the protest. Like my dad, who went to Woodstock and had a terrible time because his wallet was stolen and he couldn’t get near the stage to hear any of the music or see the bands and he had a fight with his friend while hitching back to the city and they were kicked out of the car they were riding in and couldn’t pick up another ride and had to walk to the nearest bus stop and sleep in the station overnight, hungry, thirsty, dead broke, and miserable. But whenever he tells someone now that he was at Woodstock, their reaction is always, “Really? You were there? Wow!” And the more time passes, the more impressive this all gets, and I think the cumulative memory of all the “wows” he’s gotten has replaced the actual memory of how miserable he was at Woodstock. And that’s what I thought I’d feel on my way to the protest. In the grand scheme of it all, there might not be a difference between participating and being able to say you participated. But I was wrong. There is a difference.
Astor Place was a madhouse. Overnight, Village artists transformed the triangular sidewalk into a massive canvas and covered every square inch with beautiful drawings and messages. Chalk drawings of grass and vines climbed their way up the Cube in the center. On one side of the Cube it said “Art.” On the other side it said “Wins.” On the other three sides it read “Never,” “Sometimes,” “Always.” Depending on which way you turned the Cube, the sentence read “Art Never Wins,” “Art Sometimes Wins,” or “Art Always Wins.”
Max led the crowd in chants—some specifically about Kmart, others about capitalism generally. Sometimes, she’d turn the megaphone over to others. Some spoken-word poets riffed on the East Village and sweatshops. Local business owners talked about the threat to their livelihoods and how big-box chains would ruin the feel of the neighborhood. In between speakers, musicians and drummers and street performers and break-dancers entertained the crowd. Mostly it seemed more like a demonstration of spirit than something overtly political.
After a couple hours, the NYPD forced the demonstrators to disperse because a group of women had taken off their tops and their permit didn’t allow for public nudity. For a while, protestors shouted at the police, and the cops started to move in closer. But nothing happened. No one got hit with billy clubs or hosed down with water or dragged off into paddy wagons. The police weren’t in riot gear. Mostly they armed themselves with patronizing sneers and enjoyed the topless salty women, smiling at them from the sides of their mouths, and stayed as neutral as possible to avoid the chance of an incendiary photo. Eventually, everyone put their clothes back on and went their separate ways.
Max and Violet and a bunch of their friends moved on to Mars Bar, and I followed them. The energy there was ecstatic. Everyone was chanting with raised fists, “Art Always Wins! Art Always Wins!” It was infectious. I found myself raising my fist along with them, shouting at the top of my lungs. People felt like they’d done something important. And it felt that way to me too, while I was in it. How could anyone choose Kmart over Art? Who could spend any time with these people and want to destroy the world they were working to preserve? But the city hired cleaning crews that night, and by six o’clock the following morning, all evidence of the protest was erased and whatever feeling of victory we retained overnight washed away with it.
Does art always win? If it did, the world would be a very different place. Yet it doesn’t always lose either, does it? So I guess the answer is sometimes. Sometimes art wins.
In the school’s darkroom, the photos I took that day materialized on photo paper. Photographs of the artwork on the walls, the sidewalk. The faces: smiling, angry, stoned. A few of the Astor Place skater crew. Kids my age and younger who always hang around that spot in the city, looking drugged out and indifferent in wide-legged pants and Stüssy shirts, chains dangling from their belt loops, half-heartedly trying to do some kick flips on their skateboards and not fall and break their tailbones. They joined forces with the artists that day and were chanting along with them. I couldn’t decide if they were being ironic or earnest. Maybe they couldn’t either.
There was one of the entire cast of naked demonstrators before the police began to move in. All the naked demonstrators were women. Their arms linked together. Their faces dramatically stone-cold and defiant. Their bodies all untraditional. Breasts uneven, some perfect, others pointing in two different directions. Some small and high, others large and sagging. Some stomachs flat and taut, others with strange, unexpected pockets of fat. Skin all different shades, hair all different lengths and textures.
