by Maddy Wells
I pulled the sunglasses down from my forehead to cover my eyes before I looked around. Alex wasn’t there. The advertising types stepped briskly away from the platform. The hippies conferred, lighting cigarettes and redistributing their loads, pointing in different directions, trying to figure their way and finally, drawn by the sound of tinkling bells and tambourines, they walked toward the escalator on which half a dozen undernourished looking boys in scruffy salmon pink robes, all with shaven heads, seemingly floated down to the lower level:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
I was drawn to them too, and when one of the boys saw me staring at him, he singled me out for his chanting. My heart began to race illogically and I scurried to a bench spotted with blackened gum wads and sat down. Taking deep breaths to calm myself, I saw a man staring at me who’d been scanning the passengers as we disembarked. He was an older guy, more than thirty, short blond hair—too short to be cool—wearing a safari vest and filthy desert boots. He stood not more than two feet in front of me now and looked through my dark lenses. His gaze seemed to peel away my clothes as well as any grown-up pretensions I had wrapped around myself.
“We’ll take the subway,” he said, assuming correctly who I was. I wondered what Alex had said to describe me.
“Where’s Alex?”
“At a go-see.”
He wrenched my sky blue Samsonite cosmetics case from my hand—“It’s not like I’m going to run away with your frilly panties,” he said—and led me to the subway as if I were retarded. I was angry that, if left on my own, I would be hopelessly lost in the dank and humid maze of subway tracks and humanity, which seemed menacing and foreign. I accepted the tokens Lance bought me with a grunt, hating to be even that much in his debt.
The subway that Lance led me to was a zoo of multi-colored pelts, noises and smells. Lance talked a monologue the whole way to our stop. “You can live like a king in New York if you know the right people,” he said. “You don’t have to have a lot yourself, as long as your friends do.”
“So, you don’t have a lot?”
“I didn’t say that. I meant you. You don’t need much to live here ‘til you get settled.”
We emerged into the circus-like atmosphere of St. Marks Place. Music blared out of every open door and window. Street vendors hawked roasted peanuts and sausage from carts, the smells mingling with sweet incense that burned everywhere. The odors would have made me nauseous if I hadn’t been so overcome with the excitement of actually being there. And the people! I felt like I was at a costume party: polka dots and wild Indian prints, cheap metal jewelry tinkling off wrists and ankles of both sexes. A group of tattooed bikers wearing leather vests over hairy tattooed chests revved the engines of their Harleys outside a corner bar. A tall man with blond braids sticking out of his Viking helmet brandished a shield, protecting himself from some energetic invisible menace. A man who looked like Salvador Dali was painting at an easel, pausing to look up at the fire escape above his head, but when we passed him and I turned to look at his painting, it was of a lake surrounded by pine trees. An old woman leaned on a second story windowsill and scowled down at the runaway traffic passing beneath her. Her disapproval made me inordinately happy. I stopped in front of a Magic Shop, the window displaying a hundred glasses of water, each with an expanding eyeball inside. Lance caught my gap-mouthed look and nudged me along laughing, dispelling my good mood.
We passed a man leaning over a car, his index finger on the hood seemingly holding him up. He looked paralyzed.
“Smack,” Lance said.
His apartment was a loft in an old warehouse. He had to open three locks, which seemed sturdier than the structure itself.
“What do you have in here?” I asked. “Gold?”
“It’s comfortable. It’s cheap. I have enough room to work.” He put my cosmetics case carefully on a futon shoved into a corner on the floor. The only privacy was a wicker screen barely longer than the mattress covered with an Indian print bedspread, bought for my benefit I assumed. Black and white blow-ups of women covered the walls. Stacks of books held up a door that was a coffee table and another stack held up the end of a sofa, a lime green velveteen monstrosity that had hosted decades of messy parties. A bare counter shone in the small kitchen. A beaded curtain partitioned off a waterbed with a giant hookah on the floor next to it.
