Temple and Randy catch the look on my face. “Uh-oh,” says Randy smoothly. “Somebody’s got a jealous streak.”
“Don’t worry about it, Charlie,” Temple tells me, patting my shoulder. She’s got henna tattoos on both hands today, swirling designs that wind around her knuckles. The minuscule bells hanging from her ears tinkle as she shakes her head. “There’s nothing there. She’s been playing here since she was, like, eleven.”
Linus comes out from the back, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her face lights up when she sees the stage. “Oh, man! Awesome. Have you heard Regan yet? She’s gonna blow you away. Riley loves her.”
Temple keeps patting my shoulder. Riley’s never said anything about this girl.
“Ladies and germs,” he murmurs into the mic. “Please welcome back True Grit’s favorite troubadour, our own sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, Regan Connor.”
Applause fills the café. There’s an eerie wind-down as the room gradually silences and grows attuned to her presence. When the café has stilled, she attacks the golden acoustic guitar with single-minded purpose, her fingers flying. She stands as though she’s staring a bulldozer down, her legs planted hard on the stage, one knee bent. Her voice is reedy, scratchy, and divine; she can control it enough to suddenly shift to a whisper or a growly bark.
You can’t break me down, she sings. You can’t cut me clear.
On the sloppy stage in the dim light she looks exuberantly defiant, and her words have rough, girlish hope. The crowd is rapt. Some people have their eyes closed. I look back at her, flooded with envy. She’s my age and so confident. She doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. Her voice is threatening and silky, floating over everyone in the café.
Regan is transporting the room; I watch them, one by one, fall for her.
You can’t break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can’t own my soul. What I have I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.
When she’s through, the audience roars; even the hip-hop poet shouts, “Dang, dog!” Riley uses two fingers to whistle; his eyes are wild with light. I look from Riley to the girl and then back again, anxiousness pinging inside me.
I’m always losing things.
The boxy warehouse sits snugly against the far lip of downtown, beyond the shiny buildings that rise and dominate the skyline. Pickup trucks and bicycles clog the wide gravel lot. A hand-painted sign by the double front doors lists artists’ studios and three galleries. I look at the ad in the Tucson Weekly one more time.
Linus went with me to buy the portfolio, a large, handsome envelope of leather. I used the last of my Ellis money. Linus whistled as I brought out the bills, but I didn’t tell her where the money came from.
I didn’t tell Riley I was coming here, either. Seeing him happy about that girl at the open mic, the way he talked about her on our walk home and how beautiful her voice was, and thinking of the way I never went to Ariel’s class because I didn’t want to spend any time away from him, made something wake up inside me, a spiteful, angry thing.
Watching that girl, her confidence. I wanted that. I wanted that.
I take a deep breath and enter the building.
The hallway’s dusty and cluttered. Some studio doors are open. In one, a small man is swiping yellowy paint repeatedly up and down a blank white canvas. His room is a mess of paint cans, rolled canvases, jars of murky liquid, books. A woman in the room next to his is bent over a tall table, her face pressed close to the paper she’s drawing on. Tendrils from spider plants dangle from the tops of her bookshelves. Salsa music drifts from a speaker at her feet. Other doors are closed; behind them I hear loud thumps, whirs, grinding noises. The air smells mechanical, plastery, and oily all at once.
The gallery at the end of the hall is sprawling and empty, my boots echoing against the shiny wood floor. There are no windows; the walls are bright white and bare. A boy, not much older than me, sits at a long table against one wall. When I walk closer, the table is actually an old door nailed to some two-by-fours. He’s typing away at a keyboard. He’s dressed like Beaver Cleaver from that old show. “Yes?” he says plainly. Not annoyed, but slightly dismissive.
He glances at my portfolio. “You have work to submit for consideration?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-uh. We can’t do hard. We wanted digital. You know, like images over email or on a website? Do you have anyone to take photographs for you or can you do it and scan them and send them?” He begins typing again but keeps his face on mine while his fingers dance.
I shake my head. “No, I just kind of thought—”
“No, sorry. You’ve got to follow the submission instructions.” He turns back to the monitor.
I turn to go, disappointed, thinking I’ll walk my bicycle back to my room instead of riding. It was hard to ride and hold the portfolio at the same time. My hand got sweaty, holding the portfolio against my bobbing thigh.
“Hey-oh, what do we have here?”
Ariel’s friend, the painter, is clutching a sheaf of papers and a gym bag, out of breath. Tony Padilla from the art show.
“I know you. Ariel pointed you out to me at my show. The girl dressed like a farmer. Did you like it?” He smiles expectantly. “My work?”
I swallow, considering. Wisps of dark hair curl from inside his nostrils. “Not really.”
He laughs, putting down his papers and bag. “You didn’t like it. That’s good! We don’t always like what we see, do we? We should always say so. Give me a look, yes? I see you’re old-school. I miss the days of toting a portfolio around.” He slides it from my grasp.
He spreads the portfolio out, kneeling to look at it. Today, he’s not dressed in an elegant suit. He’s wearing khaki shorts and Birkenstocks with socks and a sweat-stained T-shirt with a rabbit on it. His hair is no longer in a ponytail; it sprays across his shoulders like a black fan streamed with slivers of white.