It’s still unclear to me why getting naked was a part of the protest other than to draw attention, which seems somehow both frivolous and revolutionary. Because a woman’s body is so painfully different in comparison to a man’s. A naked man is a naked man. But a naked woman carries the weight of history. The subjugations, the violences, the stretch marks, the emancipations, the liberations, the judgments. A woman’s body is a work of art. A political act. A sexual billboard. An expression of personal joy. A public display. That’s what those artists were doing. Saying, We know the power this has to bring attention, and it’s ours now to wield. But there will always be a part of me that will silently scream from a small place in my skull, Must a woman’s power always be generated from her body? And yet. I cannot deny it. Its power. What an impossible contradiction.
The photo I took was imperfect too. The foreground was more in focus than the naked women, nothing like the crisp black-and-white photo that ran the following day in the Village Voice, but I like it just the same. It’s full-color, slightly overexposed, and soft.
What’s beautiful about film is that it ages, like skin, and so the photos you take in the moment that look so fresh and new and youthful eventually fade at the same rate as the memory of the moment. The thing that’s tragic about film is that no matter what you do, eventually the photograph itself replaces the memory. I guess there are some parts of yourself that, once they’re gone, you can never get back. Even if you take a picture.
* * *
I was hanging the photos up to dry when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and let Lauren in. She was wearing a motorcycle jacket with jeans and Docs, even though it’s the beginning of June. Her hair was down, and she had a very faint hint of freckles around her nose and cheeks. In the red light of the darkroom, she looked like an all-American vixen. Guileless and gorgeous and she’ll steal your man but she knows not what she does.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said as she passed me my yearbook.
“What’s the surprise?”
“Look at page 145.” I felt my f
ace drop. “I promise you it’s a good surprise.”
I flipped through the book to the page with the photo of me holding up the trophy. The note from Brian had disappeared.
“Wait up.” I flipped to the front of the book, where Alexis had written her long ode to our friendship, and it was still there . . . but rewritten. “What did you do?”
“As soon as I saw what that asshole wrote to you—and where he wrote it—I went to Adelnaft and asked her to give you a new yearbook. And then I went back to Alexis and Jamila and Charles and had them rewrite their notes. I wrote a note too, in the back.”
“But these yearbooks cost like eighty bucks. I really can’t afford to pay for a new one.”
“No, Adelnaft is giving this to you. You don’t have to pay. You deserve to have a memory of this place that’s good and untarnished.”
“Wow, thank you so much, Lauren.” I wanted to hug her. I wanted to cry. It was the nicest thing anyone besides my parents had ever done for me, and I’m not even friends with her. In that moment, I regretted writing my perfunctory note to her.
“You’re welcome.” I could tell by her body language she was actually expecting a hug, so I did.
“Can you believe I ever dated that idiot? Like, my biggest regret in life is Brian.”
“Sorry I don’t have any consoling words for you. I’ve always hated that kid. Even when we were in kindergarten.”
“You don’t even know the half of it, Lucy. I could tell you stories about him—” She stopped herself. “Anyway. So, I swear what I’m about to ask you has nothing to do with why I did this with your yearbook—I did that for the right reason, which is that Brian ruined your yearbook and you are a good person and you don’t deserve that—but I have a question I really want to ask you, just . . . girl to girl.”
“Sure.”
“So, I know you haven’t hung out with him a lot lately, but I know you’ve been Percy’s best friend for, like, forever, and you probably know him better than anyone, so I was hoping to get your advice. And I want you to tell me the truth.” Lauren curled her hair around her fingers and then stuck it in her mouth and sucked on it.
“Okay. Like you said, we haven’t hung out much recently, but I can try.”
“So, I haven’t heard from him in, like, a week and a half. He won’t call me back. Do you think he’s just, like, I don’t know, like, not interested anymore?”
Yes. Yes was the real answer. The truth. But Lauren had just done an incredibly decent thing for me. And her substance as a human being had just skyrocketed in my book, and I really didn’t want to hurt her feelings any more than they were already hurting.
“I’m sure that’s not the case. I’m sure it’s because he’s busy or something. And sometimes his mom forgets to pay the phone bill, so his phone gets shut off.” Which was only half a lie—that did happen twice.
“You think that’s what it is?”
“Yeah, it’s possible.”
“Because, the thing is, I, like, never get this way about a guy. Trust me. All my friends are like, ‘You’re, like, the guy in the relationship.’ Usually I’m into a guy for about a month and then I’m like so over it. But Percy’s different. We’re in love. He told me he loves me.”
