Not tall enough.
Too blond.
Too skinny.
Not skinny enough.
Droopy eye.
Scars.
Strange face.
Druggy.
Ugly.
Typical.
Fat.
Proportions off.
Hideous.
Commercial.
Too sweet.
Too slutty.
Too nice.
Too pretty.
Not pretty enough.
Something about it made me feel used up, consumed, like I was the little girl my father gobbled up all over again, his sexual abuse consuming in a drunken, hungry rage all the best parts of me until I was nothing but a pretty, performing doll. How I’d endure it time and time again, night after night, and every day I’d wake up and pretend I was fine, how I’d polish up my little soul. How I’d smile and keep on marching through my days like I was just another ordinary, happy little girl. Everything in Paris somehow felt like I’d stirred up the dirty pond of my childhood and wore it like a party dress.
So I went back to school and left modeling behind.
At least I planned to. As it turned out, modeling was a much better way to earn cash that the usual college opportunities. It was also a great way for a girl like me to travel and write and be in the world. So, I would go back (to Japan, to Milan, to Geneva, even to do some commercials in New York) in the fall semesters, save up the cash, then take a double load in the spring. But by then I knew it was a means to an end, not the other way around.
And then I met Liam.
It was the last semester of my senior year of undergrad in Sacramento. After living through my accident, then Paris, I decided I was tired of chasing things that meant nothing to me. I scrapped my law school plans and applied to three master of fine art programs in poetry.
So much for practical.
My application to Sarah Lawrence had been so last minute (I’d never heard of it until my poetry professor, Dennis Schmitz, suggested it) that it was written longhand on five unlined pages. There was nothing to do now but wait.
I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to frequent all my favorite Sacramento spots before leaving town forever.
Sam’s Hof Brau was the kind of place that lived up to everything promised in its blinking, golden, beer-suds-popping-like-tiny-fireworks neon sign. On the corner of Tenth and J Streets in downtown Sacramento, it was one of many dive bars visited on weekends by Sac State students. Inside, the light was warm and hazy, as if you were submerged in a gleaming glass of beer. Behind a steamy window, sturdy spits turned with fat turkeys and dripping hams, while charred tri-tip rested on battered carving boards. There were great interchangeable metal pans of greasy sides, and fluffy white rolls in enormous brown paper sacks, torn open at the top. The dimmed light was golden; the battered bar was long. The tables were in the back room, and the main room had the bar along one side, some skinny bar tables against the other wall, and way down adjacent to the swinging front doors was a raised, square stage.
That night, the Beer Dawgs were playing in all their rough, honky-tonk glory, while a mix of midtown hipsters, old hippies, and college kids filled the cramped dance floor under glittering domes of light. I went out three nights a week in those semesters I was home from abroad. No matter that my final semester I was—with special permission from the dean of humanities—taking an entire year’s worth of courses in one semester, I was full blown on the lookout for love. Moving back and forth every semester left me feeling, while thrilled, always a bit lonely, displaced, never able to maintain the deep friendships and love affairs hallmark to college life.
I was just home from Osaka, my last semester abroad modeling before I graduated, when we met. Liam was sitting at the bar at Sam’s, wearing ripped-up Levi’s, a pair of cowboy boots, and a threadbare vintage yellow cowboy shirt with abalone snaps. His hair, sandy blond and wavy, reached just below his shoulders, soft and thick, not wild but feral nonetheless. He didn’t have a classically handsome face—his chin was weak, his nose a little big, his skin not that of a fresh-faced college boy but of a laborer who spent long hours in punishing sun. Somehow all the rough added up to handsome, though. Mostly, because he had those eyes—deep set, almond shaped, so big, and the palest color of blue-green you’ve ever seen. Like aqua with diamonds shot through. He was slight, lanky, about my height. I’d seen him a few times before—at the Zebra Club, and the VFW Post, and the Press Club. I pulled up a barstool next to him, said, “Hey, I’m Alice.”
“I’m Liam,” he said, too quiet for me to hear.
“Arron?” I asked.
“Liam,” he said, louder.
“Wow, that’s a nice name.”
“Yeah, my mom thought it sounded like someone on a soap opera.” He laughed.
“Was your mom into soap operas?” I asked.
“No, she just wanted to sound like she wasn’t a fifteen-year-old, white-trash, high school dropout,” he said, the smile spreading all the way to those dazzlingly morning-blue eyes.
“Ah, well, fancy names for your kids will cure a lack of education every time, right?” I answered. “I suppose you have a brother named Ashton and a sister named Blaire?”
He laughed. “Hardly! Two sisters, Sandy and Brandy, and a brother, Huck. I guess they got ripped off.”
“I guess so!” I laughed. I was halfway through my Diet Coke, and he was ordering another beer.
“How’d you end up with a name like Alice?” he asked.
“I was left on the doorstep of an old-folks home in a basket, and the old folks named me before the news crews arrived.”