“I work in there.” He pointed to a door behind the master bedroom, a red light bulb on the wall next to it. “If you see that light on, don’t come in. I don’t care if the place is burning down. Got that?”
I nodded glumly. Under any other circumstances, I would have considered this a very cool place to live. Now I found fault with every detail. I smoothed the spread on my futon and sat down on it, crossing my ankles primly.
“That’s it,” he said, smiling. “Make yourself at home. I’ll get us something to drink.”
He fumbled around in the kitchen cabinet and finally came up with two glasses, blue with cut dots that came in boxes of detergent. We chatted and I tried to will away my hostile attitude, but I could not see Alex liking a man who would make her drink from such things. He was so old for one thing and he didn’t seem ashamed of it. He was at least thirty-two. His dark blond hair was cut short in complete defiance of fashion and he wasn’t wearing bell-bottoms. He moved with a confidence I found both unfounded and irritating.
That confidence must’ve been what Alex liked about him. I was worried that she was limiting our possibilities. By tying ourselves to one man we would miss all the others. Although Lance was good enough company to share a bottle of wine with—he’d begun to make me laugh despite my foul mood—and was attractive in a way that I thought of my father’s friends as being attractive when I wanted to test my feminine artillery, I didn’t want to get trapped here. The city and our adventure had seemed limitless in possibilities and I was annoyed that such an ordinary person had already defined our parameters. I would have been happier if he had been incredibly handsome or incredibly rich. Incredibly anything.
He poured us some more wine from a jug on the floor as he appraised me critically.
“You don’t look anything alike. For sisters. Maybe a little here.” He pointed to his own eyes.
I accepted the wine and drank it quickly, wanting it to complete its numbing route through my veins. I pushed my glass towards him for a refill, but he didn’t budge.
“If you’re going to crash here, you’ll have to learn to help yourself,” he said. “I can’t wait on you. I don’t know what you’ve been used to, but I’m not your servant. Did you have servants or something in Philadelphia?”
“Philadelphia?”
She had lied to him. I ducked my head, cheering inwardly at this act of disloyalty to Lance.
“That teensy-weensy mansion on the Main Line. What does your daddy do, anyway? She’s so damned mysterious. What is he, in the mob or something?”
He leaned against the sink, watching me. But I wouldn’t help him. Alex was right to reinvent our origins. We were in a new city, starting a new life. We could be anyone from anywhere we wanted. There was nothing so romantic about the truth that it was worth clinging to, and now that I was forced to think about it, I couldn’t see our mundane beginnings giving us any cachet.
“Philadelphia is such a bore,” I said.
He laughed nervously, and I was happy to see a man that old unsure of himself. “What’s so boring about Philadelphia?” he asked.
“Are you from Philadelphia?” I asked, ready to be branded the liar that I was.
“No, but I’d like to know what makes two eighteen year old girls think that a big city is boring.”
Lance pulled out a camera and held a light meter to my face. “I still can’t believe you’re sisters,” he said.
“I’m not as pretty,” I said.
“No,” he said bluntly, studying the picture I made in
his viewfinder. “But there’s something else.”
I put my foot surely on the path I was going to take and I could hear a huge gate clank shut behind me. I showed him the most flattering angle on my face and taking advantage of the years of practice in front of the mirror, my skill in making myself anything I wanted to be, I made myself sexy. “I’m more erotic,” I said.
He put his camera down and looked at me. For the first time since I’d met him I smiled. He didn’t. In fact, he looked a little shocked and put his camera away, while daring to look at me more boldly as we swam through the jug of wine.
We were pleasantly drunk by the time Alex returned. She seemed pleased to see the empty wine jug and sat next to me on my mattress, smoothing my wild hair from my eyes, and took a sip from my glass.
