by Golda Fried
So what about Jen then, don’t you love her? And he says, oh yeah, I love her but we have an understanding.
I’m staring where my feet disappear behind the driver’s seat of the cab we’re in. She says, You’ve got to stop looking at me like I’m some Scooper or something that sleeps with any trash.
The cab driver could be driving us straight into the dark river.
On our last night we run into Phil, and she knows I like him. She goes, No, we can’t go with them to Kagans, we have to eat haute Creole cuisine. That’s way too expensive for them. But we’ll meet you guys at Cafe Brazil later, I emphasize, grabbing Phil’s jacketed arm. Phil just keeps gazing down at my nail polished nails and how they’re making these red dots on his arm while his pal mutters, Yeah, right, I know how it is. I watched them fade down this boulevard of broken cobblestone, hands trying to fill their pockets.
We will, I murmur.
the edgewater hotel
Seventeen, such a pretty queen. They say that this one’s sour. Seventeen, by the sea. Waiting hour after hour.
We go down to the basement. His brother’s interested in film too. I walk around the celluloid. His brother whips it back into its hole faster than measuring tape and disappears into the white light at the top of the stairs.
I walk around like a screen waiting for them to look. His people walk through me. Projecting sea-foam and motel rooms and silk jacket lounging.
In the morning at my mother’s apartment, I pull off the blank sheets. I finger the skin under my eyes, and it’s been feeling more alligator since he and I met. Maybe from construction sleep.
I ask him to meet me at the Edgewater Hotel. I tell him they wouldn’t even know how big the rooms are if you asked them, but they are so big you can fall through them. And they say you can never get the same room twice.
Sounds like a firetrap, he says.
The air that hangs around the walk there is always a tone of green if it’s early enough. The buildings so dirty, so scraped, so bumwashed windowed. But they are layered and I always think of cake. Cake cut with saws.
I am amongst tonic-water and must. The waitress’s face resembles the peeled paint on the wall behind her. They bring you chipped china tea cups here, and you slip in your own sand.
Every time I rise from my bed since we started going out, I keep the sand in my eyes to prove that I am dreaming.
A grandfatherly guy wheelchairs up to me and says, I don’t understand why people are saying “high” to each other all the time. His legs are gone from the knee on.
Another guy is staring a bit to my left. It’s like a clue. He tries to kiss my ear and I turn away. My loyalty is in the leaves. He bites my ear on the side leaving it chipped and walks away.
That day, I told him what to listen to again. Chose all the CDs on his Columbia Record House subscription form.
The waitress comes back, takes your cup of sea. Does some kind of test. Gives you the corresponding room colour.
I say I only have immediate dreams. She says, How nice. So polite. He whispers, See, my mom’s complimentary.
His mom wheels in first course of many. Dandelion leaves from her garden. Cultivated.
She asks him, I was thinking of getting some paint for your room. 8I04 B687-4. It’s a bluey-gray. It will make you think you’re at a beach.
The first time I went over to his house there was a cat weaving through the rooms. He was showing me around. All the rooms featured a coffee maker and a snake-charmer-type laundry basket.
We snuck by his brother’s room. His brother was passed out among lots of film cans lying around. His mom was hassling the guy from another room. Hassling him about his little hobby. Even in his sleep. Make her stop, I whispered. He led me on to his room.
I sat on his white bedspread as he leaned back in a chair. He waited to watch the shadows stain the wall when I decided to come to life.
His mother’s kitchen is quiet except for the buzzing of overhead lights, casting white everywhere. He sets the mugs on the counter gently. I mutter, Something with mint. It helps clear my head. His mother has thirty-one flavors. She tiptoes in. Oh, I just need some ice.
The mint leaves are just lumps saying dreampads.
He, unruffled, offers me sugar.
They’re so perfectly cubed, I say.
We’ve had this conversation before. They’re sugar cubes, he says. They’re supposed to be cubed. Do you want some?
What do you think holds them together?
Something sugary.
