Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  Pop says they’re going to sell the house on Eightieth Street. That everything will be changing. I ask him why and he says something about letting things go, moving on from the past. It’s a running theme right now. He says there will be a small inheritance for me. I don’t know what to say to that.

  “Nothing crazy, just a few thousand bucks.”

  A friend of mine is selling his low-slung, gray 1982 Mercedes diesel two-door for a grand. I ask Pop if he’ll front it to me and he agrees. I don’t have a license, but I drive it around on my permit constantly.

  When I was seventeen I told my ma I wanted to get a driver’s license and she laughed in my face. She said, “What the fuck for?” But when I pressed her, saying I needed a friend with a car I could practice in, she dug around her Rolodex and came up with Joey, our old downstairs neighbor, the paranoid schizophrenic with the .44.

  He pulled up outside the building in a station wagon crammed with more crap than I’ve ever seen in one place (and I was raised by a hoarder). I got into the passenger seat holding the DMV driver’s manual and he snatched it out of my hand.

  “You see this?” he said. “Fuck this.”

  He threw it over his shoulder into the abyss that was the back of his car, then had me get in the driver’s seat and zigzag up every block until we hit East Harlem, then back down Fifth Avenue in rush-hour traffic, even though I’d never sat behind the wheel of a car before.

  So rules don’t exactly keep me off the road.

  One night I go to a party at some notorious loft in Brooklyn with Devin, my Canadian friend, and Jimmy, who’s visiting from the West Coast and brought a fanny pack full of drugs. I end up taking mushrooms, doing coke, smoking weed, drinking a shitload of beers, and eating a small mystery pill that makes me feel like I need to stay close to the earth. Devin and I lie on the roof, watching white clouds of our breath billow up to the stars in a psychedelic haze, until she asks if I want to see her new apartment. I’m confused. She says she’s moving into a loft two blocks away. It’s in a building that’s under construction and there aren’t any locks on the doors.

  We ring a bunch of bells and I yell gibberish at the intercom until somebody buzzes us in, and she takes me up a flight of stairs in what used to be a wool factory. The hallways are long and industrial, hung with raw bulbs. It feels like young lives are beginning here.

  On the third floor, she takes me into a huge apartment with the best view I’ve ever seen of Manhattan and all its twinkling lights, the Empire State lit up in orange and blue stripes, the FDR with its necklace of headlights, the placid East River. It’s a corner unit, with an entire wall of windows in the living room. Three bedrooms stretch out on the right, each with its own bank of factory windows.

  The apartment is barren, save a few extension cords, aluminum scaffolding, and fragments of Sheetrock. We’re both tripping our faces off, so Devin goes to feel the energy in the bedrooms while I post up on the windowsill in the living room and stare out at the city.

  My heart is pulsing, because of the drugs, but also because I’m growing. I can feel the change coming, like my limbs are becoming elastic in front of my eyes, stretching out, reaching for something new.

  There’s a roll of paper towels on the floor and a pen in one of the kitchen drawers. I start to write. An avalanche of feelings, thoughts, fears, and longing pouring onto the soft paper.

  I’m writing to Jonathan, telling him that he hurt me, but that he pushed me somewhere new. That I’m angry at him, that he didn’t have to bail, he could have dealt with it differently, but that I still love him and I miss him in my life. I tell him it looks like I’m probably gay and maybe even a man anyway, so maybe I just wanted to be him more than I really wanted to be with him.

  I write to my father, telling him what a disappointment he’s been in so many ways. How badly I needed him to let me live with him when shit was so fucked up with my ma, that I needed to know he was my father, that he could be there for me, take responsibility, make a home for me. I tell the paper towels that his heroin addiction robbed me of the best friend I’ve ever had, the most charismatic, beautiful, intelligent person I’ve ever known, and wanted to know so much better. That it put a screen between us, like a two-way mirror. He could see in and out at the same time, but I was offered a lot of reflections of myself. I tell the paper towels how much it hurt that he wouldn’t kick drugs for his kids, it took a girlfriend threatening to leave him to get him to put them down.