“You submitting for the show?”
“I was, but that guy…”
“That’s my intern, Aaron. This is my little gallery. I’d like some new work by younger artists this time around. They tend to be interesting in different ways, you know?” He examines a portrait of Manny. “You have model permissions?”
“What?”
“Release forms. If people are posing for you, they need to sign releases agreeing to have their image shown in public. Aaron, print out some sample release forms. Do you have your résumé?”
I shake my head and he laughs. “I haven’t had you in a class, have I? There’s a great deal of proficiency here, and something odd, too. But I like them.” He peers closer to the drawings, lifting his glasses away from his face. “You’re in. Leave them here. I’ve got hours of videos and films and an installation of a childhood bedroom. And a nudist. But not one drawing. Not one painting. You kids today. If you can’t watch it, walk through it, or sit on it, you don’t want to make it.”
He zips the portfolio gently and hands it off to Aaron, who shoots me a quizzical look as he passes me the release forms. “Antonio Padilla. Tony.”
“Charlie.” His hand in mine is smooth and hairless, with fine, tapered nails and a single silver bracelet that knocks against his wristbone.
“Your people are…interesting.” Tony Padilla gazes at me curiously.
“They live in my building.”
He says, “Is that so,” holding his chin in one hand. “Bring one of my cards, too, Aaron?”
Tony sighs. “Well. We have a lot of work ahead of us, putting this show together. One thing I always tell my students, and it always surprises them, God knows why, is that an artist’s life is all about work. No one is going to do it for you. It doesn’t just appear on the page or on a gallery wall. It takes patience, it takes frustration.” He looks at the blank walls.
He laughs a little. “It takes spackling, nails, projectors, lights, bullshit, and long days. I expect everyone in the show to pitch in. I hope you’re not afraid of hard work, Ch
arlie.”
I can feel how big the grin on my face is. It practically busts my cheeks wide open. I haul mop water and bus tubs all night and clean up piss and shit in restrooms and now I’m going to have my work on walls, for people to see. Me.
“Nope,” I tell him. “I’m not afraid of work at all.”
Linus says, “That’s so great,” and claps her hands. She pauses. “I’ll bet Riley is psyched.”
I busy myself with the mop bucket, wringing out the grimy liquid from the mop. “Yeah, he’s super excited.” I keep my head down, in case the lie is written all over my face.
“Mmm.” Linus gets quiet. She scrapes the grill slowly. “I see. So how much is he up to these days?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much is he drinking? Some of his prep work has been a little, uh, a little sloppier than usual.” She pushes a bucket of scrambled tofu to me and I peek inside. Ashes are dotted along the ridges of the puffy yellow hills. I’m ashamed for him, even though I know I shouldn’t be. And I’m ashamed of myself.
He’s usually asleep when I get to his house, if he’s there, splayed on his velvet couch with a book across his lap, a lit cigarette still drooping in his fingers. The bottles disappear more rapidly from beneath the sink, are replaced just as rapidly. He seems to have stopped preparing for the Luis Alvarez benefit in the summer, the guitar in its case in the corner. The notebook of lyrics and sheet music is shoved under the couch. Sometimes he looks at me as though he can’t place me. I’ve started to come in and watch him and smoke his cigarettes until my own chest feels sooty and clogged. Once, his hand on the screen door as I went off to work, he looked at me and mumbled, “I miss you being here with me at night. Hard without you.” And that felt good, but sad, and those things tug-of-war inside me until I want to bury my head in the dirt.
I avoid Linus’s eyes.
“Charlie, I am an old, sober drunk. I’ve known Riley now for six years and I know his schedule.” She takes a deep breath. “He’s in a downward slide and in that slide, we users will take everybody we can down with us. Because if we land in shit, we don’t want to be alone in the shit.”
I stare at her. Linus, who’s always helping people, always cheerful, an alcoholic? I guess that’s why Temple never pours her anything to drink at night, now that I think about it. I try to picture her like Riley, but I can’t. And what she says kind of pummels me, about him taking me down with him. I tighten my grip on the mop, looking at the dirty water in the bucket, like I can find some answer there.
She says, sadly, “Listen, I don’t know much about you, and I don’t want to pry, and I also don’t want to judge, but staying with him is only going to be hurtful to you. I just have to say it. Can you see that, honey? Like, really see it?”
I jam the mop in the bucket and grab the broom, trying not to cry, because I know she’s right, of course she’s right, but I try to concentrate on my work, to push the anxiousness away. The band tonight was some sort of polka-punk trio who spewed confetti, and little bits are strewn everywhere. The tables in the seating area have been wobbly for so long, the newspaper underneath the legs is frayed and greasy-black. I should replace it soon.
“He’ll be better. I know it.” I avoid her eyes, swipe at my own like it’s just sweat and not tears. “I can help him. You shouldn’t just give up on people.”
“Charlie,” Linus says glumly, “I’ve been in recovery for years. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that, I’d be a rich woman, and not working in some half-ass coffeehouse.”
