Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  “Wait a minute.” Nick put all the papers in with my clothes and picked up the bag. “Show these to Melissa. She’ll be dead impressed. Speaking of which, you should just stay at Melissa’s permanently. If you got rid of this bedsit, you wouldn’t have to busk so much.”

  “Well,” I admitted, locking the door to my room, “she has asked me.” We stood outside.

  “You’re over there all the time anyway. I want you to stay in London. I’d go spare if you ever left. D’you know what I mean?”

  We stopped at a café for fried egg sandwiches and chips then got on the tube and took my things to Melissa’s flat.

  “Ta for helping me,” I said.

  Nick tucked the dark-green St. Christopher medallion she always wore into the neck of her fuzzy, black-and-gray striped jumper. She zipped up her sturdy, black cotton jacket and left to meet up with some mates.

  I started Blu-Tacking the pictures I’d brought to the walls of Jake’s room. The recording equipment was set up in there, and I figured I might as well make it as conducive to creative musical thought as possible. I’d photocopied and laminated black-and-white Kurt Cobain photos from Charles Petersen’s book Screaming Life and had other pictures from Steve Gullick and Stephen Sweet’s book Nirvana, magazines like Rolling Stone and the NME and a few gorgeous ones in neon-bright colors by photographer Michael Lavine: Kurt with Day-Glo pink hair and Kurt in a bluish tinge with a cherry-red Epiphone. I put the picture of Kurt in torn jeans, sneakers, and a flannel shirt, with his fist against his head, looking like he was having a complete mental breakdown right on the door.

  I had a rare picture of Kurt playing a Gibson SG and a few of him with Telecasters, the guitars of choice for Chrissie Hynde and Joe Strummer. There was a battered, black Telecaster with a black pickguard and a beautiful, slim, bird’s-eye-maple custom neck listed at two hundred quid in one of the guitar shops I frequented, but I called it “the guitar with the thousand-dollar neck.” If I could save enough money from busking, I was going to buy it.

  Melissa had let me print out photographs from her computer onto photo paper, and I hung those up, too. My favorite was one I’d found of Chrissie Hynde in a blue denim jacket, PETA T-shirt, and cowgirl hat being arrested in New York City at a PETA demonstration. Her shirt said, “Fighting Animal Abuse All Around the World.” I’d been wearing the same T-shirt the last time I’d seen her. That was the concert where I hung onto the front of the stage and she was right above me, and for two solid hours everything in my life made sense. For the encore, she’d come out with a dazzling, sparkly-gold Telecaster that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Even the headstock was gold. And I had a picture of her much younger in her trademark red zipper jacket and black boots in Paris. I had a photo of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones onstage looking somberly out into the rain; the Jam performing in a downpour; Patti Smith with her wild mane of hair, now with a touch of gray; Davey Havok; Ann and Nancy Wilson; and a Who poster from Carnaby Street.

  I heard Melissa at the door. When she came upstairs and looked into my room, I said, “I’m afraid you’ll get sick of me.”

  “I won’t get sick of you. What I’d like is the opportunity to see you enough to get sick of you.” Melissa mussed up my hair.

  “I brought over my Nirvana bootlegs.”

  “Then at least I know you’re not gonna disappear,” she said wryly.

  “I think we ought to tell Nick about our relationship. It’s too hard not telling her, and if she finds out later, she’s bound to be really hurt. I feel like I lied to her today when I said you wanted me to move in but didn’t say why. And I can’t do that.” Melissa bowed her head, the floor lamp lighting up her hair like a halo, and I continued, “I don’t mean to pressure you. But you’ve been mates a long time, and I don’t want anything coming between you. That would be devastating for everybody.”

  “This is going to sound daft, but I feel like if I tell her about our relationship, I’ll fall apart and she’ll know I was raped.”

  “She can’t possibly know that,” I said. “You’re just feeling self-conscious having so many feelings resurface. And if you want her to know but don’t want to tell her or can’t, I’ll be happy to talk to her. I will.”