“You sounded so angry on the phone,” she said. “I thought you didn’t think I was a good scout.” Her voice so effectively wrapped its cocoon around me that I was lulled into believing it was just us again. Lance was only a host to our adventure.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked in a whisper, anxious now to know her plan.
She laughed. “With Lance? Here look.” She opened her portfolio and showed me the pictures he had taken of her. I tried not to be enthused but the photos were breathtaking. He couldn’t take credit for making her beautiful. But his photographs froze her at the precise second she was most herself. “If you don’t like him, we’ll leave right away. Right now.”
“Honest?”
“I couldn’t stay here if you were unhappy.”
“I just don’t know what you see in him,” I said, although after only a few hours I had to admit I could see his appeal. “He’s so ordinary. You’ll be one of millions. Look at all these women.” I gestured at all the black and white blown up women who pouted at us from the walls.
Lance had the good grace to go into his dark room when we started talking about him, so we were alone on my mattress.
“We’ll go right now,” she said. We hooked pinkies like we did when we were children, and I wanted to flee with her, wanted to pretend that our world hadn’t already changed. “If you leave, I’ll leave with you,” she said, but by the tone in her voice I knew it would have made her unhappy.
We opened more wine and drank right from the bottle and talked of our dazzling future in New York. Slowly, I became assured that Lance really was just the man of the moment. How foolish I’d been to think otherwise. We talked of all the men who would love us and all the jobs we would conquer. We were too young to think our future might be already decided. How could it be? We hadn’t designed it yet. How could we know that fate was feeding us our lines as if we were actors on a stage? That we had no control over what would happen that summer. The script was already written. Our only job was to play it out.
Chapter Two
In the two weeks since she had been away from me, Alex had acquired a new best friend, Blueberry.
“You can’t be my best friend,” she said, laughing at my fears. “You’re my sister. Who has more significance, a friend or a sister?”
“Depends on the sister,” I said, “and the friend.” I tried not to sulk, but the people she gravitated to were such phonies.
Alex was meeting girls with all kinds of funny names: Blueberry, Yam M’am, Moon Child. The people who wandered through her life were losing themselves in pot and other drugs I wasn’t yet familiar with, recreating reality for themselves within the walls of their own heads. They seemed to have grown disgusted with their animal selves and yearned to be plants or planets. It was like protective camouflage. If I’m a Blueberry, I can’t be responsible for the havoc humans visit on the planet. I abstained because Alex and I had made a pact not to do drugs until we were established. Alex, I suspected, abstained in order to keep an edge of cool superiority.
In any event, Alex surrounded us with fruits and vegetables, claiming these people were more real for having doused their competitive and aggressive instincts. But in Blueberry’s case, at least, I knew that she was planning to upstage Alex. I saw her looking through Alex’s appointment book and making notes on a piece of paper which she jammed into her purse when I caught her.
I tried to warn Alex to watch her back, but she wouldn’t listen. She loved Blueberry, “like a sister,” she said.
“I thought she was a friend,” I said.
“Friend, sister. Really, Nadia, what’s the difference?”
Blueberry and Alex had become friends when they were assigned to a photo shoot in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, modeling clothes while perched on the backs of horse-drawn buggies. Amish people would be used as props. The idea of high fashion and Plain Folk mixing it up for a spread in Seventeen was so ridiculous I couldn’t stop laughing.
“My God, those people don’t even use zippers,” I said. “They’re going to be praying for your crass materialistic soul, Alex.”
Alex and Blueberry didn’t find it odd or funny.
“It’s how they sell clothes, stupid,” Blueberry said. She smoothed her shiny blond hair. “It’s to get your attention.”
“It’s not dishonest or anything,” Alex said, anxious for my approval. It was her first real job and she was so thrilled she almost forgot to tell me about it. She said. She’d remembered to mention it only as she was throwing underwear and toothbrush in a bag while Blueberry waited, chain-smoking Marlboros. So I told her that of course it was a legitimate way to make a living and I was happy. I was just going to miss her. That’s why I’d said those mean things about it.
