Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  “That’s perfect. Oh wow. So great. I think that’s all we need from you today, iO. Great job. We’ll be in touch.”

  I bumble my way through Queens to the train, miraculously make it home, and spend thirty-six hours asleep. My manager wakes me up two days later with a phone call to tell me the news: I got the job. It boggles me how, but I booked the McDonald’s worker.

  Frankie is sleeping in the little bedroom. She broke up with Victor and I caught her wandering on the street with a bottle of Jim Beam, on her way to some guy’s house in Brooklyn. She said she was couch hopping and depressed because she had nowhere to make music, so I pulled her upstairs, took away the booze, and moved her into the small room in our house. She’s been here for three months. Her room is a Zen zone, filled with candles and perfumes and bras and scarves draped over the harsh lamps. Mine looks like her teenage brother’s boy hole by comparison.

  My ma went to Puerto Rico, on her first trip out of the city since we went to Europe when I was little, so there’s a new sense of calm in the house. Lately, every time Ma goes out, Frankie and I try to do a little cleaning. It’s risky, because when Ma comes home, if she notices that we moved anything she’ll lose her mind, screaming and throwing things, until we bring all her stuff back and put it where it was. Today, however, I give no fucks at all; I want to make some headway with the piles of trash lying all over the floor.

  I go into Frankie’s room and lie down in her bed. She’s topless, fallen asleep with her laptop on her stomach while watching porn, hand in her thong. I close the computer and put it away.

  “Frankie. Wake up. Let’s clean this bitch.”

  She groans and reaches for her bong. Clearing her throat, my friend rolls over and takes a huge rip before getting up, rubbing her gigantic tits together and dropping them up and down a few times.

  Both of us in nothing but our underwear, we survey the house. Every room needs help, but since my ma is out of town, we take the opportunity to deal with her area. She has a soft spot for Frankie and her beautifying ways, so I’m not as scared to do it if Frankie is involved. Frankie also has a patience for my ma’s lunacy that I don’t. She moves things delicately and remembers where she put them in case there’s a frantic need to return them. I just want to throw everything into the trash and gut the place. The grime of it makes my skin crawl.

  We start by separating out the things that can be tossed and the things that absolutely have to be saved, then we try to find a place for those things that’s not on the floor. Then we sweep. To really get all the filth up, we have to get under my ma’s mattress, so we lift it off the ground.

  There, underneath her bed, I see an orange pill bottle.

  I pick it up.

  It’s a nearly empty prescription for something called Desoxyn.

  My stomach falls out. My intuition tingles, telling me this is big.

  Frankie carries on, unfazed.

  “What is it? Something fun?”

  My voice sounds muffled to my own ears. Far away. I’m doing that thing I did as a kid; I’m leaving my own body. I almost feel nothing. Frankie has no idea that anything is wrong, that just here on the other side of my thin skin is an emotional riot. My intuition is urgently begging me not to sit at the computer and google Desoxyn. But I do.

  Desoxyn is a central nervous system stimulant. The exact way it works is unknown. It controls the release of certain chemicals in the brain that affect mood, behavior, and appetite.

  Okay. That’s not much.

  Desoxyn® (methamphetamine hydrochloride tablets, USP), chemically known as (S)-N,α-dimethylbenzeneethanamine hydrochloride, is a member of the amphetamine group of sympathomimetic amines.

  Wait. What? Like Meth?

  METHAMPHETAMINE HAS A HIGH POTENTIAL FOR ABUSE. IT SHOULD THUS BE TRIED ONLY IN WEIGHT REDUCTION PROGRAMS FOR PATIENTS IN WHOM ALTERNATIVE THERAPY HAS BEEN INEFFECTIVE. ADMINISTRATION OF METHAMPHETAMINE FOR PROLONGED PERIODS OF TIME IN OBESITY MAY LEAD TO DRUG DEPENDENCE AND MUST BE AVOIDED. PARTICULAR ATTENTION SHOULD BE PAID TO THE POSSIBILITY OF SUBJECTS OBTAINING METHAMPHETAMINE FOR NON-THERAPEUTIC USE OR DISTRIBUTION TO OTHERS, AND THE DRUG SHOULD BE PRESCRIBED OR DISPENSED SPARINGLY. MISUSE OF METHAMPHETAMINE MAY CAUSE SUDDEN DEATH AND SERIOUS CARDIOVASCULAR ADVERSE EVENTS.

