My high school had offered a free class per semester, so I had taken a couple at New School University, but they ultimately felt like a waste of time when I could be learning on the job, so I opted out of college and started a magazine about street art instead. It was growing and needed a home.
I’ve dated some people, curated some art shows, and I’m starting to find a community in the art world. I’ve even got ten people working for me who are all older than me, but no matter what I do, I can’t shake my love for Jonathan, which has dragged on for nearly three and a half years now. I’m twenty-one.
Finally, this past Christmas, I did what any smart girl would have done years ago: I brought another boy home.
I threw my annual Wayward Kids Christmas Party at Edie’s house, with Jonathan, Frankie, Naima, KGB, our new friend Devin—a Canadian import dipped in tattoos—and twenty other Jews, Muslims, Europeans, and orphans. We cooked a feast and danced the night away.
I spent most of it making out, very publicly, with a boy named Max, a painter living in Barcelona, home for the holidays. Eighteen people slept over, three to a bed, and in the morning I made them all blueberry pancakes and espresso. When we walked through Central Park to go ice skating, I was sure to hold Max’s hand. I should have known . . .
Two weeks later Jonathan’s best friend sat me down and told me he was pretty sure things were about to change, that I was about to get some good news. All of our friends are painfully aware of my love for Jon. Some of them think we’re Romeo and Juliet, some of them think I’m stupid and idealistic; either way, they just want it to happen already so I’ll stop pining.
Jon called me from California, his voice soft. He flirted with me, painting sunsets with his deep baritone. He told me he missed me and was eager to see me, flooding my system with endorphins.
When he got back, our posse went to a bar near my house. My chest was tight with nerves, so I sat by myself and drew a portrait of his back on a cocktail napkin as he talked to someone else. I took in his tanned skin, how he’d let his curls grow out an inch, how his eyes crinkled at the sides when he smiled.
I sat next to him, finally, and he rested his leg against mine, warming my whole body. We talked about records and whiskey and the glory of psychedelics. He was flirting with me and it was making my head feel like a balloon.
Frankie saw it and cornered me in the bathroom, hands fluttering and shrieking with excitement. She clomped around, daubing on lipstick and pissing with the door open.
I left the bar early, but offered for him to stay at my place that night if he didn’t want to bike home drunk. He smiled. I couldn’t look him in the eye for fear he’d see straight through me to the bottom of my heart and get freaked out by my enthusiasm. He said he’d call when they were done, for sure.
I went home and cleaned my room, slowly but with conviction. I stacked my notebooks, straightened my shelf of clothes, put my sneakers in a straight row. I lit a candle and put on some underwear I felt sexy in.
An hour later, my dream lover was in my bed. In the darkness, I could see the outline of his bony frame as he positioned himself above me and put his mouth on mine. I almost cried when I felt his scruff against my face. I had been waiting so long for this, I couldn’t believe it was happening.
It was tender and sweet. He was just as nervous as I was, and our bones tangled together awkwardly. We were graceless but hungry for each other, determined to figure it out.
In the morning we got coffees from the deli and sat on the stoop, smiling sheepishly, my legs draped over his. He kissed me when he left, and I watched him ride away on his bicycle, heart thumping in my chest.
A few days later we met up at Edie’s and he drove me downtown in his friend’s Porsche. We drove through Times Square with the top down and I watched the fluorescent lights twinkling in the dusk, feeling hard pressed to imagine something more romantic.
He took my hand in his rough fingers and told me he was feeling torn; he had made plans to go on a trip around the world, starting in Mali and on to Asia. I asked him why that made him feel conflicted. He said because he also wanted to stay and be with me. I was calm.
“Jonathan, I’ve been waiting for this for four years. You think I’m gonna disappear in six months while you’re on the trip of a lifetime?”
He looked at me with something I’d never seen before—relief, respect, admiration, gratitude. I told him to go, by all means, to do what he needed to, just if he fucked any girls to please double bag it. He squeezed my hand tighter and leaned over the gear stick and kissed me.
