by David Crabb
And then I drove, and drove, and drove . . .
Sylvia was surprised to see me. I was surprised that her phone number was listed, let alone still connected. She answered the door in a long Betty Boop T-shirt and jeans. Her brown hair was pulled back under a pastel headband. She had almost no makeup on. She looked prettier than I’d ever seen her. She welcomed me into her apartment, which was, strangely, in the same complex where I’d lived with my father.
“Girl, I always loved this complex,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Reminds me of good times.”
Walking into the living room, I was greeted by a motley crew of small animals.
“Meet my children,” she grinned, pointing at each of the four dogs and cats as she listed their names. She poured me a glass of water and caught me up on the last year and a half of her life.
“Well, Minerva, I was doin’ phone sex for a while but this creep kept callin’, begging me to make him jerk off with chunky peanut butter. Ooh! That bitch would scream!” she sighed, lighting a cigarette off the stove. “So now I just do telemarketing. Which is a different kind of phone-torture.”
“What are all those?” I asked, noticing that her refrigerator was covered in magnets and calendars for PETA and the ASPCA.
“Oh girl, I’m a vegetarian now,” she said with a smirk. “Sorry if I ruined you on burgers.”
Around her apartment I noticed odd details: things that suggested responsibility. In the kitchen hung a big marked-up calendar. By the front door was a wall-mounted key-ring holder. In the hallway there was a little slotted shelf that said MAIL on it. Even the simple clock hanging by her patio door suggested something too pedestrian. Since when did Sylvia care about time? How could Sylvia possibly have anywhere to go?
We sat down on the couch and paused the Friends DVD she had been watching.
“You watch Friends?” I asked, surprised that she watched such a mainstream show.
“Girl, I just love me some Ross. I could eat that Jew’s cookies!” she snickered, exhaling an endless plume of smoke. The idea of Sylvia liking a bumbling, uptight Jewish professional seemed out of sync with her usual tatted-up, angry poet type.
“Do you have a roommate, Sylvia?”
“Roommate?” she exclaimed. “Hell no, bitch. I’m a grown-ass woman with my own jobby-job, thank you very much.”
I looked around her apartment, and it was indeed her own: full of her own thrift-store furniture and stacks of fashion magazines and framed photos of friends. Her animals napped on every surface as we talked about Greg and Raven and Ray-Ray and the Bonham Exchange, remembering insane nights out, filling in the drug-induced blanks for each other as we went along.
“Guess what, Sylvia? I’m going to college in San Marcos now.”
“Bitch! College? That’s so great,” she said, bouncing up and down on the couch like I’d just told her an eight ball was on the way. “Your mom must be so proud!”
“You know her. She’s over the fucking moon.”
“Oh, I miss your mama. But truth be told, she is a talker. Dear Lord, she could keep a bitch on the phone for hours! I had to fake a kitchen fire once just to hang up.”
I chuckled to myself at how incredulous my mother would be.
“So you like your job?” I asked.
“Hell no! I’m gonna save up my money, buy some real nice clothes, and get an internship working for a magazine in New York City. They won’t pay shit, but I can shack up with a bunch of weirdos in the ass end of Brooklyn. I don’t care if my bathtub’s in the motherfuckin’ kitchen. I can douche and boil ramen at the same time!” she snickered.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No, ma’am. Know why? ’Cause ain’t no man good enough! I locked up the goodies until I get to the Big Apple. Cla-clink!” she cackled, miming a chastity belt locking between her legs and throwing the invisible key over her shoulder. “What about you, Minerva?”
“No. Um, I’m not seeing anyone.”
“Oh, stick-in-the-mud, are you still livin’ like a nun? What about that big old skinhead, girl? Have you knocked boots with Mr. Clean or what?”
I wanted to tell her where I’d just come from. But nothing came out.
“Hey, you,” she said, touching my hand, “what’s wrong?”