  I write to my little brother, telling him I hope to know him one day, that I wish so badly that he would come and live in New York so I can take care of him and be there for him. I write about being angry at our dad for never showing up for him, and I apologize on his behalf. I write that I will buy us a Christmas tree one day and cover it in decorations. I’ll load the bottom of it with enough presents with his name on them to make up for all the Christmases we never had together.

  I thank my aunts Olivia and Alice for saving my life. I thank my sweet grandma Edie for her generosity and thoughtfulness, for showing me inspiration.

  I can’t even write to my ma. I write to Frankie. I thank her for being there, for helping me clean, for holding a lid on the pot when all I could do was boil over. I tell her that I’m going to leave, because I have to. I know she’ll stay on once I’m gone, and I tell her that’s great, that’s okay, it’s wonderful really. I thank her for taking care of my ma. I explain that I need to have a home of my own. I need something clean. I need a life now. I’ve got to go.

  When I’m done, I’ve covered twelve paper towels in scribble and I’m weeping in silence. I feel empty and so afraid of how it will all go once I bust out of the nest. I feel tremendous guilt about leaving my ma at such a fragile moment, but I can’t stay on and take care of her insanity forever. I won’t. The signs are telling me to jump ship now, and I have to while I can.

  A few weeks later, Pop calls to tell me Edie has started to refuse liquids, so it’s a matter of days. Olivia tells me I shouldn’t come up, it would be too much of a burden, but I feel the urgent need to say good-bye. My pop calls me and says, “Listen to me. If ever something is burning in you that clearly, and you feel like you need to say good-bye to someone, you take that and you go. Don’t let anyone stop you, because you’ll regret that you didn’t get to say it for the rest of your life.”

  So I get in my rusted, low-slung Benz and drive up there.

  When I walk in, the shutters are drawn and the room smells like sterilized hospital gear. Edie wakes from her sleep and says softly, “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, Grandma, it’s iO.”

  “Oh,” she says, as I put my hand in hers, which is thin skinned and bird boned, “You look like a boy.”

  I laugh and ask her how she is, and she says she’s fine. She agrees to take a sip of water from the strawberry-shaped cup next to the bed, but her way of doing it tells me it’s a special favor to me. Poppa warned me that she is trying to die with dignity by sending herself over to the other side before her noble mind can disintegrate.

  I ask if there’s anything she’d like, and she says she wants to go for a walk among the turning leaves. Knowing full well she’ll never stand up again, I turn to the window and say, “Oh, Grandma, you know, it’s awful cold outside. I’m not sure you want to go out there. What about this—what if I just open the window and let some air in here? Will that do?”

  Slowly, she turns her head, looks out into the crystal-clear fall day, and nods. I tuck the blanket in tightly around all her edges. Our ritual.

  I say good-bye, trying not to cry. I rush to my car without a word to my uncle, unable to communicate any further, and peel out into the trees. Thirty minutes into the drive, I feel a pull in my chest, so I turn around and go back. I race up the stairs and into her room. I crawl into her bed and lay my head on her shoulder for a while, her delicate, papery fingers stroking my forehead, her eyes closed in reverie, and I tell her how much I love her and that I’ll see her again soon. Tears rol
l over the cliffs of my cheekbones onto her soft pajamas and she holds my hand as tightly as she can. She nods and says she loves me, too.

  “Good-bye, Grandma.”

  “Good-bye, iO.”

  Blasting music for the three-hour drive home, I am a mess. I know I will never see her again, that her final gift was to get me out of my hell, to give me the means to start my own life, but I can’t handle that it comes with such a loss.

  Chapter 51

  The Bridge

  New York City, February 2008

  AS EXPECTED, FRANKIE SAYS SHE WILL STAY ON. MY MA takes the news of my leaving hard. She starts bawling, asking for an explanation of why I feel that’s necessary, as though she truly can’t imagine. I tell her I applied for the apartment above Devin’s and I got it. I tell her I’m twenty-two, and it’s time for me to live my own life.