“No,” he said.
“No,” I said, “both my grandmothers were named Alice; it was fate.”
“Would you think I’m crazy if I told you that sitting next to you here feels a little bit like fate?” he asked, only half smiling now.
“You’re teasing me.”
“I might be.” He smiled. “I’ve been watching you for months.”
“Where?” I balked.
“All over town, all the clubs, at school.”
“You go to State?” I said, shocked. I’d never seen him there.
“Yeah, I’m premed.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “That explains it. I have science-geek blindness,” I teased.
“Very funny.”
“I’m only kidding. You’re going to med school, then?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to, my whole life,” he said, growing serious.
“How come? I couldn’t imagine being a doctor,” I added.
“Growing up, we had nothing. I mean, nothing. Less than nothing. Most of the time we were homeless. If someone was sick, there was nothing we could do about it but just endure it, you know? As a kid, I always thought that I was missing out on something. That if we had the money to go to the doctor, that we’d be getting some sort of powerful medicine that would make us better. I don’t know, I felt more than sick. When one of us got sick, and we were always sick, I felt like it was our fault we were sick. We were dirty, you know. Somehow in my kid brain I got it in my mind not only that if we had money to go to the doctor we’d be well but that also we’d be clean and we’d be, I don’t know, somehow, as good as all the other kids, like, worthy. Whatever, it doesn’t make any sense,” he trailed off.
“It makes a lot of sense, actually,” I said, putting my hand on his arm, a sensation like a ferocious wave running down my body at the place where our skin met.
“I just want to help people, do something meaningful,” he said.
“That’s amazing.”
We sat in silence for a while, side by side at the bar. The Beer Dawgs went through a couple of songs while people danced and talked and laughed above the music. From the next room, silverware clinked while couples feasted on their roasts and fowl. Liam ordered us another round, Diet Coke for me and a dark brew for him, and we drank it slowly, his hand on the small of my back while
we sat in the gentle light of Sam’s, content in our silence. Eventually, my girlfriend Lark Noble, who I’d come with, came to get me to dance with her. She tried to pull Liam along, too, but he refused. As Lark pulled me away from him, he called out to me, “Hey, what are you going to be when you grow up?”
“A poet!”
I danced, grooving and losing myself in the hard blues on the little dance floor under the big arts-and-crafts chandelier, the now-muted light dropping a soft yellow ease over the throbbing mass. Liam joined up with the buddy he’d come with, but he watched me for over an hour from the bar. I saw him standing there at the edges of the crowd, and I thought how different we were—me at the center of the action, him at the fringe. But there at the bar, side by side, it felt like we were the same kind of person. Like we could sit there for a long time and never run out of things to say. Like we could unzip our chests and the same pile of wounds would fall out. Somewhere toward the end of the evening, he came and shoved a little piece of paper with his name and number in a terrible scrawl in the pocket of my jeans and left. He told me later, much later, that he announced to his friend that night, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”
THE “I”S HAVE IT
I called Liam the very next day. On the phone, his voice was soft, with a happy lilt, as if everything he said was the penultimate line of a joke. Turns out he didn’t live far from me.
I had a flat in midtown on Twenty-third Street in the heart of the city, a gorgeous white Victorian that had been chopped up into seven flats, all with polished hardwood floors, odd angles, and big, sunny, wobbly windows looking out on the church across the street. Liam rented a converted garage in the statelier environs of East Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties neighborhood, not far from where Ron and Nancy played house in Sacramento for the governorship.
Despite Sacramento having the reputation of a cow town, those were heady days for a twentysomething college kid in school there. People were forever asking me why on God’s green earth I went back to Sac between modeling assignments. The truth was cheap rent, being a big fish in a small pond, and a pretty thriving scene to keep me entertained when I wasn’t in Paris or Milan or Osaka or New York kept me coming back.
On any given weekend, you could see a hard-core punk band in an abandoned warehouse in a back alley on Friday, a very-young Nirvana at the Cattle Club on Folsom Boulevard on Saturday, and Cake in a friend’s backyard on a Sunday afternoon. Chi Cheng from Deftones was in my poetry-writing seminar, and I was taking Intro to Native Art from Frank LaPena. Besides, I had neither the grades nor the cash to get into a better school. I was making the best of Sac State, and—even taking a year’s worth of classes each spring—I was still clearing a near 4.0.
Everyone knew everyone. My teenage crowd of skaters and punkers became artists and journalists and rock stars and chefs. My parents were pretty liberal when I was in high school, and we always had a homeless skater or two crashing in the poolroom. Mama’d deloused and supplied pancake feasts to more than her fair share of tweakers and lost boys. Junior year, I donned a vintage strapless black Betty dress and went to prom with Chico Garcia—who promptly got drunk and drove Mama’s white Lincoln Continental up the curve and almost into one of the lakes in William Land Park. I’d had my first fuck with my boyfriend’s best friend in her Dodge Charger after band practice. The point being that despite the fact that I was nerd when it came to making the grades and had never touched so much as a single joint in my life, I knew from boys and butch girls and troublemakers. From the stories Liam told, it sounded as if he had been around the block and halfway back, and yet I’d never so much as heard his name. I found it strange we’d never crossed paths, but I brushed the thought away.