  No. Like prescription speed . . .

  Desoxyn has a high risk for abuse. Long-term use of Desoxyn may lead to dependence. Use Desoxyn only as prescribed and do not share it with others.

  Oh God. My skin cools. I’m trembling. My innards are separating. Frankie is singing along with the radio, dancing, stoned. I want her to know. I want to cry. But nothing happens. The only thing that moves is my mouse finger and a part of my brain that tells me to search for the side effects of mixing Desoxyn and alcohol. And then there it is . . . in plain, clinical English:

  Side effects from combining Desoxyn with alcohol include psychotic behavior.

  So . . . my mother isn’t insane . . . ?

  Jesus. Blurry images rush into focus: the years of yelling into my mother’s blank stares and her looking through me, all the times I’ve agonized over why my pain meant so little to her, why she would go on drinking in the face of our ruin, the insane hoarding, the manic mumbling, the twitches and sleeplessness, the endless walking, never knowing which version of her will come home at night, why she’s gutted me repeatedly with vicious verbal attacks, with her glassy black eyes and twisted lips, and why she remembers nothing after. Why there is now an impenetrable wall between us. Because it was never us, because it was never her. There it is. In the bottle in my hand. The visitor.

  Darkness pushes into my field of vision, blanketing, suffocating my thoughts and feelings. I push it away by spinning around and shouting to Frankie, “It’s speed. Should we try one?”

  “You’re shitting me. Okay, yeah!”

  We sweat for four hours, amped up like lunatics, scrubbing the place from top to bottom. Frankie pulls down a trunk from on top of the fridge and a shower of cockroach carcasses falls over her face. I stay low, scrubbing furiously. Anything not to think.

  When my ma comes back from Puerto Rico, the house is cleaner than it ever has been. I send Frankie out to greet her and tell her where all her precious treasures are. I don’t want to see her. All her freak-outs and lunacy. It’s all bullshit. The psychosis of a crankhead. She doesn’t need any of this shit. She isn’t getting better. She doesn’t even see me. I want her to be dead to me, but I love her too much. I can’t look at her.

  A VAST DISAPPOINTMENT SETTLES IN, one that I can’t describe in words. I don’t have a mother. She is gone. I have a child, another immature kid in distress. I don’t have a caretaker, I have a charge. I don’t have a home, I have a hovel. There has never been any room for me in this show, and now I finally know why.

  This breaks me all over again, profoundly. I’m disoriented and sluggish. I start to separate from myself on a daily basis. It lasts weeks, which seep into months. I stop seeing things in linear order. I spend my nights out of the house, experimenting with a stream of psychedelics that give me a way to address myself, a portal into feelings I can’t access without them. I feel homeless, more alone than I ever have, swimming in a city so much bigger than me. I taste a new kind of depression, and I finally understand why my ma stayed in bed for those months when we moved back to Third Street. It’s like a wave of sadness has broken over me and drowned my whole world. Every time I find a dry patch to plant roots in, the ground is soaked through.

  If the night ends alone, it ends in tears, knuckles swollen from beating on mailboxes and phone booths. I’m desperate to get it out, this tension and pressure in my chest, and the pain in my body forces a release.

  If I could only pin my hopelessness on a single cause. It would be easy to blame my ma for all of it, but I can’t. She is just trying to make it through her own graveyard of fantasy lives. Shattered dreams splinter into the sharpest shards, littering her forever.

  When I get angry with her, Billy floats into my mind,
visions of them together, running the streets in the seventies, him in leather, her in sequins. I feel the tenderness in her voice when she would tell me about their adventures, driving up to Boston for Christmas in a Camaro with no floor, snow and ice blasting up her skirt, her loving each second of it. She loved his every breath, how he shoveled snow in front of their storefront on St. Marks wearing nothing but biker boots. I imagine them performing together, him playing piano standing up, singing his heart out. I imagine her caressing the sutures where his collarbones once were, her favorite part of his body, while he lay unconscious, handcuffed to a hospital bed, his voice forever gone because they shot him in the throat. This was his drug, not hers. Her taking it was a way to remember him, before it made her forget everything else.

