“She’ll have a Long Island iced tea,” Naveen said as he came up behind me and slung his arm around my shoulders.
I shook my head at the tattooed bartender. “I have to drive home. Also, I’m—”
She interrupted me before I could explain I was underage. “If you’re planning on staying for an hour or two, you’ll be fine.”
“Um, ’kay.”
“I’m so glad you came,” Naveen said. “Almost all of my other so-called friends bailed for the night. We go on in ten, so I’ll come find you after the set.”
I nodded as he made his way through the small crowd hovering around the bar.
The bartender handed me a tall glass that smelled like way too much booze for my taste. “How much do I owe you?”
She shook her head. “I put it on Naveen’s tab.”
“Oh. Thanks.” I raised my glass and wandered to an empty table. Just a small sip of the “tea” puckered my face. I set the glass down on the table to let the melting ice dilute some of the alcohol, and pulled my phone out of my shoulder bag to make myself look occupied. A few minutes later, a middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache took the stage and cleared his throat into the microphone. He wore a battered black tux with coattails and a red lapel. The noisy patrons at a table up front whistled and then raised their glasses.
“Good evening, ladies, gents, in-betweeners, thieves, poets, politicians, lonely souls. Welcome to Salone Postale. We have a fabulous night planned for you that will include music, monologues, and mayhem.”
“Mayhem! Hell yeah!” one of the noisy patrons shouted.
The man in the tux grinned at him. “Most of you already know me, but for those of you who don’t, my name is Monty the Magician. I will be your master of ceremonies, here to provide a little lubrication between acts.”
The crowd laughed, and I swallowed another boozy sip of my drink.
“Before we subject you to the strange stylings of the Mollusk Brigade, how about a little foreplay?”
“That’s what I said to your mom last night,” the noisy patron by the stage shouted.
Monty didn’t seem to mind, and I wondered if heckling was par for the course at Salone Postale. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. I’d seen the trick before at a few birthday parties, but Monty performed it with such cheeky panache that I couldn’t help but find it amusing. He almost came off as a parody of a birthday party magician, like he knew the golden era of stage magic had long passed, but he didn’t give a shit and would continue to milk that old song and dance for all it was worth.
“Ta-da,” he shouted with a flourish of his hand. He poked his head between the plum-colored curtains and then re-emerged with a toothy smile.
“Without further ado, the Salone Postale proudly presents . . . the Mollusk Brigade!”
A nearly deafening cacophony of brass instruments busted through curtains, gyrated on the stage for a moment, and then shimmied onto the floor, snaking between the café tables like a caterpillar on drugs.
The band wore dark blue marching band uniforms, like the color of a stormy ocean, with pink and white nautilus shells embroidered on the shoulders and lapels. Once the initial cacophony ceased, they launched into a catchy instrumental cover of Television’s “See No Evil.” Most kids my age wouldn’t have recognized the tune, but my mom had spent a chunk of my childhood trying to educate me on “good” music. I preferred jazz to all of her guitar-heavy punk, though, in moments like this, I appreciated the knowledge she’d handed down.
A juggling act came on after Mollusk Brigade, and then a guy in waders delivered a monologue about the solitude of deep-sea fishing. By that time I’d finished three quarters of my drink and realized that the kindly octopus and little girl in puffy sleeves had led me down a rabbit hole and into some sort of vaudevillian parallel universe.
Naveen finally emerged from backstage during the intermission. “What did you think?” he asked as he brought me another Long Island.
“I’m not drinking that. But your band is great. Fun . . . kitschy in a good way.”
He pursed his lips. “I guess I can live with that.”
“Can I meet the girl who designed the poster?”
“Yeah, I’ll see if I can track her down.”
Monty the Magician wandered toward the bar as Naveen ran off to find the artist. He ordered a drink, took it from the bartender without paying, and then eyed me for a moment. I scrunched into my chair as he made his way to my table, praying that if I made myself small enough I’d disappear.
