Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  I stumble down Sanderson Street, straining my eyes against the shadows. The few scattered street lamps give out a smudgy light. The sound of the ocean grows louder with each deserted block I pass. As I walk, I pass some boarded-up buildings and a few vacant lots, and then I come upon a stretch of train tracks that have clearly not been used in years. Even so, I look both ways before stepping across them, navigating my way around broken bottles, candy and condom wrappers, and a blue running shoe.

  I hear music under the crash of waves before I see any place that could be producing it. Soon, though, hovering in the distant dark appears a ripple of red neon, a sign that becomes legible only when I am standing directly in front of it: Lucky’s.

  I extract my hands from my pockets and study the outside of the bar. Below the cherry Slurpee red of the sign is a blank cement block of a building, which would undoubtedly be gray in the light of day.

  Rain starts, a light mist on my face that clings to my eyelashes and cheeks. Not wanting to look too much like a drowned rat, I hurry inside.

  Jingle bells ring the door, either left a month after Christmas or always there, but no one looks up as I enter. The light is as dim as the doorway outside, and the place smells of old cigarettes, grease, and something sharper and unidentifiable.

  A sign that reads: “NO PERSONS UNDER 21 PERMITTED” hangs faded by the inside of the door. Someone has crossed out the “1” with heavy blue pen but the number still shows faintly beneath the ink. Low country music infuses the room.

  There are four or five people at the bar—all men, all shoulders and raincoats, with beer glasses in varying stages of empty. A man eyes me from behind the counter, and my heart beats erratically. In no way could I pass for twenty-one.

  “You looking for Cass?” His voice is surprisingly low and soft, awkward in the sandpaper edges of his face.

  “Yes,” I manage.

  He nods to the back of the bar, a smattering of tables and an elevator-sized stage set with a single chair and microphone. Several people sit at the tables. Barely visible from the door, crammed into a corner table, are Cass and Sam. They are whispering quietly, sodas half finished in front of them. Cass looks up and notices me.

  “Hey.” She waves me over.

  Sam turns his head and sees me, and the surprise that seizes his features is not quickly masked. He, clearly, did not get a note in his PE locker. His gaze darts back to Cass, but she is standing, sliding her chair in.

  “You want a Coke?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  She goes behind the bar, her motions familiar, scooping ice and spurting soda from a tube into the glass. She pauses and looks at me. “You want cherry in it?”

  “No thanks.”

  I stuff my hands into the pockets of my raincoat and stare at the wall behind Sam’s head, trying not to notice his lack of eye contact. He studies the table, sips his drink, and runs his finger through the rings of moisture his glass has left.

  “Here.” Cass plunks the soda onto the table. “Sit down,” she says, her normally gruff voice softened.

  I sit where she had been sitting since there are only two chairs at the table.

  “I have to work,” she tells us, and disappears through a swinging door next to the bar.

  “So you know Cass?” Sam asks, his eyes settling on me for the first time.

  I sip my Coke. “We have PE the same period.”

  He nods and swirls the ice in his drink. “She’s a good person,” he says after a minute.

  “Seems so.”

  “People think she’s a freak but she’s not.” The music in the room is suddenly shut off mid-song and, though the music was low, its absence creates a hollow, empty feel to the bar.

  “How do you know her?” I ask.

  Cass reemerges through the swing of the door. She has pulled her hair into a ponytail and removed her sweatshirt. She wears a black shirt that says “GIRL,” and her studded black belt balances her baggy army cargo pants precariously on her hips.

  I wait for Sam’s answer, but he just watches her as she steps onto the small stage, moves the chair, and adjusts the microphone.

  “Is she going to sing?” I ask, surprised.

  “Not really,” Sam says.

  “Good evening, folks,” she says into the microphone, her voice clear and strong. The casual buzz of conversation at the tables stops, and the men at the bar swivel in their seats to watch her.