“He did?” A sourness filled my mouth.
“Yeah, a couple times. And then, poof. Radio silence. Has he ever done that with a girl before?”
“I don’t think Percy would tell you that if he didn’t mean it.” Which wasn’t a lie. I mean, I think he’s got more integrity than that. But who knows.
Lauren breathed a sigh of relief and began to cry a bit. I had a used tissue in the small pocket in my book bag, and I gave it to her.
There was a part of me that wanted to commiserate with her. Hey, I loved him too. He broke my heart too. At least he gave you the courtesy to let you believe he loved you. Even if it was only for a short time. But I didn’t say any of that. No matter that we shared a similar experience in this situation, Lauren is beautiful. And talented. And intelligent. And charming. And now I also know she’s kind and has a sense of justice. Amazing guys who are actually capable of love are going to fall for her left and right throughout her life. Our paths of experience may have crossed this one time, but otherwise they will always be divergent.
“I never get this way about a guy. It’s so dumb.” Her face was splotchy.
“At least you’re not in some novel or a teen movie about the depravity of America’s youth.”
“What?”
“Well, if you were a girl in some novel or a character in Fast Times at Pendleton High or something, it wouldn’t be enough that you slept with some idiot guy who was careless with you. You’d also have to have an abortion and get AIDS and have the word “slut” or “skank” or “whore” painted across your locker, you know? It wouldn’t be enough that you got your heart broken, you’d also have to have an ending that feels satisfying to the moralists in the crowd.”
She stopped crying and looked at me blankly.
“I’m just saying, at least there’s no moral at the end of the story.”
“Totally.” She nodded her head. “But do you think he’s gonna call me?”
There was a part of me that wanted to take all of Lauren’s willful ignorance and earnestness and innocence and set it on fire because it annoyed me, but that’d be pure self-immolation, because I sat up nights wondering that very thing. Is he gonna call me? And in those lonely hours, the thing I figured out is that Percy will never stand on my street flinging tiny stones at my bedroom window to get my attention so he can apologize and declare his love, or hold a boom box blaring Peter Gabriel over his head, or write a sonnet for me or deliver any kind of sweeping romantic gesture. I didn’t get a happy ending. But nothing really tragic or even vaguely sad happened either. The universe didn’t punish me for having sex with a guy I knew was a jerk. There wasn’t a loaded consequence. Nothing grand or important came of it. I fell in love with a boy, and he didn’t love me back, and that’s pretty much the whole story.
“Yeah, he’ll call you,” I said. Because that’s the kind of answer you give to a question posed by a Lauren Moon.
After she left, I read her note to me. It was filled with all the platitudes one might expect.
Dear Lucy,
You are a kick-ass basketball player! Keep putting those boys in their place on the courts! It’s been an awesome twelve years at Pen! Always remember when Adelnaft fell off the chair in history!
Love you tons,
Lauren XOXO
I bet Lauren is a fun friend. I bet she rocks out with her girls in her bedroom to Hole and the Breeders. I bet she holds back her friends’ straight, shiny hair when they vomit in a toilet in some rank club. I bet she tells her friends they look pretty even when they don’t and that their butt looks good in those jeans even when it doesn’t and that they look skinny in that dress. I bet she and her friends meet up with fun boys wherever they go. I bet they dissect all their interactions like biologists. I bet they’re always telling each other the things they want to hear. But I’ll take my honest friendship with Alexis, we two who don’t fit anywhere, not even quite with each other.
* * *
I make my way up to Broadway and stop for a moment at the bus stop where Percy wrote that quote in the beginning of the school year. What was it again? Something about being rich? I can’t quite remember. It’s gone now. Covered by other graffiti. It wasn’t meant to last long anyway. All his other contributions to sidewalks and buildings, written in chalk, have all washed away. I haven’t seen any new ones recently, either. I wonder if he’s stopped, or if he’s become more daring in where he chooses to write them and so it hasn’t occurred to me to look. Though I’ve stopped seeking them out the way I used to. For no reason, really. I guess I’ve just sort of . . . forgotten about it.
On the way home I head into H&H and get an everything bagel. Luckily, they’re the ones that have just come out of the oven. It’s piping hot in my hands, so
I leave it in the wax-paper bag. There’s a chill in the air, and I’m wearing a Knicks T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, so the breeze is really hitting me on my bare skin, still wet with sweat. The sky looks gray.