“Five days only,” she said. “I’ll be back before the weekend.”
I wasn’t disappointed that Alex would be gone for few days. I needed some time to reconnoiter, plan our next moves. It was hard to do with Alex wandering around, happy and busy. It made any suggestion to move on ludicrous.
More importantly, Lance left the next morning for a photo shoot in Mexico. He would be gone for a week. Once they were back, it would be impossible to be myself, so I made the most of the next few days, trying to chisel out a life amidst the clutter of theirs.
Noon the next day, I ventured out for the first time alone. Men with jackhammers and cement mixers did their best to repair potholes and cracks in the seams of the city, but I got the feeling that the place was deteriorating faster than they could pour the concrete. The constant pounding in the street was a backdrop of sound for the entire summer.
The neighborhood around Lance’s apartment had the sleepless gaiety of a wake on its third day. Drugs were everywhere, lining the streets like lumps of gold in a hippie El Dorado and although Alex and I had our pact not to do drugs until we were on our feet, I made mental note of how sellers approached you and where they were.
Narrow single window storefronts housed boutiques garishly lit by strobe lights. The clothes they hawked were mostly Indian, some Mod mixed in for those who were straight enough, or cared enough, to iron their garb. Vendors with push carts sold silver jewelry and patchouli incense: the scent filled the air, defining the area as a tabernacle. I stopped for a moment, closed my eyes and breathed the exotic aroma. Even now, when I’m in a suburban mall and unexpectedly smell the stuff wafting from a head shop it brings me back to that day, that summer.
I stopped at a café and sipped coffee from a dirty cup, but I determinedly ignored it and scanned the want ads in a Daily Mirror someone had left on the table. The paper had nothing about auditions, so I looked for more mundane occupations. It was breathtaking how little I was qualified for. I had endured twelve years of education and was astounded to find that nothing learned in Samaria’s public schools could be converted to cash. Even the most mindless occupations, like receptionist, required experience.
I put down the paper and stared into the mirrors that lined the walls around the booths, slowly becoming conscious of a man staring at my reflection. He wore an Army fatigue jacket with a name over the breast pocket I was sure wasn’t his, because he had officer insignia on the collar and sergeant stripes sewn sloppily
on the sleeves. I knew from my father’s ranting about draft dodgers that a man who had actually been in the service could never tolerate violations to the uniform no matter what his politics. It would feel like a stone in his shoe.
Otherwise, he had the look of the boys we had necked with in high school. Skinny, long dirty-blond hair, impossible to resist smile, which I found no reason to resist. I turned to get a look at the real thing and smiled back.
Soon we were sharing a table and dismay over my career prospects. He dragged a long suitcase with him, which contained, he said with pride, an electric guitar.
He was only a few years older than me, and New York was not the first place he had ever been. Like me, he had been raised in an industrial town. Within five minutes we knew we had nothing more in common than that and our youth. But I found his world-weariness enormously appealing, because that’s how I pictured myself in a few years. He was on the third stop of a goal to travel around the world. He had already been in Philadelphia and Washington DC and I liked that he wasn’t impressed with them. I didn’t imagine I would be either. I couldn’t think of what would impress me, but I knew it wouldn’t be contained in a lesser city than New York.
His name was Eric, but he was known “professionally” as Rick. He would play his guitar in a city until he had enough of the place and enough money to move on. He planned to circle the globe and land back in Indiana in five years. And after that he foresaw his future opening up again like a rose on its second bloom. All those possibilities thrilled me. Rick had been in New York three months and was crashing with friends until he got enough money to go to London.
“See these?” he asked, sticking his hands in my face. “Five years learning this thing.” He pointed his head towards the guitar case.
I scrutinized his yellowed fingers, trying to make a connection to the guitar. It looked like he’d smoked a lot of cigarettes for a person his age, but that’s all. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to see. “Why? What’s the matter?”