  I am struck by the strangeness of her clear voice, her straight shoulders. At school, she is ghost-like, the shadow of a storm cloud. Here she is neither ghost nor shadow.

  “I thought it was time for a little spoken word,” she says, to a sprinkling of applause from some of the tables. “I wrote some new ones for tonight’s performance.”

  Performance? I look at Sam, who is watching her, chin in hand.

  She speaks, low lidded, into the microphone. “This first one is about identity. Most of you went to AB High, so you know a little something about having this spelled out to you by a bunch of bastards who don’t know anything about you.” The tables cheer and applaud, hands over heads. Sam whistles through his teeth.

  She puts her hand around the stem of the microphone. “It’s called…‘YOU.’”

  Then she begins.

  YOU see me each day, YOU with your yellow cellophane eyes

  Blind to the clarity of what is me, of what is under the tough of my skin,

  YOU with your varnished truth, your shoe-shined words that scuff

  And cut me. That carve me up and break me into tiny puzzle pieces

  Of lies.

  Don’t look at me. You don’t see what you think you see.

  I have heard only a few spoken-word poems before, some of Ani DiFranco’s and a short movie clip Mr. Ericson showed us during the poetry unit, but they were not like seeing it live. Throughout the piece, Cass becomes every word, her body swaying, her arms punctuating, her voice both accusatory and sympathetic.

  She finishes:

  And YOU with your Oedipus eyes, with your gold-plated lies,

  YOU won’t wrap me, package me, trap and fasten me to who you MAKE me—daily.

  To who I have to be so YOU can be who you think YOU are.

  Even though,

  In the dark decay of your soul, you know you aren’t

  That girl, that boy, that face, that smile that disgraces the loneliness

  You hold down, down under the black water of your heart,

  The loneliness

  That knows that even as it gasps for air,

  YOU are losing your hold on it; we’re ALL losing our hold on it,

  And it has only to wait minutes more for the clean honest air

  To fill its lungs with success, for it to beat us,

  Defeat us, forever.

  She closes her eyes, nods into the microphone, and says, “Thank you.”

  After a brief hush and a quick intake of air, the room breaks into applause. I am caught between feeling like I’ve had ice water dumped down the back of my shirt and like I’ve taken a punch to the stomach. Even with all of the performances I’ve seen from Drew and Sara and Eli, nothing has ever hit me like this one, the sheer energy of it pounded into me for two breathless minutes. In those 120 seconds, she transformed the shape of the room.

  “Wow,” I say. And I suddenly know who the bathroom poet is.

  “I know,” Sam says, watching as Cass drinks the last of her Coke several steps from the microphone. “She’s amazing.”

  “I just need a refill,” Cass tells the audience before dashing to the bar.

  “I had no idea she could do that.” I drink my Coke, my senses whirling: cold, sweet, bubbles, ice against my lips.

  “She’s up there every Friday,” Sam explains. “This is all the stuff she writes during the week.”

  I take a deep breath. “You’ve seen her before?” Somehow the thought of Sam alone at the corner table seems too bizarre.

  “A few times.” He hesitates, attemptin
g to wipe the wet from the table with a white square of napkin. “When I need to get away.”

  “From your mom?” If I’m too bold here, he doesn’t show it.

  “Did Cass tell you about my mom?” He digs an ice cube out of the glass with his finger and chews it.

  “Not really,” I shrug. “I’ve heard some things.”

  “What things?” His eyes darken, immediately guarded.

  “That it’s alcohol. That she gets sent away.”

  Red crawls over his face. “It’s not alcohol,” he says gruffly. “People should keep their mouths shut.”

  I watch him steadily, hoping my face doesn’t betray the ragged beating in my chest. “People need reasons. Explanations. If they aren’t given them, they create them.” These words echo in my ears. I think of my father, imagine him sitting alone in a jail cell. Wrongly accused. He must have been.