“Well,” I paused, worried that once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. “A week ago, Max was driving alone at night along the highway. They’re not sure what happened, but . . . He lost control of the car and flipped it. It was late, so he didn’t hit any other cars, but he crashed upside down in the emergency lane. They think . . . They think he hung upside down like that for a while, suspended by the seatbelt. Maybe he was unconscious for part of it, maybe not. He eventually freed himself and barged the door open, but . . .”
“It’s okay,” Sylvia said, gripping my hand tighter as the tears came.
“But he fell out of the car just as another car was passing and it . . . hit him. They say he died instantly, that he didn’t feel any pain. But I don’t know how long he was in there. How long was he alone and conscious? I keep thinking about how scared he must have been, waking up like that. And was his body hurt? Was something broken or cut before that? Was he bleeding? Did he call out for someone? Was he scared?”
I covered my face in my hands and kept talking, my mouth like a gaping wound now, pouring everything out in a way I wanted to stop but couldn’t.
“I was just at the funeral surrounded by all these people, all his friends. Some of them were people I used to know. I thought it would make me feel better, but without him there I felt like . . . no one. Like I didn’t know any of those people. And I thought when I saw them or hugged his mom that I would . . . feel something. Like I would feel . . . him. Like a presence or a spirit or something.”
The sounds of the words I was saying reverberated back at me and pushed out more tears and spit and mucus. I felt messy and ugly and full of imperfections. I wanted to shut up, to be mute, to simply disappear. But I couldn’t.
“I started to panic because I knew Max really wasn’t there. So I went to his grave later and said all this stuff to him. Stuff I’d meant to say but was either too scared or lazy or dumb to have said before. And I waited, thinking he would . . . But . . . I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t feel him, Sylvia. You know? I had not even just a little sense that he was there, because he’s gone. Not gone the way you’ve been gone or Greg is gone, but really gone. I’d just seen him a few months ago and we were going to be friends. But our classes were on different days and I met other new people and he was dating this nice girl and we . . . We just . . .”
I looked through my fingers at the coffee table, noticing the interlocking rings of drinking-glass stains in the wood.
“Me and him . . . We were gonna be friends again.”
The silence between us was cut by a sound, a bubbly, rumbling hum. I uncovered my face and looked at Sylvia, who was holding, as if it had materialized from thin air, the biggest water bong I’d ever seen. It was two feet long and flesh-colored, streaked with small pink lines. She held it by its base, a pair of darkened lavender orbs full of percolating water. She drew her lips away from the dark-pink, spherical mouthpiece atop the chamber shaft.
Sylvia was smoking weed from the hollow mold of a two-foot-long, erect penis.
“Bitch, that is the saddest shit I ever heard,” she sobbed, blowing out a massive cloud of smoke as I looked on, shocked out of my state by her magically appearing dong-bong.
“What?” she asked, seeing the appalled expression on my face.
“What the fuck is that?”
“Oh. It’s just a little purple haze,” she said, handing me the huge dick. I paused with it in my arms and shot her a look of concern, doubting the bowl’s contents.
“Okay, Minerva,” she blushed, “you got me. I put a little catnip in there too. Just tryin’ somethin’ new.”
I put my lips on the bong and inhaled, letting the thick, warm funk fill my lungs and tak
e me somewhere else.
“I missed you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. About everything.”
“Me too,” I choked out, holding a giant cloud of smoke inside my chest.
“I’m glad you’re here, David.”
Sylvia let go of my hand and got up. I could feel the damp moisture on our palms as they grazed each other. I lit a cigarette as she walked across the living room and pressed play on the CD player, filling the apartment with the sound of a song. It was a song I knew and loved but couldn’t name. In the glass of a frame across the room I caught my reflection, dressed in all black again, but for a different reason. Behind the glass is a photo. In it, most of my friends are on a dance floor, probably FX, but maybe not. Sylvia is there in a black smock throwing a shady look to Raven and Carla, who are wearing dog collars and sticking their tongues out while dry-humping each other. Hector is there in his torn blazer with the words “I am human and I need to be loved” scrawled across the lapel. Daphne is in the back, sipping from a plastic cup, looking bored and staring off with glowing red eyes. Jake is shirtless and covered in sweat, head back and eyes closed, fully surrendered to the music playing. Greg is in the foreground with his perfect bangs, reaching toward the lens. He’s gesturing to whoever’s taking the photo, his index finger wagging them toward him. His mouth is frozen midword, probably saying something like, “Come on! Come dance with me!”