  How can I hate her?

  Chapter 44

  Black Eye

  New York City, November 2003 through October 2004

  POPPA HAS COME HOME TO STAY FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE I was six. Grandma Edie is getting too frail to care for herself and Pop’s job was coming to an end, so he moved into the top floor of the house where he was born, to take care of her.

  His twenty-three-year-old German love, Nina, has come with him. They married so she could have citizenship. He bought rings from a gumball machine in Chinatown and asked me to be the witness. I was thrilled to oblige. On the way to City Hall we stopped to pick lilies from a tree pit on Park Avenue for her. He grabbed my elbow and whispered, “I’m not only marrying her for papers . . . I really love her.”

  He was blushing and cute, like a teenager in love. I smiled and put my hands through his handsome hair. I’m happy for him.

  I’m burnt out on the skeeviness of the coke business and I don’t want to get arrested, so I’m taking odd jobs doing videography stuff, filing negatives for photographers, stuffing envelopes, trying to act.

  It’s coming up on Thanksgiving and I get offered a gig filming backstage at a fashion show in a church on the Lower East Side. I’m there before anyone else, poking around, observing, pointing my camera at anything interesting.

  Models start to saunter in like baby giraffes, beautiful but in an alien way, mostly from other countries, asking directions and instructions in broken English.

  They are predominantly teenagers, younger than me, with not much to say. They wait for someone to tell them what to do. Hair takes a frantic hour, makeup thirty minutes, dressing ten, then they sit around dangling cigarettes from endless fingers for two or three hours, listening to music, chattering away on cell phones.

  They fascinate me. I’ve always been taught to idolize these creatures, serenaded since I was tiny with glory stories of my ma’s days modeling for Vidal Sassoon, ordering a bowl of pure hot sauce at a table with Andy Warhol, walking the catwalk for God knows who in the seventies; but the truth is, these kids just look bored. And boring. Their conversations are mundane, debating whether tomatoes have calories, laughing thinly at bad jokes, telling stories of boyfriends who sound like meatheads. But I can’t deny the allure. There’s something magnetic about them, because the world lauds their beauty.

  The male models have it the worst. They don’t have hair to do, so they have to wait for almost five hours. One boy in particular fascinates me. He’s wearing a baseball hat with metal clips on the bill, his skinny arms covered in tattoos, with a fat chain tight around his neck, cinched with a padlock. He has too much energy for the room and no interest in the gossip or the girls, keeping his earbuds in and air-drumming through the tedium. I can tell he’s listening to punk or something heavy by the way he pounds the air and bounces his scrawny body.

  We catch each other’s eye, and I work up the guts to approach him. Improvising, I tell him I’m thinking about making a documentary about the reality of being a model versus what society idealizes it to be, and would he be interested in being in it. He’s nice, speaking slowly and clearly but with intelligence. He smiles at me, tells me his name is Jonathan. He shakes my hand like a gentleman. When I ask him for his number he rips a page out of his ninety-nine-cent composition notebook and writes down his landline, explaining that he doesn’t have a cell phone. I feel a flutter.

  It takes several weeks for me to realize how beautiful he is. I do a two-hour interview with him on my roof about his life and his dreams, then I follow him around one of his shows, sneaking a peek as he changes clothes, ribs jutting sideways as he slips out of pretentious designer jeans into his baggy shorts and Chucks.

  It happens gradually, over five or six hangs, but the day we lope down Twenty-second Street and discover an abandoned pier on the Hudson River, I start to realize I can’t get away from him. I love his dazzling California smile, his laid-back gait, the stories he tells about birds and the desert and the coast off Big Sur, adventures he’s taken down Route 1.

  I love that he wakes up early and rides his bike everywhere, that he lives in his head, that he stays quiet at parties and observes people. I love that he will vanish into the evening to wander alone, because parties cloud his conversation with himself. He goes out into the streets of New York to clear the signal.