  I spend a week putting my shit into boxes scrounged from the deli and the wine store. Frankie helps me and Ma does what she can to pitch in. She is up and walking around again, using a cane, which means she’s probably back to drinking because she can get to it. It doesn’t seem like she’s on her pills, because she isn’t raging, and she is so down, so mournful.

  When she pulls out drawings I made when I was a kid, old yearbooks, or my baby shoes, and starts crying, I take Frankie and leave. I can’t go there; I can’t walk her through all her regrets.

  Frankie and I go up to St. Marks Place to get coffee from a big orange truck where a bunch of hippies blast rock music and sell drinks.

  I discovered the Mud Truck and its mother ship, the Mud Spot, through the go-go dancer I chased onto the ferry so many years ago. One day, when I’m sitting in the café, trying to get my thoughts onto a piece of paper, she walks in. The go-go dancer herself.

  Awkwardly, we exchange hellos and she introduces me to her friend, a striking girl with short black bangs and giant, piercing brown eyes. She looks familiar somehow.

  “I serve you coffee every day. I work on the truck. I’m Sadie.”

  “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry. Nice to really meet you. I’m iO.”

  They go to a table together and talk, but the truck girl suddenly appears back at my elbow.

  “Hey. What are you working on?”

  “Oh. Just writing some stuff.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  She is standing too close to me, smiling too much. She’s flirting with me. She’s the type of girl no one realizes is five foot three because her personality is so big. She looks directly at you when she speaks, blinking long black lashes down over her huge, glistening eyes. She has a gruffness, a tomboyishness that plays well against her emphatic femininity. She is fucking me with her eyes and it throws me.

  “What days do you work on the truck?

  “Monday is my next shift. Come by.”

  That Monday, on my way to sign my lease, I stop at the truck. Despite my bumbling flirting, I order a coffee and I get a phone number.

  We make a date to go to the Guggenheim and I pick her up on the corner of Ninth and First, where I find her leaning against a lamppost. As she piles into the passenger seat, I take stock of how stunning she is. She’s an aching beauty, hiding behind baggy jeans and a wifebeater, her jet-black hair pulled into a single braid. She explains that she’s just come from work and to please not judge her dirtiness. Actually, she says, she’s into it, and if I’m not I can fuck off.

  As we drive uptown, she tells me she’s from San Francisco, that she is a trained dancer, a graduate of NYU Tisch, and that we probably shouldn’t flirt with each other because my ex would be pissed. I tell her I agree, that us flirting is a terrible idea.

  Sure.

  We climb over a stone wall and sit in Central Park eating arepas. As I watch her type text messages into her flip phone with coffee-stained fingers, my emotions swirl together, indecipherable ingredients forming something significant.

  Waiting in line at the museum, I tell her I’m going to do everything in my power not to be cute, and pretend to start picking my teeth with the pendant on my necklace. She says I am failing miserably. A droplet of affection swims down into the cocktail inside me.

  The exhibition is an installation of wolf sculptures scattered up the entire winding spiral of the museum. Tourists mill around, taking photos and chattering in other languages. Sadie and I don’t speak. We don’t need to.

  Seeking deliverance from the tension, I go to the bathroom to piss and be alone. When I open the door to leave, she pushes me back in and locks it behind her.

  “Stay in here with me while I pee.”

  I stand in the corner, smiling at the floor. When she’s finished, she pulls her pants up, sits down on the closed lid, and stares at me.

  “I wish we weren’t restricted.”

  “Oh yeah? Why?”

  “I wish I could do whatever I wanted . . .”

  “What would you do?”

  “I’d tell you to come over here and straddle me.”

  I take the taunt, walking over and swinging my leg across her body. I sit down into her lap and press my hips against hers.

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what else would you do, if you could do anything you wanted?”

  “I’d tell you to kiss me.”