The flash is unflattering; the harsh truth of the camera eye reveals every zit, pore, and smeared eyebrow. They’re clumpy and drippy and torn, trying to come off world-weary and sexy but failing in the most charming way. Collectively, they think they’re almost there, standing at the threshold of becoming who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives, not knowing that they’ve, thankfully, just begun.
They’re brash, flighty, messy kids. But in that frame beneath a pane of glass, they transcend all that. They’re special, preserved, and perfect. I look at the picture and try to imagine having known anyone else, but I can’t. Because when I look at the picture, all I can think is, I am just like them.
I pressed myself back into the couch, feeling the cool fabric of the upholstery against my arms and neck. I let out a long sigh and smiled as Sylvia turned from the stereo to look at me.
“What?” she asked, flashing me a smile I’d missed so much.
“Nothing,” I said, “I’m just glad I’m here too.”
Epilogue
I.D., please,” said Varla before taking my Texas driver’s license in her huge, hairy-knuckled fingers. Varla Rose was a sensationally messy drag queen known less for her stage shows and more for her nasty attitude, which was generally served out the side of her half-frozen face. Tonight at the Bonham Exchange I’d be seeing her ill-reviewed show, which I’d heard entailed less actual dancing and more drunken leaning: against poles, chairs, and walls. I’d told my friends that if we were lucky, things would get physical. We might get to see her verbally degrade someone or snap a nail off in another diva’s wig.
“That’s pretty sad when a drag queen has to check IDs for her own show,” whispered Shelly through her long, kinky red bangs.
“Thanks, peaches,” slurred Varla, letting out a belch. As her left eye wandered in a different direction from her right, I had a feeling we’d be in for a great show.
“It’s barely eleven and she’s already walleyed,” I whispered as we walked into the club. Shelly tilted back her head and laughed like a maniac, showing off the wide gap between her two front teeth.
“You could park a car in there,” I chuckled, pointing at her gaping maw.
She smacked the back of my head and looked back to our friends. “Hurry up, fuckers!”
Behind us was Jeff, a tall philosophy major with prematurely salt-and-pepper hair. I knew him through Kim, the petite blonde beside him whom I’d met in my still-life photography class. I’d met Shelly during my sophomore year in college as an art major. Tonight I was taking us all to the Bonham Exchange, which I was entering legally for the first time as a twenty-one-year-old.
“Wait up,” yelled Kim, running up in her thrift-store heels and baby-doll dress. “I need to fix your hair, Crabb,” she said, reaching up to finesse the bleach-blond spikes of my Mohawk. “It’s like a haystack or some shit!”
“Where’s the bathroom?” Jeff asked, fanning himself in the club’s crowded main hall. He looked at himself in a mirror and gasped, “Oh, girl. I need to pull my face together.”
“Actually, I need to powder my nose,” added Kim with a wink.
“It’s right over there,” I screamed over the distant thump of house music. “Meet us on the dance floor!”
Shelly and I moved down the wide, eighty-foot-long hallway of the old synagogue, squeezing through a mix of young- to middle-aged gay San Antonians in their Friday-night best. They fanned themselves with flyers and free downtown papers in the mid-July heat.
“These guys are so hot!” yelled Shelly, passing a gaggle of lean Hispanic men with perfectly shaped beards in fitted black tops. “I feel like a hippie schlub, David!”