  “You know it’s not because I’m ashamed of you or anything like that, right? It’s not because you’re a woman. It’s that we haven’t—and I don’t know if I can. And I feel so vulnerable, like I’ll split open if I tell her.”

  “She doesn’t have to know each intimate detail. She just needs to know we’ve started seeing each other romantically.” I started unpacking my clothes.

  Melissa picked up the copy of Outweek. She glanced at the magazine and gave a hint of a smile, sitting down on the bed. “I heard about this.”

  So you did have an inkling of me, I thought.

  Jesse Helms had wanted to quarantine people with AIDS. The refrigerator in his office had a large sticker that said “Keep the Refrigerator Beautiful,” and I remember thinking, the man who wants to put people with AIDS in concentration camps has a clean refrigerator. My “Helms = Death” poster broke the Xerox machine when I tried to make ninety-nine copies of it and his big, fat, right-wing head got caught in the paper feed. I scattered a box of forty tampons all over his office and said I was campaigning for rights for the unfertilized. The US Capitol Police dragged us away, and I spent the afternoon handcuffed to a metal ring screwed into the wall of a police station. There wasn’t much of a view, so I stared at the words engraved on the silver handcuffs, “Property of US Capitol Police,” and tried making new words out of the same letters. Type, clap, lice, lip. Then I tried making a sentence. Pope foe of clit. The officer, who was using one finger to type up my citation, asked if I knew the name of the woman on Senator Helms’ staff who had phoned the police. I told him her name was Eva Braun, and he typed out the name of Hitler’s girlfriend while I spelled it for him. When I was finally released, I stepped out of the police station and it was raining so hard the car alarms were going off in the parking lot. I remembered shivering in my wet sneakers and ACT UP/DC cap, drying off the black-and-white “Earn Your Attitude—ACT UP!” button pinned to my black sweatshirt.

  I told Melissa how I’d been one of a group of seven ACT UP women from DC and New York who were invited to give a presentation on women and AIDS to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, and his staff after we got arrested there. I wanted her to know that I, too, had done something medical. I hoped she’d be impressed and think we had even more in common. “How can medical doctors, even male ones, not understand lesbian sex when they supposedly know how a woman’s body works and where everything is?” I asked.

  “It’s a failure of the imagination,” Melissa said.

  I had arranged some personal items around the room to make it feel more like mine: a pin made out of a piece of green fencing that surrounded RAF Greenham Common from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp; my purple “Don’t Do It, Di!” badge from the marriage of Lady Diana; a light blue badge that said “I Have been Certified Handicapped by Dr. Runcie” from the time the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that gays weren’t sick, they were only handicapped; lavender, red, and yellow 999 badges; and pens from the London bookshop Gay’s The Word that said, “This Pen Belongs to a Homosexual.”

  I glanced around the room and asked Melissa nervously, “Are you sure it’s alright?”

  “It’s brilliant,” Melissa kissed me, “and I’m so happy that you’re here. Harriet was right.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “You know,” she said.

  TRACK 36 Girl’s Not Grey

  “Nicky, I talked Amanda into moving in with me,” Melissa said. The three of us were sitting in the Horse and Groom to celebrate the six-month extension of my visa. “She’s in that parky bedsit, you know. I put her in Jake’s old room.”

  “Tha
nk God. It’s about bloody time.” Nick turned to me. “Now you won’t have to go back to the States.”

  “And Nicky, your room is always there whenever you want it. But I don’t think you fully understand the situation.” Melissa glanced at me quickly. “Amanda could only extend her visa for another six months. You can’t live in the UK more than twelve months on a tourist visa, which is what she has. But we think we’ve sussed a way around it. There’s something called the Unmarried Partners rule. If Amanda lives with me for two years, she can apply to stay in Britain if we say we’re partners. Unmarried, same-sex partners. Do you know what I mean?”

  Nick nodded. “That’s brilliant. I didn’t know we had that here. But will there be any problem with you not being a lesbian? Should we say she’s my partner?”