“Hey there, noob,” he said as he pulled out the chair next to mine and took a seat. “How’d you find your way in here?”
“I’m friends with Naveen. Sort of.”
His thick lips curled into an unnerving smirk as he rattled the ice in his glass. “Does that mean you’re sleeping with him?”
“No. I’m, like, underage.”
“Oh. Of course. Good to know we’re now serving minors.” He shook his head. “Really classy establishment we’re running here.”
“It’s just tea,” I said with a smirk of my own.
“Yeah, right. I’ll let it slide this time. What did you think of the first half of the show?”
I paused for a moment, debating whether I should continue down the trail of idle chit chat, or give him an honest answer. Part of my brain was screaming for me to say something bland, like good or interesting, when my honest answer somehow popped out of my mouth. “I’m not saying this to flatter you, but you were the best part. I’ve always been kind of fascinated by magicians.”
He raised his greasy eyebrows. “Really?”
My whole brain was firing on all cylinders at that point, screaming for me to abort, but my mouth, well lubricated with alcohol, must have responded with Fuck off, cerebral cortex, I got this. “Yeah. Magicians are like kindred spirits of escapologists. I’ve been obsessed with escapology for . . . I don’t even know. Like, forever.”
Monty’s dark eyes lit up. “Did you know Akiko Miyake used to perform here?”
I nearly spat out a swig of my second drink. “She did?”
Monty nodded reverently. “She developed her aquarium escape here. We still have the tank in the back. Would you like to see it?”
My mouth finally gave up, and I just stared at him.
“Okay. I’ll take that awkward silence as a yes.”
I followed Monty toward the side of the stage and through a series of doorways and curtains that blurred together in my tipsy state. I stumbled after him into a storage closet and squinted when he flicked on the overhead light. As my eyes began to adjust, I could make out the silhouette of a massive box, like the industrial coffin of an unlucky giant. So much dust had collected on the glass panels they’d become opaque, almost matching the tarnished brass running down the corners of the tank. On the left-side panel, some clever soul had dragged his finger through the dust to draw a cartoonish representation of male genitalia.
“It obviously hasn’t been cleaned in a while.” I punctuated my statement with a painful hiccup.
Monty shook his head. “I know. It’s terrible. We haven’t had a props master in years, so no one takes care of all the stuff in storage.”
I walked around the tank, examining the ladder to the top. I tried to picture myself climbing it, but the thought sent a boozy laugh rumbling through my chest.
“What was she like?” I asked.
“Alas, her heyday was before my time. I only know her through second-hand anecdotes passed around by some of the older patrons. But I’m friends with her daughter. Sort of.”
I grinned again. “Does that mean you’re sleeping with her?”
Monty chuckled. “You don’t miss a beat, do you? When I say we’re friends, I mean I’ve met her a handful of times. She doesn’t get out much so the salon volunteers are the closest thing she has to friends.” Monty rocked forw
ard and back on the toes of his wingtip shoes. “I’ve gotta be onstage again in a minute, but you can hang out here as long as you want.”
“’Kay,” I said between hiccups. Once Monty left, I planted myself on the concrete floor. Even if I knew the most exciting thing in the history of the universe was about to take place on the salon’s small stage, I wouldn’t have been able to tear myself away from that dusty tank. Instead of returning to my seat, I sat on that floor until I sobered up, then snuck out a back exit and drove home to Tivergreene.
***
Guinan clacked over to me on the kitchen tile when I pushed open the back door. “Hey, girl.”
I found Kyle in the living room without the usual suspects. He looked at me with bleary eyes and took another swig of something that smelled like drunk old man.
“Where’re Mom and Dad?”
“Went to visit Aunt Millie in Jersey. Remember?”
“Oh. Right.” In the midst of my losing my BFF for the summer, I’d apparently turned into the kind of self-centered kid who can’t keep track of her own parents.