Okay, go ahead and drink away but you’re drinking glue.
Behind him on the fridge are construction paper hearts glued on to cards with sparkles saying, HAPPY BURTHDAY MUM. His mother must be keeping them forever.
In this film at the Edgewater Hotel, I recognized that bartender. The bartender is going through the scene trying to be there for the customers. And then the film shows the bartender after closing time, laid out on the counter saying, Go ahead, saw me in half.
I look over misty. He smiles and I don’t realize why until the cat he put on my lap claws through my pants.
He leads me by the hand so happy just to hold it. His friends are every colour of a Smarties box. They’re throwing knives around. He whispers, It’s a friends-thing tradition to make a Duncan-Hines cake with Smarties on top when it’s somebody’s birthday. They are sweet when they pull me aside and ask me what I’m doing with him. I mumble that I have to go for more cake.
I think I love him as if we are married, I wrote on his cake before I smeared it out, afraid.
I call him up on his own white phone. His parents don’t want to have to say hi. His mom quickly passes the phone over to him whenever she answers.
But when I got to him, I could call him up on his white phone even at three in the morning and feel like tonguing his ears.
I see lots of film. He likes to hold my hand as we couch down.
They’re all shot at the Edgewater Hotel.
It’s his birthday. We kiss well. I am making a film. He gives me all the time I need. I am cutting on the cutting room floor. Telling him to grow his hair so I can cut it jagged. We kiss again. The floor of my dad’s car is like a puddle outside the Edgewater Hotel, and he won’t come in a place like that.
I stuff notes about it in his locker. I slip one in between his pillowcase and the pillow so he’ll feel it when he lies down to sleep.
I was tripping over a sidewalk when he said he wished he met me later because he would have married me if we were older.
We’re divided by glass and it’s dark out and I’m throwing clumps of dirt at it trying to see him. He comes out saying, Are you crazy? You are going to wake up my parents.
And I'm digging sandcastles.
Somehow we first got together at a park party and that night I was let out and it meant it had to be worth six other nights, but it didn’t take long before I was tossing dirt around near the bushes away from everyone else.
Someone had brought tequilas, and I ate the lemon pieces without flinching while people were licking each other’s necks. Some sort of contest was in the air like rain. His best friend going, Look, and farting into tuna fish cans.
He had thirty seconds to meet me behind a shrub before I was out of there.
The ball was knocked over that way.
Seventeen, where has she been? I found her with the dandelions. I was running for a pass. It nearly popped off her head.
I shred the flowers he sends. He comes over and thinks I’ve laid out petals.
His best friend sees me near the end, and usually he sees me around school but won’t even walk me across the street. Now he was buzzing around my locker, and I wasn’t about to open it. He thought he was being such a friend asking me up front if I was charming his friend. I said, You know, in this story, you’ll still say I’m trying to win him back.
I hate Toronto in my bed. My friend drops off the latest Royal Trux tape. She says they played once at the Edgewater Hotel, which turns ou
t to be in Toronto. I didn’t know it actually existed. I can’t find the way to my bed, but I know I have to dream tonight.
I make him give me a lift there, but it’s no use. We get out and have it out on the curb. I touch his cheek. He has baby skin and the whole street is potholes. I tell him I’m going inside. He says okay but don’t do any drugs. I say, Why are you saying this, are you still going to be there of me? I hold my breath to wait for some kind of grip. Some sort of sweaty fingermarks or underwater sound. He says he’s tired and he has to be up early to go to school. He walks toward his car. He lets the words go, You can’t even hug a cat. I rasp, You’re tumbleweed and my heart’s a ghost town.
He no longer stumbles through it.
I’m eighteen. I check into the Edgewater Hotel.
Fumigating silver machines wheel by the doorway. I dream that he and his mother are sealing my sand in glass salt shakers to be sent out to hotel restaurants all across the country.
zoon & june & the sleepover guest
June said to come right over. She’d make a big green salad and she & Zoon would be watching this comedy show they loved to watch as a couple. When I got there, June started giving me the tour but we were talking so much in the kitchen. She had corner store stuff in a bag around her wrist like a bracelet. There was gold glitter nail polish by the salt and pepper shakers and I started to do my toes. Zoon caught a whiff. Salad crunched in his mouth like a mattress.