  When our lips touch, lava floods my veins. My eyelids close over detonations in every part of me. My being combusts. Her mouth is so soft, and when her tongue finds mine it is nothing short of perfect symbiosis.

  We make out in every bathroom in the museum and she rides me so hard my back is black and blue.

  I drive her downtown and we kiss at every red light, hungry for each other, insatiable. On Twenty-ninth Street, she takes my right hand and sticks it down her pants.

  When I drop her off at the truck, we both know we’re sunk. Something big has begun between us and it’s unstoppable, regardless of the politics involved.

  I go home and pull out my typewriter. A letter pours out of me, two pages long, that tells her I know what I’ve found. I have understood now that love is not something you design, it is something that finds you. I will wait as long as I have to, and once she is mine, I will give her this letter, and she’ll know that I knew from day one. I put the letter into a box and tape it shut.

  A text arrives from her as I’m loading up the backseat of the Mercedes with the last of my stuff. My ma is sitting in the passenger seat coughing. She has pneumonia and we’ve been bickering. She’s being difficult because she doesn’t want me to go. The text says, “Dinner tonight?”

  My mother’s voice recedes into background noise.

  “Yes. I’ll cook for you at my new apartment. Can you deal with Brooklyn?”

  I sprint up the stairs with fire in my heels. The reply comes as I’m doing a final sweep of my cleared-out room.

  “Ha. I live in Brooklyn. Send me an address and a time, and I’ll be there.”

  Smiling, I turn out the light and pull the door shut. Frankie is out, so I steal a glance at her room. It’s come so far since I used to sleep in here on that broken army cot, with her big candles everywhere and her shelf of creams and perfumes and makeup. They’ll be okay, her and my ma. In a way, she knows how to handle my ma much better than I do. She can deal with it without exploding.

  Taking in the kitchen, I know I won’t miss it here. I’m going to a new place, with new floors, sinks that aren’t clogged, and a shower I can keep clean myself. If anyone disrespects the house, it’s my name on the lease so I can kick them out. I don’t have a table, but I’ve got boxes, one of which I’ll put a sheet over to serve Sadie dinner on tonight.

  I can’t believe my luck. I don’t understand how this beautiful creature has surfaced at just this very moment, an oracle of the future that awaits me. She’s like a spirit guide, an usher, showing me to my seat in the theater of my new life.

  I help my ma to stand up, holding her cane. She tries feebly one last time to convince me to stay, but she knows it’s done. S
he knows her cub is leaving the den. This story, this yarn, this torment between us is entering a new chapter.

  I start the engine, smiling, my phone on the seat next to me, and pull out into traffic. My ma stands on the curb, in the very spot I imagine they loaded her into a cab to take me to my birth, watching me pull away. She is crying.

  The trunk swings low to the ground, weighted with what little I own. The engine drags as I put on some music and light a cigarette. I feel one with this machine and with myself as I creep slowly down the Bowery, left on Delancey, and begin to climb the Williamsburg Bridge. I watch Manhattan receding in my rearview, a mausoleum now, a mausoleum of malady that I disburden with each block I pass.

  I can’t wait to get to my new home, unpack my things, lay them out as I want to, to grocery shop and cook, to welcome this new woman into my world. I can’t wait to close the door tonight, to lock it behind me, to turn the radio off, and to sleep in peace.

  There but for the grace go I, that I was not down there looking up.

  Me

  Acknowledgments

  My ma, my great muse and my protector.

  My father, my best friend, my guide, and my collaborator.

  Katie, for keeping me alive so many times.

  Nea and Leslie, who went into battle for me when it mattered the most.

  DD, the originator. The rock.

  Bill, for pointing out that I’ve been a writer all along.

  Dan, for trusting me and giving me the chance.

  Every person in this book who played a role in my life and let me attempt to describe them.

  The beautiful faces around my chosen family dinner table, who have given me a foundation.

  Claudia, for living a life that has resulted in such wisdom, that is now generously shared with me.

  Kashi, my general, in life, love, work, food, and Drag Race.

  Everyone at Ecco.