We packed up his apartment in Red Hook, a tiny place overlooking the bay, and rode our bikes back to the city.
He has two pet finches he keeps in a wrought-iron cage, which he’s been teaching to say “I love you.” When he leaves the house he puts a tape on repeat that says it over and over. I think it just makes them crazy. One is blue and one is green, Blue Pea and Green Pea, and he loves those fucking birds. I can’t stand them. I can’t stand any birds. I have a legitimate phobia and it even extends to his tiny creatures.
He asked me to take care of them while he’s gone, and I regretfully told him he was dreaming. I’d never be able to come close enough to the cage to feed them, so he asked my ma, which I thought was a bold move. Jon’s become a part of our family over the years, so she agreed, but the whole thing makes me nervous.
Jonathan left on his tour of the world, but something happens when you cut people loose—they want to be near you. He e-mailed me from Mali and told me he would come join me in Paris for Valentine’s Day. I’m doing a play and we’ll be rehearsing there for all of February. He’s been gone for three weeks already. By the time I see him, it will have been five.
I’m living on a cloud. I feel like I’ve finally accomplished something I’ve been waiting my whole life for: I have a man, a beautiful, kind, wild one. I use any excuse to show people photos of him, to mention “my boyfriend.” It feels weird to be on the right side of normal, to be just another straight girl, but my gay side keeps me comfortably couched in weirdness, even if it’s hidden for now.
I’M SITTING AT A beautiful marble table in a room filled with interns on the ground floor of Edie’s house when the sleek black phone rings.
“Overspray magazine.”
“My bud.”
“Yo, Ma, what’s up.”
“My bud . . . I gotta tell you something about Blue Pea . . .”
“Oh God . . . What happened, Ma?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know!”
“Is she okay?”
“Well, no. She’s dead.”
“What?!”
“She’s fuckin’ dead! Little sweet creature. I came in and I looked in the cage and Blue Pea was just tottering, like she was fainting, and I saw that the food dish was empty and I says, ‘Oh my GOD,’ and I ran down the street to find a pet store. I found one on Second Street, and it was one of Rafik’s brothers, because you know, they have a syndicate, hahaha, and I got the bird food and ran back. As I’m running to the window to the birdcage, the little bird keels over and falls face-first into the food dish, which is empty. So I put the food in the dish, and put his face right in the food. But it was too late. But the other little bird—and those two birds were in love! They would clean each other all day, and feed each other from the, you know, how they have the food in the throat thing, and um, they were just completely in love. They were lovebirds—and when the other bird just fell flat over, and the food came to the dish, the other little lovebird pushed him aside, even though the other little bird is fucking dead, and started eating the food. You know, like that’s cold-ass nature right there. It was over. And she pushed the other bird aside and started eating the fucking food and that’s it. And went on, ya know?”
“Ma! Blue Pea is fuckin’ dead?!”
“Yeah! Yeah! I took the other little dead bird and I says, ‘What the fuck? Oh my God,’ you know, it was just too much that I’m in charge of the bird and the bird just fucking di
ed. And Jonathan is in love with his two birds, Blue Pea and Green Pea, and I says, ‘Oh, what the fuck am I gonna do? Let me go and see if I can find another bird that looks exactly like this.’ So I put the bird in a plastic bag and I went to Petco, on the upper side of the Fourteenth Street park. And I walked in and the kid that works there, you know, the little Puerto Rican teenage boy who works there, says, I opened the plastic bag and showed him the bird and I says, ‘Do you have a bird with this exact coloring? That looks exactly like this?’ He says, ‘Mmm, I don’t think so. Go look over there.’ I says, ‘When you getting in more birds?’ He says, ‘In two weeks.’ I says, ‘Oh shit, that’s too late.’ And I went and I put the bird in the freezer, in the plastic bag, so I could go to another pet store the next day.”