Once it was summer and Zoon & June were on a beach in bikinis and each photograph was a kiss. Back at the fridge, they pressed up the photos but it was still cold. June’s mother told them to raid her freezer while she was out of town. They gathered up all the change on their dresser. They bought picture frames.
Zoon was waiting for his dad to call. June picked up the phone. Police message. A young male attacker with a ponytail was climbing through windows. Zoon & June talked about it with big eyes. The window in the kitchen kept open by a brickish dictionary.
June helped Zoon lower the extension out the window so he could hear the phone outside. “If my dad phones, it will be to call us ‘teenangels’ again,” Zoon said.
In the backyard, there was a rocket. A neighbour rocking a little too close. A velvet covered journal on a stone block. There were used cups everywhere collecting something from the sky.
Zoon waited with his guitar for the words to fall. Then he could string them up like patio lanterns. “Am I just the fungus of my emotions?” I offered for lyrics. Zoon laughed, “I can’t sing the word fungus.” Zoon was staying. Maybe he’d go inside and dust, leaving all the lampshades crooked.
I told June in the park about lost loves like stepping on ladybugs. June said when I used to be in Geography, she was in her basement in a bathrobe. We wanted to play Frisbee and found one. June said, one time Zoon and her went on a picnic that never ended. Their shadows pumped in and out of the basket.
Zoon was a statue in the chair that we left him in. June slipped coins between his toes. The coins fell, the dictionary by his feet, the window closed. She reached into her bag and lit them up cigarettes. Their cigarettes, they never rushed. He asked us if we believed in guardian angels because his was a rock star.
Before, all I thought I knew about them was that they broke into swimming pools. Zoon sat at a table upfront by the band, by the fingers. June saw the whole picture from the bar stool. Carried it bulky in her arms to the bathroom. Left it there. Kept going to the bathroom.
It was a mall out. Zoon up and down the streets with his running shoes. Popping into one place for money, one place for smokes. Banging on the restaurant windows at the fish inside swimming. June buying watermelon thick as carpet and pink tongue. They let me walk in the middle.
Zoon set up a place for me to sleep in his music studio, a room at the heart, six feet lower than the rest of the layout. The door was off its hinges, it danced with me on my way in. Zoon sunk a satin sheet down on a couch. Said, “It’ll be like a groupie, you’ll probably slide off.” I asked, were they going to fall asleep to music? He pulled out a drawer that had tapes. “I haven’t done that in a really long time,” he said. “I used to do that all the time.” Me too, but I was acting the role of the sleepover guest.
Zoon grabbed the door to leave and it collapsed on him. “My dad did come by,” he told it. “He smiled leather in the doorway. I waited but could just crawl in and play on the skeleton bars.” June was a skeleton herself helping Zoon towards the kitchen.
I was sleeping in Zoon’s eyes. Lucky he saw the world as his bed or I would have slept on, endlessly touring.
I floated on cat sperm. There was a phone in a tree.
(for nic and anj)
roses are loud, violets are lewd
There was one home movie that would slip into Pearl’s dreams of her grandmother’s wig falling off and everything would just cut into place including Grandma’s eyes. She could see the wig in Grandma’s hands. And she would think, “The hair is removed from its pain.”
Then she would add soundtrack . . .
We were at the nearby McDonalds, John and Driz swaying in their chairs. It was somewhere near the top of the hierarchical list of cool things to do during lunch in high school. Driz had the car to get there.
John was having his usual coke through double-barrel straw although he was saying, “Why do we come here this fountain shit tastes like liquid lipstick?” and Driz grinned, “Well, I’ll go put some lipstick on then,” and went off to do so.