This city is dry and stifling hot. Everyone keeps telling me I’ll get used to it, that I’ll grow to love it, that the winter will cool down a little, but the sun is a giant ball of fire that doesn’t quit. Just biking from my apartment to the library downtown leaves me in a full sweat, with the underarms of my shirt soaked and my bike seat wet.
There are nine new unread messages from Mikey. It’s like I’m starving him out and I don’t know why. I don’t have anything from Blue, but I write to her anyway, just one word, Hey. It’s like reaching out to get a grip before you fall off a cliff, but no one is there.
But the last email from Mikey catches my eye. The subject line says birthday/a while longer. I click it open and read it.
You probably heard by now about me and Bunny. It’s crazy, I know. We are going to be out on the road a little longer now—at least until November. I’m taking a leave from school. We’re going to do that album up in N. California. There’s a record deal, Charlie. I didn’t want to be without Bunny any longer, and things just seemed right. When I get back, I have something really important to talk to you about. And hey, it’s okay that you haven’t written back. I understand. I hope you are okay. And, Charlie: happy birthday.
I stare at the word: birthday. Then I close down my mail and leave the library.
It takes me a good forty minutes to find the right place on my bicycle. I have to ride deep into South Tucson to find what I want. When I find it, a shabby little panadería that smells like sheer heaven, I choose the most cream-filled, icing-topped confection behind the smudged glass of the pastry case. After studying the coffee list, I ask for a café de olla. I sit in a sticky chair by the window, the sweetness of the pastry collecting in my mouth, the creamy, caramelly drink warming my hands. I wonder what Mikey wants to tell me that’s so important he couldn’t just say it on email. Maybe Bunny’s pregnant. Maybe Mikey is about to have his perfect life with kids and a wife and a rock band and everything he’s ever wanted, while I’m dehydrated and tired and should be drinking water, but I’m not, I’m drinking coffee, spending seven dollars and sixty-eight cents to wish myself a happy fucking eighteenth birthday that I’d forgotten all about.
I ride down to the gallery every morning and help Tony and Aaron with the show. The other artists are older than me, in their late twenties and thirties. Tony has them experiment with the placement of pieces while he walks around, rubbing his chin and thinking. He’s decided not to frame my drawings, but to mat them simply. Tony was right: there are plenty of installations, including someone’s childhood bedroom, right down to a complete set of My Little Pony figurines and her original ballet shoes paired with her adolescent Docs and fishnets. Someone else has spliced found video footage together: on one wall plays an endless loop of people and dogs jumping from diving boards. The colors are washed and dreamy; the jumpers seem to leap through thickets of watery sunshine, pasteled sky. A man with one half of his head shaved and the other in a tall Mohawk has glued eighteen beach balls together in a pyramid and painted crude words on each one. One woman kind of has paintings, but there isn’t any actual paint on the canvas. Instead, she’s glued squirrel pelts, crow feathers, and chunks of her own hair to the canvas.
A thin, angry-looking woman named Holly plans to lie nude on the floor. “I’m my own exhibit,” she explains to me, crunching her black thumbnail between her teeth. “Just having to confront the fact of my presence will be overwhelming for most people.”
I don’t really understand how the woman’s piece will work (what if someone touches her? What if she has to go to the bathroom?), but when I look over at Tony, he winks and whispers to me, after the woman has stomped away, “Holly’s thesis defense is going to be spectacular. For all the wrong reasons, but spectacular nonetheless.”
They use words and phrases like theory and actualized identity and constructed identity and core fragmentation. When Holly saw me with my sleeves pushed up, she said angrily and earnestly, “You need to understand and examine your transgressions against societal norms.” She gripped my wrist. “Do you understand the act you’ve committed against yourself is fucking revolutionary? I’m going to make you a reading list tonight. You have so much to learn.”
I memorize what they say as I wander the gallery, following Tony’s instructions, moving things this way and that, my hands covered in little white gloves, like Mickey Mouse. I think, no, I know that some of them are laughing at my drawings and me. They snicker at
Hector and Manny’s lumpy faces and bad teeth, Karen’s hopeful smile. And when I leave, I go to the library and search for all their terms and words and phrases, working my way through them.
I don’t want them to think I’m stupid, but I also don’t want to be stupid, that’s why I take the time to learn their language.
And when I look at my arms, I don’t think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.
The next time I see Holly, though, I do think asshole, and that makes me smile all day.
Temple passes me the phone. “Hurry up, okay?” she whispers. “We want to make it to the Tap before last call.” I look at her enviously; all the girls here go out together at night after work, to bars, to parties; they never ask me to go along. I’ve been trying to talk more with them, but their group seems tight. I’m too young, anyway, to go to bars. Only Linus seems interested in me, mostly in a motherly way, pushing plates of potatoes and bowls of lentils to me across the grill island. Linus does not go out with the girls. Sometimes she’ll tell me she’s headed to a meeting after work. “Addiction isn’t nine to five,” she’ll call out cheerfully. “You can feel like shit twenty-four seven. That’s partly why I work all these shifts. Have to keep busy, keep the demons at bay.”
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