I’m dying of laughter at this point, tears coming out of my eyes. I’ve put her on speakerphone, and the editorial staff is gathered around the phone. It’s not funny, but she took the carcass to the pet store in a plastic fucking bag?!
“Wait, Ma, when did this happen??”
“A few days ago.”
“A few days ago? And you’re only telling me now?”
“Yeah.”
Tears are streaming down my face. I can’t stop laughing. She starts giggling, too.
“Stop fuckin’ laughing, iO! It’s not funny!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. So then what?”
“The next day, I put the bird in my bag and during the day sometime I went to [sneezes] Fourteenth Street and Avenue C, there’s another pet, whatever it’s called, Petland. And I go in the back where the parakeets are. And I show the kid that’s working there the bird and ask if he’s got a bird that looks like this, and he says, ‘Mm, there’s something close like that. Go over there and take a look.’ And there was one that was the right color, it was the blue one, but it had the wrong pattern, like the black edging. Cuz Blue Pea had, like, white and black edging, and it goes in little scallops on the edge of the feather. But this one had, like, just black edging in perfect scallops, and Blue Pea had a variation on the tips of his feathers, with black and white, and maybe a little yellow or cream in there, on the very tips of the feathers. You know the edging, like scallop kind of thing. And so I was like, oh God, you know, so I’m calling you.”
It’s impossible to breathe, I’m in stitches.
“Stop fuckin’ laughing! This is horrible! You can’t tell Jon!”
“Okay, Ma. I won’t.”
“Also the kid, the Fourteenth Street kid, he told me, ‘Well, if you get another bird for the mate, the bird that’s left alive, they’re gonna fight the other bird. So you have to keep the new bird in a cage next to the first bird for like two fucking months, so that they get used to each other’s presence, otherwise the first bird is gonna fight the new bird and kill it, if it just comes into the cage. You don’t do it like that. You have to get them acclimatized by being in two separate cages next to each other.’ So I says, ‘Two fucking months! I don’t have that kinda time.”
“No. We have to do something before then, Ma. You have to tell Jon.”
“No! I feel terrible!”
“Okay, Ma, okay.”
“He’ll never speak to me again! Or he’ll try to kill me or something. I killed his beloved bird. Fuck.”
“Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll handle it.”
“Okay . . . Also, my bud, I’m competing in the Mister Lower East Side Pageant at the Bowery Poetry Club tonight. I want you to come.”
“The Mister Lower East Side pageant?”
“Yeah! These fuckin’ yuppie fucks around here don’t know dick about the Lower East Side! I’m the realest fuckin’ deal there is around here, and I’m gonna fuckin’ show ’em! So what!”
I can’t hold it together to speak, I’m laughing too hard.
“All right? And if you got a problem with that, you can take it to the fuckin’ mayor kiss-ass himself. I’ll see you there, okay? Bye.”
She hangs up and I collapse onto my desk, dying, the entire office belly laughing at the absurdity of the bird corpse in the bag.
THAT NIGHT, FRANKIE AND I arrive to find the Bowery Poetry Club miraculously sold out. It’s a local mainstay for disgruntled loners and frustrated poets. I explain that one of the performers is my mother, and they let us squeeze onto the stage.
The pageant is broken down into three categories: talent, swimwear, and eveningwear. We sip cheap beers as a parade of men come out, doing everything from the expected juggling or singing bullshit, to the weirdly unexpected, like the old man whose talent is to appear buck naked, bend over, and show the audience the inside of his asshole. The only other woman in competition also comes out naked, and fills a jug with her piss. Cheap. Then comes my ma, introduced as “Esqueleto!”
She appears from backstage holding Frankie’s fold-up keyboard table, wearing her full-length black trench coat, Ali G goggles up on her head, and a do-rag. Two pieces of black tape cover her nipples, and she’s wearing basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a belt with a giant sparkling weed leaf buckle. On the table are miscellaneous tools and a mannequin head that’s been in my room for several years, that’s now been painted blue and given a brown wig.