  Cass stops by our table, her eyes absorbing my stare and Sam’s red face. “Things okay?” she asks, her glass newly filled and fizzing.

  “Yeah, sure.” Sam looks up at her. “Great.”

  “You’re amazing,” I tell her.

  A flicker of a smile catches her mouth. “Stick around.” She makes her way to the stage.

  “It’s depression,” Sam says, watching Cass set her drink on the chair and fiddle with the microphone. His eyes slip to me. “My mom. Clinical depression. She gets sent away for it.”

  I want to respond, but Cass is starting her next poem. As the words wash over me, her pulsing, rhythmic anger charging the air, I watch Sam’s face and feel the pain there.

  ***

  Sam doesn’t show up at school for three days. He was in English class Monday, in the hall, by his locker, in the lunch line, with my eyes tracking him like a Sherpa. Then he was gone. No Tuesday. No Wednesday.

  Now, Thursday, his plastic seat sits empty in English. Amber hovers around it, her pink-nailed hands curled protectively over the back of the chair.

  “He’s been calling me like three times a night,” she announces loudly to Kandace Jones, a bird-boned fake blond from the cheerleading squad who never seems to do anything other than fix her makeup and echo whatever Amber says like a parrot.

  “Three times,” she says, looking up from her chair into Amber’s smug face, a mascara wand poised before her compact.

  But Amber is not talking to her. She’s talking to me. Even from halfway across the room. Her eyes flit occasionally to Kandace’s narrow painted face to keep up the façade, but she stares mostly in my direction. I bury my face in my English book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’ve read three times already, and will myself not to meet her eyes.

  “Family emergency,” she says, sighing heavily. “His mom again, poor thing. They took her to a special hospital. In San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco,” Kandace breathes, more impressed, it appears, by the city than by the reason Sam’s there.

  “Yeah.” Amber nods dramatically. “Thank God he has me. I don’t know what he’d do if he had to go through this alone.”

  Alexa rolls her eyes at Drew. “Well, thanks to you now, Amber, and your public service announcement, he has the whole school behind him.”

  Amber ignores her. Her eyes bore into my skull, but I read the same line over and over, hum a Jack Johnson song under my breath, and don’t meet her stare.

  CHAPTER 18

  BUSTED STUFF

  …emerging from my room to the sound of scissors snapping—snick, snick, snick—over the low growls of the Dave Matthews Band. Mom has dumped Ted’s remaining clothes in a pile on her right. On her left, she is making another pile: the shredded remains of jeans, shirts, some ties—snick, snick, snick—ribbons of material curl away from the gleaming blades. I watch her for ten minutes, but if she notices me, she never looks up from her work…

  The house is dark. No one home, I guess. I drop my backpack by the front door and ease out of my jacket. My head spins with Sam’s absence, with Amber’s English class announcements, with the near end of a long, heavy week that still has a day left in it.

  My ears prick at a choking sound from the kitchen, one deep intake of ragged air and a whimper like a puppy. I rush to the doorway, my heart already tipping into familiar fear.

  “Mom?”

  She is crouched in the dim of the kitchen, wedged into the corner where the cabinets meet. She is shadowed in the filtered light coming through the window, but I see clearly that she’s wearing only her bra and a pair of jeans. And that she’s sobbing. She clutches a bedroom hanger and a pair of Rob’s running shorts. Seeing me, she holds them as if in prayer and says, “All he left,” through her sobs.

  I pull it all in at once: her tears, the hanger, the shorts, her words, now repeating, “All he left, Calle.” I know this scene well. In my heart, I know that I have been waiting for it, each of my days without it just preamble to this—to what always is.

  “When did he leave?”

  My voice is so low, I can’t imagine she’s heard me, but in her state, her senses are heightened like a dog’s. Her head dips into her chest. “Today. While I was at work.”

  “He took everything? Did he leave a note?” Sometimes they leave a note; sometimes they just leave.

