by Golda Fried
She took a drag on her cigarette, which was always when my laugh slipped in.
But it’s a hell of a song.
So did you fuck him yet? she asked me. Romy was one of my friends who had been doing it with all kinds since she was fourteen.
No.
So what have you guys been doing?
I don’t know. We went to see Leaving Normal last night.
I saw that. It’s totally awesome.
Well, anyway, I had my face all over him while he was trying to watch the thing. Of course, he was quite responding to me though at the same thing. We really should have sat in the back row.
Well, was it good for you?
Yeah, Romy, you know, I would look up, and the dust flurrying in the projector beam glittered like stars.
She was nearly ashing in my food. Hey! I said and continuing, So how’s it with Lincoln?
Daryll, he’s so big, it hurts. She smiles making her eyes pop out. Seriously, I wobble around the room after.
You wobble? This, from a person who makes the bus driver go slowly down the steep part of York Mills Road because the drop terrifies her.
A few seconds later and I’m saying looking down, the thing with Skyler though is, he’s going away for school in September.
Honey, no one stays in touch with their ex. You’d have to have a horseshoe up your ass.
My mother hasn’t been too cool with it either. It’s such a drag because his mother’s so nice to me, it kills me. It’s partly his fault though because he refuses to talk to adults of any conservative kind and won’t say more than two words to her.
I’m not much the conversationalist with my parents either. My mother knows I’ll just walk out on her if she starts up with me. So you know what she does? She gets me in the car with the doors locked and waits ‘til we’re on the highway to yell her lungs out at me. Happens all the time.
Me and him were in his sister’s room trying to go at it. The phone was ringing. I was looking at the wallpaper. It was pink. There were stuffed animals all over the bed too, and I felt bad elbowing them. One was looking at me all lopsided. And where was the owner of the stuffed animals, anyway? Harvard.
The kissing started to taper down. I was looking and looking around. But then I peeked at him, and maybe I had been too silent because he was already getting up. Both of us pale faced.
And he goes, Maybe we should try this some other time. A real wiz of a thing to say. The carpet was more of a wine colour and spilled out the door.
There was baby powder on the dresser on the way out. And then I was thinking maybe we could have tried using that. Rubbed it into our bodies. Relaxed a little. Had powder fights. Huge particles would explode and then hang in the open air. And we could’ve left the room with white hair looking older.
I’ll be flagging cabs in another town soon anyway, he said. The freedom. The freedom. I saw his heart, the entire city area and the little yellow cabs pushing through. And where would I come in?
I touched his long hair in the summer that it is now. In September, you’ll go to writing school and you’ll decide to cut your hair and you’ll send me some locks like ribbons and they’ll fall all around me from their white envelope. And I’ll drop it startled. And this does happen. Like white gloves over the eyes.
He says, I knew you had to call me to give back those gloves, you know. I was totally after you. Then not calling, making you think I was indifferent. It was all part of the plan.
I can’t think about these things now, Dad.
But you have to think about things. Every good chess player thinks five moves ahead.
Well, maybe I don’t have vision, Dad, no vision.
Daryll, twelve years from now, I’m going to be in my grave, and I want to know that you’re going to be able to support yourself in a moving doorway.
I don’t have the energy to go over there and deal with his draining, I-can’t-entertain-you mood. I wish that it would be okay to do nothing with him.
Now it was getting close to September and I was calling him fifty times a day like a maniac. And most time his mother would answer and have to say, I’m sorry, Daryll, but he’s not home. I was hoping you could tell us where he is.
I hugged my pillow and listened to the same song over and over until I was as sad as the song and told myself on repeat: I’m not obsessed, I just really like him.
Skyler wasn’t there. I could hear his father moving around in the next room. I got the hell out of there leaving the front door half-open behind me.
It’s over. He told me.
And I said, This isn’t a fuckin’ movie. You can goddamn think of something more original to say!
He had driven over to my house late that evening, after brewing it over all day with his friends, and we were having it out over the roof of the car. His story lay there, him nervously pulling the pages apart. The story that got him into writing school that I had asked ages ago to see.
We decided that you were going to go away with no attachments three months ago, so what’s your fuckin’ problem?
His friends, snickering in the car.
Well, I haven’t been excited about being with you for the last few weeks . . .
But you were trying to have sex with me three days ago, you fuck.
Look, he said, I just have to make sure that it’s really over. You know, start New York with a clean white sheet. And you have to know I don’t love you.
I’m just going to go. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry thinking how he had told me once he’d know it was love if some girl cried in his arms over him.
He yelled out, Call me in a couple days when you’re feeling better.
I looked back at him.
He was serious.
He got into his car and left a cloud of pages. I picked one up.
I was out cold in my bed. And all the hi knockin’ at the window didn’t wake me up. And finally my name got through to me Daryll, Daryll. And I ran downstairs and opened the front door, Skyler? He wasn’t there, what the fuck? Skyler. And there he was descending down from the roof beside my bedroom window, Look I made you a mixed tape. I said, God, you’re so cold, how long have you been out here? Forty-five minutes, he said. I had to hug him back to warmth. And then I had to hug him.