  “Uh—” I cleared my throat, “Melissa has the financial resources and the space. She’s kind of sponsoring me, you know, saying she’ll be financially responsible so I won’t rely on public funds. And we really have got to live together. They check. We have to provide evidence we’re in a real relationship.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Nick said quietly. She turned defensively to Melissa. “And that’s a problem for you, is it? You have a problem with pretending to be gay? Is that why you both look so tense? Because if it is—”

  “No, sweetheart.” Melissa gripped Nick’s hand reassuringly. “That’s not a problem for me.”

  “So everything’s alright then, yeah?” Nick looked to me for confirmation.

  “We’ll be living as same-sex partners,” Melissa said.

  Nick shrugged. “Who cares what you do if Amanda can stay? Just be openly affectionate. You already are. Are you afraid of what people will think? Your mates? Are you worried about your practice? I know it’ll be hard on you, living a lie an’ all that, but if it means Amanda can stay—please, Melissa, you’ve got to do it. Are you afraid it’ll fuck up your love life? Just date that bloke you’ve been seeing in secret. Say it’s like Romeo and Juliet or something. Make it all sound romantic and clandestine. He’ll go fer it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Melissa said patiently. “I broke up with Martin. Amanda and I want to live as unmarried partners.”

  “Then it’s alright. Keep your personal life private. You can do that.”

  “No.” Melissa shook her head. “You still don’t get it. We’ll be unmarried partners. We are unmarried partners.” Nick continued to look confused. Finally Melissa said, “Nicky, Amanda and I have been seeing each other.”

  “What?” Nick stared at her incredulously.

  “I thought you might have guessed with Amanda spending so much time at mine.”

  “Wait. What?” Nick was utterly mystified. “What do you mean you’re seeing each other? As in dating? You’re not gay, Melissa, are you?”

  “I’m not. I mean I wasn’t. Not till just lately. I mean, I never was before.” Melissa studied her pint of real ale. “Nicky, I can’t believe this never occurred to you.”

  “Me? It didn’t occur to me?” Nick said emotionally, rising from her seat. “Well, it didn’t. I don’t know what to say. I’m absolutely gobsmacked.”

  “I’ve never had these feelings for another woman before,” Melissa said. “It’s caught me by surprise.”

  “Caught you by surprise?” Nick said with a tremor in her voice, falling back into her chair, her eyes reddening. “How could you not have told me?”

  “I am telling you. This just happened,” Melissa said. “This really never occurred to you?”

  “No,” Nick said. She looked down at her hands on the table. I saw a tear land on her wrist. “I’m going back to mine.” She stood up falteringly. Melissa instinctively jumped up and put out a hand to grab her because she seemed so unsteady, but Nick stepped out of her reach.

  “Hang about, you don’t have to go. Wait.” Melissa hurriedly shrugged on her black denim jacket over the bright-red university sweatshirt she’d borrowed from me. “We’ll take you.”

  I followed them out. We started walking up Heath Street toward the tube.

  Melissa put her hand on Nick’s arm. “Are you sure you want to leave it like this?”

  Nick wavered, and the three of us sat down on the curb across from Hampstead station. Nick played nervously with the black zippers that zigzagged across the legs and pockets of her white trousers.

  Melissa said, “We didn’t mean to hurt you. I never meant to hurt you.”

  And I said hesitantly, “Is it that—do you have feelings for Melissa? For me?”

  “For fuck’s sake.” Nick looked like she would dissolve from embarrassment.

  “It’s okay if you do,” I said. “We can talk about it. We can talk about anything. The two of you were best mates long before I ever came along. I didn’t mean to do anything behind your back.”

  “And I would never come between you and Amanda,” Melissa said. “I know the two of you are very close.”

  “Jesus.” Nick looked so uncomfortable I thought she would burst into tears. “I can’t get me head round it, can I?”

  “There’s nothing we can’t talk about,” Melissa echoed me.

  “Bloody hell, I know it’s got nowt to do with me.” Nick looked at Melissa. “But I never thought you could be a lesbian. I always thought of you as intractably straight.”