  As I swing my body around a barbed-wire fence, following his six-foot-four frame into the darkness; as he sits looking out over Jersey, watching helicopters carrying rich people lift off from the West Side, I stare at the back of his head, his shoulders, his calves, and I realize I want him. I want him in a way I’ve never wanted a boy before. His pillow lips and big dark eyes, his perfect hairline. I want to kiss him and fall into him. I want to be his. Not just as an escape from shitty things I feel, but in a real way. As I look at his silhouette, I realize he is my match, my other half.

  I put a camera between us as much as I can, hiding my interest behind something vaguely professional, but the pretense of the documentary quickly gives way to best friendship. We spend every other day together, wandering the city, going to castings, watching movies, going to music shows, doing psychedelics and graffiti. He comes up with a tag, a simple, cursive I LOVE YOU, that lights up the town. People write articles about it and put it in movies. His noble approach pushes my crush into love.

  He says he wants to screen print, so I take him up to Edie’s and show him the family business. My pop teaches Jonathan how to make screens, how to hand-pull stripes, how to get a good layer of color, how to treat the fabric. I learn, too. He is ecstatic and impressed.

  Jonathan has a girlfriend, a model. She’s a six-foot bleach blonde who wears high heels every day. She’s a hippie from a commune in California. He says she’s “crazy” and “hot” and desperate to have his babies, which is nuts since they’re both only twenty-one. She was away for the first month Jonathan and I knew each other, and it was a big problem when she came back. She didn’t understand our friendship and got catty about us hanging out so much, always wanting to come along.

  When he tells me they fucked on the balcony of our secret pier, I want to throw up. Finally, I crystallize what I want: I want to be his girl. I wanted to fuck on that balcony when we were there, but he’s not interested in me. I’m awkward and weird, I’m scrawny and don’t wear thongs. I wear hoodies and sneakers. I skate. I’m one of the boys, even with hair down to my ass. I don’t register on his radar.

  He breaks up with the model a few months later because she’s pressuring him to “put a baby in her.” He gets into being single until he falls into it with a woman who is fifteen years older than him and even more desperate for a baby.

  He lives in a fifth-floor walk-up with three other guys in Chinatown. They turned the place into an art den, covering the walls in collages of bits of mirror, silver paint, and pull-up bars. I go there and sit on the couch, awkwardly, drawing and writing and waiting for Jon. They start a band, which is terrible, but I go to every show.

  I think I do a pretty decent job of hiding it, but he must know that I’m in love with him. He must.

  We are out tagging one night when the cops roll up on us in SoHo. I’m in charge of keeping watch, and out of nowhere, an unmarked
car speeds up the wrong way and jumps the curb, and three dudes start chasing us. I manage to shake them, but they all pile on Jonathan, bearing down on his lanky gait with their brawn and guns, tackling him and dragging him to the Tombs. I’m up all night, worried, waiting for him to call, but he doesn’t get in touch until the following evening. When he does, he says he got out that morning, called his new girlfriend, and went to her house to shower and sleep it off. I feel dumb, helpless, like a fish with a hook in my cheek.

  A year goes by like this, hoping, wanting, yearning for this boy.

  In the meantime, I’ve turned nineteen. I made a new friend, a Russian girl I call KGB, who looks like a buxom Kate Moss. She works at a bar two blocks from my house and we start doing psychedelics together at least twice a week. The rest of the nights, I go there and she serves me free drinks. When she gets off, at four thirty in the morning, we take a cab to her house and make out and roll around, only to wake up in the morning and act like it never happened. She has watched me openly sob in the streets because Jonathan went home with a girl or just went home without me. I spend her shift at the bar, writing stories on cocktail napkins, observing how every guy who comes in tries to hit on her and how she ices them out with a bitchy Russian wisecrack.

  A month in, she confesses that the first night we hung out she took her boyfriend into the back of the bar and broke up with him on the spot, telling him she wanted to explore being with me. That confuses the shit out of me, but gets me interested enough to lend her my drunken body whenever she wants it.

  Frankie and I are both still living at my ma’s house. Ma started dating a reggae singer who I suspect is a piece of shit. He’s got my ma convinced that he’s a star in Jamaica, and he’s always in the recording studio, but no one has ever heard of him and the Internet turns up nothing except a feeble Myspace page with some pictures of him in cheap sunglasses with some diamonds Photoshopped in. But my ma is in love, and she’s never home, which gives us free run of the place.