Romy would be right there to take me out to get trashed. And she would refer to him as Mr. Cool Asshole, as some kind of comedy. And on the way home, the outside scenery would be a complete whiz-cam. I would feel the Ginsu windshield wipers, real horror show. Romy would try to slow down the car and stop so that I could casually swing the door open and “bugle” as she called it. But I puked, the poor plush interior.
That night, when I finally was ready to come inside the house, everyone had long since gone to bed except my father who was poring over some journal. And I thought, please don’t make me talk.
I had to pass the den to get upstairs. And my dad was sitting there with his journal and round tummy, nose in a tea mug. And don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? My father gazed up at me was whispered with wide eyes, Daryll, do you know: when you were born, it was snowing and the rabbits were out.
blue toenails
Her feet stuck out as she was falling asleep. Her toenails were actually blue, her hair already wafting on the sheets. A record swirled in the background with more scratches in every groove.
In their minds they were just X and Y.
I need some coffee, she thought. She was reading a letter from a friend at The Greasy Bulb. Something about how some guys will dine you before laying on you something heavy.
She was afraid to come here because the last time she came here, they played this woman’s tape with a high melodic voice and all the characters she had been studying that day were suddenly rushing out of her skull making a halo around her head.
What she had to notice was his hair. It looked like all the split ends had been ripped off. It was dyed light blue.
Cough. She grabbed under her throat
checking for swollen lymph glands. This never told her anything.
She brought her stuff to the bedroom.
“No toilet paper.”
“Oh. I’ll fix that.”
He was frantically searching for toilet paper, which was of course right in front of his face. He grabbed a roll, “So what do you figure, Horatia? Should I roll it to her like red carpet, or should I throw it to her and make ribbons in the air all Rocky Horror Picture like?”
“How’d you get your hair that colour?”
“I bleached it, right. Then I used Methylene Blue cough syrup on top.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, I swear. $I.89 a bottle at Jean Coutu.”
He left her there with the ceramic bowl of golden light brown sugar in the middle of the table packed to the top like a sandbox. She reached for the fork and tried to make it shower yellow.
“You got sugar eyes?”
“It’s that girl over there.”
Horatia looked at the girl by the window curled up with her coffee in the frame. “But she’s just sitting there, hardly moving at all.”
The waiters, if you could call them that, didn’t get paid except for sharing tips.
X saw Y making his way over again slow. He was all violins and bow-legged.
She was waiting on his mattress on the floor of his bedroom, and he only had crackers in the cupboard. But when he came back, the crackling went on and on forever. Somewhere between this is crazy and wasting time, and this is allowed as a dream. Somewhere, like X always equals something.
If she came to his place more often, she’d learn that his cupboards would never have more than one lonely can or some box of something but always the perfect thing.
She had smiled when he brought out the box of crackers. She had gone and crawled inside it.
He was holding her bra in his hands, threads coming out of it all over.
“This looks like it’s been through the whole football team,” he said.
No, she shook her head. No.
His fingers curled around the back of her head.
“My band’s playing at The Bulb tomorrow night. Will you come?” I’ll get Horatia to bring you lots of free coffee, he was thinking. “It’s actually getting kind of ridiculous. We’re always playing the same songs and it would be really helpful to know if you think we’re fresh at all…” he said grabbing a toe. He heard the sound of potatoes frying.
He was taking more and more of the black records out until they were everywhere.
She went over to his shower. There was a spider there on the wall. She put her foot on it. Yellow liquid dripped down the wall. She opened her book. The pages a dark yellow. The black ink type started to suck up the yellow. Then crawled up the curtain.
She woke up in his cold apartment with cracker crumbs all over her skin. She sat up. He had left. Did anything happen? No, he had kissed her a lot, and she had told him she had a cough, and he had said like I care.
She let her head fall back on the pillow and she knew he had put his hand on the top back of her head like chocolate fudge pouring on vanilla ice cream.
But now there was only this dark magazine page with ragged edges, above and askew, and out there like eye breakfast. She had never seen a poster on the ceiling before.
Its letters were a little cloudy without her glasses on, but it said “Pray for Rain”.
There’s a fine line between Kleenex and toilet paper, she thought as she stumbled towards the shower. When she undressed, she saw seven blue numbers penned on her leg. She turned on the water and got in with her brick of soap.
Y was looking sick hunched over the table by the window. The table’s centre at the floor split into four.
“Do you want me to go buy you some cough syrup or something?” Horatia came over and asked him then said, “Fuck it anyway, let's keep your voice scratchy for next week’s show.”
He remembered that the scratchy sound of the records didn’t seem to make X uncomfortable at all and they had gotten to talking and she had said, “I’m in the book” before she began to drift. A bootleg crackled in the background, a live show, and the singer in his throaty voice had gone, “So Montreal, you’ve got me here again for another night – now that’s luxury.”