  “Yes.” She nods into her chest. I don’t know which question she’s answering, so I decide to ask them independently. No compound questions for her, not now. She answers: yes, he took everything except, it seems, a pair of running shorts, and no, he did not leave a note.

  “Money?”

  She shakes her head. I frown. I would have picked Rob for one that would leave money, but you can never tell.

  “What happened?” I can hear my voice building, taking on a shrill echo of the hard pulse in my ears. “Mom! Answer me. What happened?”

  Her sobs amplify. My body heats. I want her to answer me, to stand up, to put a shirt on.

  “Mom. Get up!” I scream. “Get up now!”

  She buries her face in the shorts. I have never screamed like this before, and the sound of it startles me. Propels me forward.

  I race to the bedroom, my eyes taking in the things missing—the empty closet, the missing pillow, the straight-back chair, the small television. Again. Again. I wrench a battered blue suitcase from the bottom of the closet and yank open my mother’s drawers. Tears on my cheeks, I throw in shirts and socks and leggings—anything I can grab hold of.

  Returning to the kitchen, I see her on her side, tucked into a ball like a rolly-bug, the kind we flick outside when we find them on the kitchen floor.

  “Get up,” I say again, my voice harder, less shrill. “We’re going to move again, right? That’s how this works, right?”

  I hurl the suitcase at her, and it splits open, clothes exploding around her. A pair of leggings hooks onto her right foot. She whimpers, face buried in her arms and hair.

  Her back is shaking with tears, but I can’t stop myself from throwing my words at her. “You can’t keep doing this to me! I like it here. I have friends here. This isn’t just your life. It’s my life too.”

  She just rocks and rocks.

  “Are we moving?” I ask. This is a whisper—almost without air. She doesn’t respond, just looks up at me, her eyes liquid and swimming. Afraid. She twists the hanger into a figure eight and rubs her face into the smooth of his shorts. Has she heard any of this? Probably not. She’s too far stuck in the swamp of her own misery, lost back behind vacant eyes. I am just a howling, creeping background noise to her right now. Anger drains away, leaving a dark hollow in me.

  “I’ll get donuts,” I tell her, knowing that this is the only thing I can do right now.

  ***

  For a week, my mother slips in and out of agony. Pink Floyd pounds the walls as she moves like a phantom from couch to bed to brown overstuffed chair in the living room, always with the same green fleece blanket wound around her. She doesn’t shower; she barely eats (Safeway donut box half full now). Sometimes she cries; sometimes she just stares.

  I
clean up the suitcase mess in the kitchen. When her work calls, I tell them she is very sick, a horrible flu. On the fourth day, they tell me if she can’t produce a doctor’s note, she’s fired. She produces no note.

  I file the bills in order of due date, in order of the ones that I can let lapse and it won’t directly affect us. I cancel cable. Fishing my mother’s checkbook out of her purse, I pay the electric and water bill. I pull forty dollars out with her ATM card to buy food she picks at without comment. I eat pizza and Kraft dinners, and, once, I make a salad.

  I go to school.

  I watch Eli and Alexa laughing at lunch, watch Drew abandon his capes for a long, silver trench coat that looks like aluminum foil. They talk about the spring show and what they’ll do this summer. They are fixed in their lives here. I’m such an idiot. I let them get too close; I let them take me in. I can’t stop thinking about Sam even if he never even looks at me anymore.

  I should have known better.

  I sit in English class and ignore Mr. Ericson’s concerned looks. Sam is back in class looking thin and tired. Amber fawns on him like a new mother, and he allows it, vacantly. She runs her fingers through his hair, picks imaginary lint off his jacket, and feeds him french fries from a paper tray. Alexa and Drew make gagging noises for my benefit, and for theirs, I try to smile. I don’t tell them that my life has disintegrated.

  ***

  “Hello?” I tuck the phone between my ear and shoulder, and pull the rest of the laundry from the washing machine.

  “Calle?”

  “Yeah?”