“Shut up! You look beautiful!” I screamed back, catching our reflections as we passed a mirrored wall. Shelly was in purple leggings and a blue velveteen dress, each arm covered in a dozen chunky vintage bracelets. She wore her favorite beaded lip ring and a floppy brimmed hat atop wild auburn curls. I wore my favorite Smashing Pumpkins shirt under a too-small vest that was covered in band pins for Hole, Garbage, and the Pixies. My torn blue jeans and Converse high-tops were stained from semesters’ worth of painting classes and photo-chemical mishaps.
The grungy, alt-rock nineties were in full swing. Any attraction I’d had to clean lines and grayscale was long gone. I was queer. I was an art major. And I was twenty-one.
“This is amazing!” Shelly screamed, looking up at the massive disco ball hanging from the three-story vaulted ceiling.
It was as amazing as I’d remembered it being three years earlier, the last time I’d snuck in. It was nice to be back, and I was relieved that not much had changed. I ordered drink upon drink, proudly flashing the glow-in-the-dark stamp on my left hand. At midnight on the patio I grabbed Kim’s hand and dragged her around the side of the building.
“Where are you fucking taking me, Crabb?” she demanded, covering her nose from the stench of the alley’s dumpsters.
“It’s still there!” I exclaimed, slurring a bit.
“Are you high?” she laughed as I pushed on the loose two-by-four. “It’s a hole in a fence!”
“Yeah,” I smiled, realizing I was far too drunk to explain what that hole meant to me.
Everywhere on the dance floor I noticed a certain type of boy: boys with badly copied stamps smeared on their hands; boys hanging on the darker edge of the dance floor for fear that the pulsing lights would reveal their peach fuzz and acne; boys on the arms of their loud, brassy girlfriends, hiding in plain sight with cohorts they call their brothers who they’re actually dying to kiss; boys who owed the first genuinely dazzling night of their lives to a hole in a fence.
By 2 a.m. I’d lost Kim and Jeff to some other part of the club. Shelly had met a short, pixie-haired lesbian named Sky, whom she’d decided to flirt with in the basement. Although Shelly wasn’t gay, she was a liberal-arts major who listened to a lot of Sarah McLachlan. Eventually Shelly and Sky started making out at the bar, violently flicking their tongue piercings together as a remix of Madonna’s “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” blared through the sound system.
I took my cue and left to walk around alone, drunkenly trying to recall the spots where I’d gotten sick from tequila or tipped my first stripper or felt the explosion of a thousand supernovas in my chest as a tab of acid kicked in.
In the small ground-floor bar I sat alone and thought about the only night I’d come here with Max. I remembered sitting in exactly the same spot, with Greg and Sylvia laughing on either side of me about nothing I could recall. I wasn’t listening to them because I was staring at Max, twenty feet away, c
ornered by two older queens who were ogling him like a piece of meat, their eyes wandering up and down his figure. It was nice to be the one checking in on Max for a change, and charming to watch him suffer their questions so politely. As the two men cackled about something and gave each other a high five, Max looked at me with those squinty Buddha eyes and shrugged with the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, a giant sun patiently shining light on all the tiny moons drawn into his orbit. Max was simply too full of love not to give it to anyone who asked, if only for a moment; even to a couple of drunk queens three times his age trying to get into his pants. I remembered that moment as he looked at me and how I knew, in some ineffable way, that love as strong as this wasn’t about reciprocity. The gift wasn’t in having it returned, but in feeling it at all, if only for one incredible summer.
I got up from the bar and moved through the main hall, reaching the crowded grand staircase, an eight-foot-wide walkway that led to the upstairs ballroom. I squeezed myself onto the first step of the staircase, which was as dense as a New York City subway entrance at rush hour.
“Move it, girl!” a platinum-headed man in front of me yelled to a group of stationary boys on the landing above. “You can’t stand there, assholes!”
I slowly moved up another two stairs as more bodies piled up at my back.
“Sorry,” said a voice behind me as I tripped forward.
“Watch it,” I began, prepared to tell off the asshole at my heels. Over my shoulder was a tall boy about my age with short, brown hair, wearing chunky black glasses and a red T-shirt.