I took a seat next my brother and tried to relax. I cracked my wrists, kicked off my shoes, stretched my toes. None of it helped. I still felt like I wanted to jump out of my own skin.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kyle asked.
“Ugh. I don’t know. I had weird night.”
“Where were you?”
I eyed the bottle as he took another swig. “Can I have some?”
“Since when do you drink bourbon?”
“Is there bourbon in a Long Island iced tea?”
His eyes popped open.
“I can have secrets,” I said. “No one needs to know everything about me.”
He handed me the bottle, and I took a deep swig. It tasted nothing like the drink I’d had at the salon and burned my throat on the way down. Once we’d polished off half the bottle, everything seemed to move faster and slower at the same time.
I glanced over at Kyle. My paused eyes on his three-day-old stubble and his droopy eyelids. I swear he hadn’t always been a drunk bum who wore pajamas more often than actual clothes. He’d practically been a rock star from grades K through 12—starter spot on the basketball team, honor roll, a gazillion friends and girlfriends, the whole deal. And then college happened.
Everyone thought Kyle was destined for great things. What they didn’t realize is that his golden boy life had turned him into a relentless praise-whore. Seriously, the guy was addicted to “attaboys.” But no one throws “attaboys” your way when you fuck up your knee three days into the first semester of college. And the attention you get after multiple surgeries isn’t the same as the attention you get when you win the big game with a three-point buzzer shot.
That’s all it took to drive my brother down into a depression spiral. I’ll forever be haunted by the image of him limping around the house, all smelly from not showering, his eyes glassy and bloodshot from painkillers topped off with stolen sips of whiskey and vodka from my parents’ liquor cabinet. He came home one weekend and never went back.
He tried at least half-heartedly to get a job, but the recession was in full swing, and no one wanted to hire a perpetually depressed college dropout and borderline junkie who they assumed would go back to school once he snapped out of it. But a year later, he still hadn’t snapped out of it.
Connor, his best friend, dropped out at the end of freshman year. Even with his fierce dark eyes that stared through everyone and everything, he’d never been charming enough to get the kind of attention he craved unless he was standing in the glow of Kyle’s halo. And when the halo crumbled, so did Connor’s plan to bask in that glow for another four years while he attended college with my brother.
Sometimes my heart kinda broke for the two of them. Sometimes I wanted to scream at Kyle for being such a mopey wuss-face. Aw, boo hoo, you got hurt and now you can’t play basketball. Meanwhile, children in third-world countries are starving and have probably never even seen a basketball. Grow some freaking perspective. And sometimes a rotten little part of me, a slimly kernel full of maggots, was glad my rock star brother had crashed and burned because it made me look good by comparison. And an even more rotten part of me was glad Connor had gotten a raw deal because, you know, screw him.
But as I stared at my brother, I realized I only looked good by comparison because no one really expected anything from me. I guess I was a little bit like Austin, Connor and Kyle’s third wheel, who never even applied to college and went straight into some low-wage cubicle gig. We weren’t fuckups because we’d never really tried at anything. We just skated by under the radar. At least I could say that instead of befriending a couple cool kids who treated me like their personal punching bag, I’d befriended Stella. Stella, who was off rubbing elbows with people who were the polar opposite of me, for the whole freaking summer.
Another one of my moments came on, only it didn’t feel like someone had struck a tuning fork by my ear. It felt like my whole body was ringing. “Kyle, I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Don’t do it here,” he barked. “The last thing I want to be doing before Mom and Dad get back is cleaning vomit stains out of the rug.”
I pushed myself off the couch and fled to the bathroom just in time. Projectile vomit, composed mostly of half-digested booze and Indian food, spewed from my mouth into the toilet bowl. After a few painful retches, I lay down on the cool tile floor with my eyes closed and my hands clutching my dizzy head.
“Guess you overdid it,” Kyle slurred from the doorway.
“I feel like death,” I moaned. “I’m going to bed.”