And I was like, “John do you really believe everything that girl you’re sweet on says?” And he responded, “Pearl, it’s just like writing (he dreamed of writing in Laundromats). I wouldn’t say it’s half true and half lies, I’d say it’s all true and all eyelash false.”
There was another movie of Pearl’s grandmother in the kitchen baking cakes. White fluffy cakes with white swirling icing on white counter space. She’d stack them up like sandcastles. And Grandma insisted on keeping the counter space. “My dream is counter space to the moon,” she would say.
Oh Pearl’s birthday, the party dresses were frilly and perfectly white. CLICK. Grandma who was still blonde and presentable would say outright if it was a bad Polaroid: “WHO took this? I’ll chop off his hands.” Only on this special day was anyone allowed to have one of Grandma’s cakes. “Just for Pearly.” Grandma would scrunch up and whisper, “But it looks soooo lovely,” as she cut a piece sliding the knife down through the layers. And Pearl would hope on the edge of her seat that she'd get the slice with the penny in it. She saw those pennies go into the batter from Grandma’s sultry red change purse. The open and shut snap. If Pearl got the slice with the penny, she’d get her wish.
John and Driz were already doing couple things that first year of high school, although she’d never admit they were going out. They went camping once Driz got her license, for instance, in the States no less. I could just see them drifting down the highway, constantly feeding the tape deck and everything. But John told me it was such a letdown: it was a total McCampsite with hardly any trees and sites so close to each other it looked like an Astroturf minefield in a parking lot. But then John looked at me and said, “Overall we had a good time even though Driz kicked me out of the tent in the middle of the night. But really, I love the smell of asphalt in the morning.”
And he went on, “The best was that this boy next to their site was saying to his sister as they were going to bed, ‘Just to let you know, you’re barf!’ and she’d go, ‘No, I insist, you’re barf,’” and John and Driz would say that back and forth to each other before school in the cafeteria where I’d see them every day.
But it was definitely John who came up with the good lines, like the time we were all at Mrs. Robinson’s place and John wanted Driz to let him open up the photo albums of Driz as a drooling toddler. “Oh come on,” he said. “Let me look through the archives for the peanut butter and jam.”
Pearl’s mom made butter sandwiches.
All I remember about my grandfath
er is how he snapped his leather briefcase shut and waltzed out the door each morning leaving the scent of his cologne behind, the scent of violets. I’d open and close my pudgy hands trying to catch it. He never had a lot of money and only had two or three suits, but he would use the money he had to dry clean those suits every day. I spent all my money on comic books and wearing my hooded sweatshirt and jeans and running shoes. And maybe it made my sadness comfortable and maybe I did it also to piss my mother and grandmother off. But for sure it felt right. One time my grandfather snapped his leather briefcase shut and left for good.
John said to me, “Do you know in L.A. they have graffiti on trees?” While the weather was still cool, we could wait for the school bells by a tree in the front. “I wish I had a cousin in L.A. who could send me Death cigarettes. It’s all in the packaging, the packaging is wild. Jet black and it’s got this skull on the front with cross bones. Hey, aren’t these jeans great?’
Driz had shown John how to bleach his jeans and now he’d be into bleach forever.
Driz’s car was covered in one big coat of nail polish. She was coming back from making sure it wasn’t chipped.
“In New York City the garbage bins are like fish-net stockings,” he said.
Tide was the neighbour. Eighteen and working on this fifties convertible in his parents’ garage. Pearl went over there to sit on his car like a hood ornament. She was twelve. She’d watch him for a long time, dying for him to drive something by her mind.
He would look at her with his eyes and say, “High school sucks. By the end, all your friends have yellow teeth.”
And he had all these tools, and every time something wouldn’t work, he would get all uptight and make a dent in the car. A new dent every time and Pearl would laugh. She asked him, “So are you going to sail her somewhere pretty when you’re done? California? Miami? Venice Beach? Mexico? And he said, “No, I’m going to sell it, girl, make big bucks.” And every day she’d sit there, her head going vrmm, vroommm trying not to let the sound turn to vacuum.