I put my head down and start walking faster. There’s thunder rumbling behind me, and the rain begins again. Tiny needles prick the back of my neck. I walk faster. Past Zabar’s and then Bolton’s and the real-estate office that always has pictures of apartments my parents look at whenever we pass by and laugh at the absurdity of the price tags. Past the Shakespeare & Co., where James’s dad took us all to see Toni Morrison read from Jazz last fall, and Percy lamented that he’d never get to see any of his literary heroes read because they were all dead. Past the dry cleaners and the electronics store and Town Shop, the lingerie store where fat old ladies feel you up and tell you your real bra size before they stick a thirty-dollar bra in your hand, which you pay for even though it’s too expensive because you feel shamed by the fact that they have to feel people up for a living, and then the restaurant, Polistina’s, that used to be Teacher’s Too that used to be Teacher’s. Past the Korean grocer’s with the best fried dumplings on the planet, which I used to eat for lunch every day before I gave up meat, and the counter filled with Far East herbs in neon packets promising longer-lasting erections. Past Burger King and a sparkling new Chase Bank storefront and the newspaper stand that used to sell Percy all his Juggs and Hustler and High Times mags and Philly Blunts way before he remotely looked old enough to buy them. Past Harry’s Shoes, with loads of shiny wingtips and ladies’ pumps in the window, where my mom used to buy me saddle shoes I’d be forced to wear to family celebrations even though they pinched my feet. Past Edgar’s, named after Edgar Allan Poe, who I guess had a house on Eighty-Fourth Street, and now to honor him they made this café with what looks like a set piece for a Broadway production of The Raven and has the best seven-layer chocolate cake. Past Broadway Market, where the produce always looks a little depressing, and then Ray’s Pizza, which has the best crust in the neighborhood but not the best sauce, and the perfect slice of pizza has to have all three—great crust, great sauce, right proportion of cheese. Past the Loews movie theater, which, no matter how many times I correct her, my mother insists on pronouncing “Low-Eez,” some artifact left over from her barefoot Brooklyn childhood when she would stare out at Manhattan from the harbor and mispronounce the names blazing atop the buildings, all that industry and sophistication flickering on the other side of the water, just beyond her grasp. Past the Lars LaTreque Salon that always leaves its doors open in the summer so we can feel the air-conditioning blast as we walk by, hoping to entice us, but to me it seems like such a waste. Past Pildes Optical and Broadway Video with the NYU film student who works there, with his floppy curly hair and tortoiseshell glasses, who always has obscure art films put aside for me to rent whenever I come in and when I come back in to return them, he gives me a miniature lecture on their context and why they’re important in the canon and I always walk away a little high from our interactions and my mom swears to me that means the guy likes me, but I assure her there’s no way because I’m like half a foot taller than him. Past the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station, where Alexis and I saw male genitalia for the first time when a homeless man wearing pants that were essentially a glorified burlap sack exposed himself to us during a trip downtown to the New York Public Library for a research project on Sacajawea when we were in eighth grade. Past Gristedes, which Percy calls “Greasy Titties” and always smells like garbage in the dairy aisle. Past the Gap, which has been there so long no one even remembers anymore what was there before, and the newly opened Starbucks, which used to be a musty antiques shop that felt like the inside of an Édith Piaf song when it was in the commercial space of the small, squat brick building that used to be on this corner until it was demolished and replaced by a tall luxury building that was designed to look like the other buildings on the Upper West Side, with the limestone facades dotted with some lions’ heads and other silly flourishes, but instead looks like an imitation, which is what many of the buildings on the Upper West Side already are—the Apthorp and the Dakota and the Ansonia and the Beresford—all simulacrums of French architecture from the Belle Époque, so the new building is a bad imitation of a good imitation of an original, but I guess two hundred years from now no one will know the difference. Past the doorman of that tall building that replaced the squat brick one, who wears a uniform and pushes the revolving doors for the people who live there as they walk in. Past the sad, misshapen orange metal trash can I walk by every morning and every afternoon and every evening of every day on the corner that is somehow always, always overflowing, no matter what time of day or night. Across the street and through the traffic island where pigeons congregate to peck on some leftover chicken fried rice from white Styrofoam take-out containers, where I once observed them fight over a desiccated buffalo wing when I was stoned and I looked at Percy to confirm