“Drink water before you sleep or you’ll feel even worse in the morning.”
I shuddered at the thought of ingesting anything and climbed up the stairs to my bedroom. I felt exhausted, but couldn’t get the muscles in my limbs to relax. I lay down on my quilt and the room began to spin.
“Make it stop,” I moaned.
The walls of my bedroom pressed themselves against me. I stared at all the antique knickknacks on my windowsill. Mr. Crankypants, a scowly ceramic gnome I’d picked up at a yard sale, stared back at me. Oh, did you want me to do something? Like give you a hug? Because I can’t. ’Cause I’m, you know, just a hunk of dried clay and glaze.
I picked up the paperweight on my bedside table and watched the light sparkle in the bits of sea glass buried inside it. Usually, just the weight of it in my hand would soothe my nerves, and I could distract myself by making up romantic stories about the previous owner. This time, I felt nothing and let the paperweight drop from my hand onto the oriental rug.
The stuffy air threatened to shrivel my lungs, and I pushed my window open to let the cool night in. I lingered by the windowsill for a moment and then slid out onto the roof, dragging my ass along the shingles because I didn’t trust myself to stand. The street below was deserted, but I could see TVs flickering in my neighbors’ houses. I pulled my knees up to my chest as I heard an epic battle between two screeching cats break out in the distance.
In that moment, something inside me shifted. The pit that had been hollowed out by a bunch of tiny, icky things caved in on itself, flooding me with fear and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d spent years convincing myself that my life under the radar was enough. That it was for the best because it would keep me from turning into someone like my brother. Or Connor. Or Meadow or Will. But Stella was the thing that made it tolerable. Without her, I was just a drunk girl on a roof, teetering on the edge of the same kind of depression spiral she’d watched her brother slide down.
I wish I could say that in that beautiful little moment I’d decided to make the conscious leap from consumption to creation. But the reality was considerably less romantic. Perhaps some small part of me was clutching those big ideas in the back of my mind, but the actual epiphany went more like the pa
thetic prayer of an intoxicated seventeen-year-old girl.
Dear God. I’m so freaking bored, and it’s making me think about things that are making me really sad. I really, really need something that will make me not think about these things so that I can survive this summer without using alcohol to turn my brain to mush. Thanks.
The very next day, I found myself outside Akiko Miyake’s crumbling house, trying to convince her daughter to help me save my own life.
The humid Southern California air hit me like a wall the moment I stepped out of LAX. I eyed a poster for Disneyland as I stood in line for a cab. When I reached the front, a gray-haired man tipped his cap to me as he pulled up in a yellow taxi.
“Where ya headed, miss?”
I gave him the address of my hotel in North Hollywood and took a seat in the back.
“First time in California?” he asked.
“Yes.” I slipped on my black-as-night sunglasses and hoped they made me look like a savvy world traveler instead of a scared-shitless co-ed who’d left the country of her birth for the first time in her life.
The cab smelled like stale body odor and my stomach had tied itself in knots. But I didn’t care. That smell and those knots and that humid SoCal air were about to deliver me to the future.
– Akiko Miyake, Los Angeles, July 3, 1976
Will With Two Ls Takes the Trolley
The night of Mattie’s first performance at Salone Postale, I was riding the crosstown trolley, half-hoping to see the lady with the empty cat carrier. Instead, I found myself amidst a bunch of drunk college kids who turned out to be just as obnoxious as drunk high school kids. One of them broke into a saucy rendition of “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” except he changed “flag” to “fag” in all the verses.
He wasn’t using the word the way the guys on the basketball team did. They tossed it out as a thoughtless insult, like a sharp cousin to the oft repeated and equally reprehensible “that’s so retarded.” But as an easily identifiable member of team-QUILTBAG, this college kid was reclaiming that three-letter word and brandishing it like a shrill fuck off. It was both a weapon and a come-on.
The Art of Escaping Page 6