  “Intractably? Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Melissa slowly gave a half-smile and I wanted to kiss the delicate creases at the corners of her mouth.

  “I know I should be happy for you but it’s just too weird, innit?” Nick said.

  “Let’s go back to mine,” Melissa offered.

  We walked back to the flat, Nick and Melissa slightly ahead of me, as I watched Melissa’s hips sway in black drainpipe trousers. The streetlight glinted off shiny silver rows of pyramid studs on her bright-red tartan belt. I heard her say, “It’s really my fault. Amanda wanted to tell you straight away. It came about so suddenly. I didn’t know how to handle it.”

  I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Waiting for the water to boil, I put PG Tips into three cups and hung my blue denim jacket over a chair. It had the Clash back patch Nick had given me after I’d admired hers and the upside-down American flag sewn under it, on which I’d scrawled, “Jail War Criminal Bush.”

  I brought the tea into the sitting room as Nick said, “You don’t understand. You’ve been the one stable woman in my adult life. It’s not that I’m sexually attracted to you, but you’re not just a friend either. D’you know wha’ I mean? But you’ve got your nice life and Amanda here. Wha’d you want me hangin’ about for? I’m an emotional fucking disaster next to you. Emilia pisses off, and I fall apart. Jake leaves—I fall apart. But you’re alright. You never stumble.”

  “Stop idealizing me,” Melissa said. “It isn’t fair. I don’t just stumble. I fall over.”

  “Yeah? Well, you never show it. At least not to me.” Nick opened and closed the zipper on the right leg of her trousers. “After Jake left, you seemed—distant. I thought maybe you didn’t want me around as much now we were just the two of us. But then that night—when I was attacked—you really came through for me. And I thought, yeah, she really does care about me.”

  “Of course I bloody care about you,” Melissa said. “Oh, honey, is that what it is? I’m sorry I seemed distant. Nothing changed in my feelings towards you. I had my own shit going on at the time.”

  “You never said,” Nick offered glumly.

  “I have a hard time showing that part of myself. It was something—personal.”

  For a second I thought she was going to tell Nick about the rape, and my stomach lurched. But then she said, “It had nothing to do with you. I’m so sorry I ever made you feel like I didn’t care. That’s bollocks, and it would never be true. And I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could come to me about it.” She got up and sat next to Nick. “I must h
ave really hurt you.” She put out her hand to touch Nick’s hair. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “Now you’re taking the piss,” Nick accused her.

  “No, love, I swear I’m not. I’m being sincere. Please forgive me. And please stay here tonight. I’ll never sleep if I don’t know you’re okay.”

  After Melissa convinced Nick to spend the night and we’d gone upstairs, I said, “I thought for a second you were going to tell her about the rape.”

  “No,” Melissa said, and the flash in her eyes told me not to push it any further, “I wasn’t.”

  The first sentence of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies popped into my head. “And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?” And as I got into bed, softly I recited:

  “Ah, who can we turn to,

  then? Neither angels nor men,

  and the animals already know by instinct

  we’re not comfortably at home

  in our translated world.”

  TRACK 37 Godspeed

  Melissa had got out The Patti Smith Masters box set and was relaxing in the back lounge after work. She’d put on the first CD, Horses, and Patti Smith’s lesbian rendition of “Gloria” was just ending as I came into the room. Patti’s voice made me feel confessional, and I wanted to tell Melissa about the voices in my head.

  “That song certainly sounds different now,” Melissa said dryly, “hearing it with lesbian ears.”

  I sat down beside her on the settee as Patti Smith recited the introduction to the next song, “Redondo Beach,” “Redondo Beach is a beach where women love other women.”

  “That made me feel tingly and scandalized when it came out in 1975,” I said. “Since we’re listening to Patti Smith and she makes me want to spill my guts, there’s something else I want to tell you.”

  “You mean besides being off yer head and listening to Oasis?” Melissa smiled at me.

  “Yes. I should wait until we get to Radio Ethiopia. That album describes it best.”