Frankie and I stare, jaws slack with awe.
Ma limps to the front of the stage, lowers the goggles onto her eyes and barks into the darkness, “Hit it!”
Aggressive oontz-oontz pours from the speakers, and she starts humping the air. We watch, thrilled, as she lifts a cone made out of a sheet of paper to her lips and lights it, causing an eruption I worry will singe her eyelashes off. She blows it out casually, keeping the comical “joint” in her mouth. She continues to air thrust as she sheds the coat, revealing a tool belt atop the knee-length basketball shorts, with the oddest assortment of things dangling from it: a bottle of Windex, a hammer, some yellow tape.
Then, she reaches down into her shorts and produces the coup de grâce: a long Italian sausage, which she positions just so, so it won’t fall out, as she grabs the mannequin and makes it give her head to the beat.
Frankie and I completely lose our shit, screaming and clapping and falling over each other with laughter. Even the MC of the show, who has surgically implanted elf ears, is amazed. I lean over and tap her on the shoulder.
“Hey. You wanna know something crazy? That’s my mother.”
Chapter 48
Skeletons
Paris and Los Angeles, February through May 2007
JONATHAN CAME TO PARIS. HE FUCKED UP HIS DATES AND arrived the day after Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t care. I was so smitten it was like Cupid held the date for us. All the restaurants were empty the next night, so it worked out.
Jon wrote me before he came and said he needed to get laid, letting me know that he hadn’t fucked anybody else while he was gone. Neither had I, and it made it all feel more legitimized. I was nervous though. Could I have sex with a boy regularly and enjoy it? Would it hurt? What if I couldn’t go there, even with him?
I drove myself into a worried frenzy the night before he arrived. Malia, my old Syrian friend from boarding school, lives in Paris, so she came over and we smoked Gauloises and drank cheap red wine, which, in France, is still quality.
Malia, it turns out, had started dating girls, partially inspired by Nikita and I, so she had all kinds of insight into the realities of sleeping with men while thinking about women. Something about being Jonathan’s girl, though, fulfilled a sense of correctness in me. I felt like I belonged in the world in some sick way.
After she left, I took a long shower in the gorgeous slate bathroom and thought about why I cared so much that he was a man. I felt like I’d been fighting to get over something since I was fourteen, to turn myself into something that a man would want—not just any man, but a man every girl wants—and now I’d achieved that.
I pushed aside my instinctive sense that love is organic, that it doesn’t come from a place of what should be or a strategic move toward social normalcy, and focused on what it would
be like to fuck him in that shower. The idea of it was so hot that I went upstairs, smoked a joint, and passed out, letting go of my concerns completely.
I dreamt of what it would be like to be his girl, to finally be wifey to him. He wanted to buy a farm one day and live off the land, and I painted myself into that picture.
When he showed up we kissed tenderly. He towered over me, but we landed in the bed quickly, and we’re all equal when we’re horizontal. It didn’t hurt. It even felt good. We enjoyed the shower, as planned, went out for dinner, came back, and did it all over again.
Lying naked in bed, under the slanted roof, in a postcoital haze, my lover said to me, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah . . . if we’re gonna do this, for real, I don’t want there to be any skeletons in our closets.”
Fear dripped into my perfect picture.
“Okay . . . well, I don’t have any skeletons, but please go ahead.”
“Well . . . I slept with KGB. Twice.”
It was a cold tingling that started at the top of my head and spread down through my body, like he had poured liquid nitrogen into my brain. I couldn’t speak. I was stunned.
Staring at my feet, I couldn’t escape the visuals of one of my best friends, my part-time lover, who picked me up, sobbing, off the ground in my devastation over this boy, and my love, fucking. She is so much more woman than me, tits three times the size of mine, a face like a page in Maxim. Why wouldn’t I have assumed that they would fuck?
“iO?”
“Twice?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Halloween and—”
“Halloween?! I was with you guys that night.”
Darling Days Page 29