for me that he too was watching indigenous birds of the city losing their instinct against cannibalism, and it felt like the foretelling of an incoherent future world. Past the sidewalk splattered with yellow and white paint. And the brownstone with the stoop with one of the steps chipped and exposed. Past the small prewar building that always has inhumane rat traps out and I try to avoid walking past whenever I remember so I don’t have to hear the rats’ whimpering. Past another brownstone that has a stunning Christmas tree in the window every December, and every year, I stop to observe it from across the street, a better vantage point, and wonder whether the lives inside that charming brownstone really resemble the perfect version it looks like on the outside. Past the bodega, where on a random Tuesday afternoon five years ago, the cashier was shot point-blank in the head for three-hundred-some-odd dollars in the register, and even though my parents spent my first years of life with crack vials crunching under stroller wheels, for the first time they considered moving to the suburbs, and we spent every weekend for two months looking at very nice houses in New Jersey with proper lawns and swing sets and these things called garbage disposals that grind your food waste in the sink, but ultimately they decided that they couldn’t let go of their dream. Because the dream of a Brooklyn childhood isn’t making it to the ’burbs. The dream of a Brooklyn childhood is making it across that East River, excelsior to sky. Cross the street and walk past the housing project with a hand-painted mural of a sun with hands of all different colors that was painted a few weeks after Hands Across America and then the gated community garden maintained by our neighborhood association, where I sometimes go to read and sit under a pergola that’s on the verge of collapse because I don’t think the wood was ever properly treated to protect against the rain and it’s since been completely overrun by honeysuckle, but I take the risk anyway in the summer when they’re in full bloom and smelling so sweet. Past the playground where I would go every day after elementary school to play with my friend Sylvie, who lived in the projects down the block and who was deaf and always wore pink and purple plastic barrettes in the shapes of animals at the ends of her multiple pigtails and who taught me how to double Dutch and how to tie my shoelaces without using bunny ears, who spent hours and hours with me poring over the Sesame Street sign language book my mother bought from the discount bin at the library so I could communicate with Sylvie at least a little bit, even though she’d always giggle silently at my attempts, where I stopped going after I found out she’d moved away when I showed up one afternoon and she wasn’t there and I asked the other girls playing double Dutch where she went and they shrugged and told me she moved to some island, which I pictured in my head as tropical but later realized they must have meant Long Island, and it came as a complete surprise to me because that’s what happens when you’re friends with someone whose parents aren’t friends with your parents, they just up and move without even so much as a new address to maybe write letters to, and I spent the whole afternoon sobbing into my mother’s shoulder not just because I’d miss Sylvie, which I
would, but because instinctively I knew that there would be many friends in my life but not all of them would be true, and I know now there will never be another Sylvie, or another Alexis, or even another Percy for that matter, and all I can ever know for sure is the ball I’m carrying in my own hand against my hip as I run home and the hope that there will be someone I love to play with. Past a prewar and then another prewar, both with the acid-washed remains of old gang signs and tags. And then my building. Small and humble. With no doorman but a hollow-feeling lobby with distressed marble installed when the building was first built at the turn of the century. Metal mailboxes that are always getting jammed. Heavy wrought-iron-and-glass doors. And an elevator with the mahogany wood paneling of a coffin and an Art Deco metal plate with barely legible floor numbers and worn-out black buttons that you have to push down and hold in that position until you hear the whir of the motor of the elevator mechanism begin to work and you have to say a little prayer that the elevator will actually move and not get stuck, because we’ve all been stuck in it before and we can always count on a solid five hours of our lives wasted depending on the time of day because we have to wait until a neighbor gets home and can hear our yelling from the lobby in order to call the elevator servicing company to come and fix it, and inevitably it’s always this one guy named Victor, who is sort of dirty sexy in a young Al Pacino kind of way, but he has one long pinky fingernail on his right hand, and when he’s prying open the elevator doors with his crowbar and reaching his hand down to help pull you up and that one long nail accidentally scratches your skin it is deeply creepy, and you might spend the rest of your day shuddering at the sense memory of the coke spoon he’s grown on his body having scraped against your skin.