Then she was asleep and he had been holding her feet like her wanted to hold her hands.
it fills the holes
There had been school and this big hole in the timetable.
She is looking down and not at me at all and so I end up following her on to the train, past the seats, and why aren’t we sitting down? I tell myself, Shut up, Shut up. I have gotten myself on the train, after all.
You should see us in the lounge car. She is chattering it up with everyone else, giving each person two and a half minutes.
When we are there, we are in a drugstore. She picks out these gold dollar condoms. Hmm, a buck a fuck.
This is New Orleans, this is new orleans. If I can get her on to the abstract things, maybe she can get lost in the coffee. Look here, The Abstract Book Shop and Cafe. And homemade chapbooks. The one in my hand’s got pages that run ragged. Someone’s taken off their wings and stapled them.
I’m reading the poems out loud. She bites into her po-boy sandwich, clams or oysters. On the side, my chipped nail-polished nails turning each page.
The cops at the next table are listening to me read. They don’t pick up their coffees through the whole thing. My travelling companion’s three cream containers and sugar packets all over the Formica, and here I am putting them back in her empty cup like mine.
She asks the cops for directions. One rambles on above one street, and the other drags on above the cross street.
We get to the corner and a big armchair comes at us at that very moment with this bearded guy behind it. I sit down in the armchair not even filling half of it, it seems. I am among sticky garbage bags with hyper flies as she hurries by, hair whipping past my teeth.
I ride it out as she paces. I feel my suede pouch around my neck, but this is not like in some movie where my travelling companion tells her life story and we become best friends.
This drug thing is not something I can do seriously, she says. Someone making me wait around. I could get involved if I wanted that.
This armchair I’m in is deep red. I feel the stitching all the way down the inside and find plastic. I thrust this baggie at her, There, and she mumbles, The skies are always sidewalk colour.
She is passed out. I go out alone.
There are roads all over, and I’m leading myself on to the next bench.
There’s one, in the corner of Jackson Square right in front of some buskers. The singer is wearing a Tom Waits hat down over his eyes. A battered fedora thrown around on its own time like a plastic soda bottle in a fountain.
I start craving the chocolate that I eat when I’m watching tv. I’m wondering from this bench how I could get them to ask me to some bar. But it’s like wanting them to walk through windows.
In the French market, someone’s putting a vest in my hands from some place far away. My fingers waving, the bits of nail polish float up to his eyes. His name is Phil. He has bullet holes in his jacket. He comes around to the front of the table to ask me about my suede pouch.
Inside’s my last baby tooth.
Phil sends his pal on a candy bar run for dinner. He says, I know my friend’s the type who reads all the ingredients off the packaging out loud when you just don’t want to know, but we always end up having a lot of time to kill. It fills the holes.
He tells me how he goes from town to town. How he saw a Jane’s Addiction concert in some cornfield in Iowa for free. How some girl for no reason during the concert grabbed his arm and took a chunk out of it with her jaws. How he tossed some bits of corn back at her.
He says, The graves are always overflowing.
Then he has to work. I have to leave.
I take the string of my pouch around my neck and hand it over to him. He says his buddy won�
��t let him do trades for clothes. I back away.
It’s empty air the whole walk home and my numb cheeks are hoping for a breeze, a paper airplane, bird shit even, but eventually I get her hairspray bits that eat my face. My companion is getting ready to go back to Kagans that night where we saw a guy who was the spitting image of Lenny Kravitz. He is supposed to meet her there. He doesn’t show.
She keeps ordering drinks until she finds these two guys and then our eyes meet for the first time since we stepped into this place: we come all the way to New Orleans to meet two shits from Montreal.
They know the bartender and persuade her to make us free shots of cherry something. My guy is nudging me saying it’s got Tabasco sauce real hot, huh? It tastes revolting but I sip the whole thing down to the glass.
He is kissing me, deep ones. Phil could be passing by the window and I feel sick. My companion is poking her finger into the other guy’s arm, Get me another drink. The glasses in his hand come back swaying, and I’m hoping maybe thus guy will shatter them, make her face wrinkle up or something. Was it the drugs still?
She drowns out in my ear, Supposedly it was a horse tranquilizer in practical life. I’d never give that shit to my horse.
The guy I’m with yanks me on top of a chocolate bar dispenser. He tells me things. The know-how carry around dried raccoon penises for good luck in this town. Then he’s talking about the sunset curtains that drape the doorway of his room here and do I want to fall through them.
And then I know it will only be a matter of time until his story is shot full of holes.
You’re that Rob? The Rob that’s been seeing Jen Silks for like two years now. And this is one of those so-together couples. I’d probably heard that he’d bought her a diamond chunker gold ring on her birthday, or that they tree planted together one whole summer, or that they vacationed in Paris, because they were so in love.
My companion’s got her fingers all through the other guy’s dreads, and she’s probably getting lost in them only to get fucked and home by one a.m. to get enough sleep. My hand leaves my pouch that’s not there.