Who needs red flags when you’ve got red tap pants instead?
Perhaps that was part of my downfall—I liked to play awful dirty, but I liked to keep my dresses pristine. While everyone else was rolling out of bed the next day at noon, I was sitting in the front of the class, raising my hand like a guileless fool. I do have the hindsight to realize now this was, quite literally, a near-fatal flaw.
We talked for hours the first few days after our night at Sam’s, exchanging stories about our childhoods: mine Southern and wretchedly storied, his decadently horrific, both abusive to the utmost extreme. Between us there was a lot of “past” to cover—not only our childhoods but our college years, too. Nothing was off limits; secrets were a sharp tool of seduction we’d both honed well.
We were both just about to go into our last semester. He’d applied to six or seven medical schools, and I’d applied to exactly three MFA programs in poetry—Iowa, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence. Meanwhile, his applications were not quite due, and he asked me to “take a peek” at the personal statement part of his applications. A few days after we met at Hof Brau, we made plans for Liam to come over to my house the following night at six.
It was raining and dark. I was wearing one of my favorite outfits; no one around Sacramento wore anything like it. That’s why I thought I was cool. In other words: I was young, arrogant, and trying mighty hard to be sexy. Everything came from a thrift store: the men’s XL tuxedo shirt with the extra-wide cuffs, little woven knobby links instead of buttons, perfectly pleated bib front, and tiny stand-up collar; black lace bustier underneath; waist-high, lace-edged satin tap pants, red; big woven tooled cowboy belt slung low on the waist; knee-high tube socks with black stripes around the top; vintage cowgirl boots with inlaid roses; tons of turquoise jewelry. My blond hair was pulled back more severely than one of the girls in Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video, and my face was bare except for a dark, deep-red stain of lipstick.
Fucking ridiculous.
This look might—and I emphasize might—fit in perfectly were I, say, sitting backstage waiting for hair and makeup at Chanel in Paris. In Sacramento, I looked like I had not only forgotten my pants but my makeup and my hairstyle, too. If I had a mama who ever gave a decent slip of advice to what made for a decent young lady, I’d have known better. Not that I’d have listened. But good Lord and Savior, what was I thinking? Not much other than what was going to happen the minute he walked through the door. I checked my lipstick one last time in the mirror above my cassette deck. The rain came down hard. I was ready.
He was late.
First, just a few minutes: no big deal, really. Though I must say, I’ve always been a bit of a stickler for promptness. Instead of behaving like a normal college chick and having beer in the fridge and a bag of chips on the counter, I had an inlaid lacquered tray of hors d’oeuvres set out on a battered wooded trunk between the two love seats in my main room with tiny pieces of soft cheese and broken unraised bread and tsukemono and hard meats, a couple of bottles of good sake, and two perfect tiny little sake cups at the ready. I had a book of Ono no Komachi poems that just happened to be there on the trunk, too—just in case.
Outside, the rain fell like rice grains poured into a silk sack. I reapplied my lip stain. I had a mixtape playing on the boom box—shakuhachi, Mazzy Star, Nirvana, K. D. Lang, Cowboy Junkies, and Jane’s Addiction.
Twenty minutes passed.
I milled around in front of the window, watching a steady stream of people leave through a side door of the church into the rainy night. They were all dressed normally, not dressed up. Not like anyone in Sacramento dressed up for church—I hadn’t seen finery for church since my childhood days in Jackson. It was a Wednesday, and it didn’t look like they were coming from a service. Some held a little blue book. Some had papers or coats they held over their heads against the rain as they dashed to their cars or down the sidewalk into the night. Every few feet a streetlight shone a soft, bright, almost white illuminated waterfall unto itself. I stepped away from the window and backed into my ruined bookcase.
A few weeks previously, just before I’d come back from what would be my last semester away, there was a hard freeze in Sacramento, and the pipes burst in our building. The burst in general was a big disast
er in the building, with people moving in and out, floors being pulled up, people staying in hotels, and mammoth old industrial fans whirling, whirring, day and night. Unfortunately, during the hoopla, no one thought to look in on my little flat, and so no one realized that there was water damage inside until I came home.
As soon as I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy door, the smell of rot hit me. Stepping in, I encountered my one bookcase, half-decayed, expanded, the books engorged, the deckled edges of beloved books dotted with spotty green mold, the solid wood of the case split up the sides. That was the extent of the water damage, other than an ugly spot on the roof—the books had slowly soaked up all the water as it came down. The floor could have use a bit of sanding underneath where the bookcase sat, but nothing disastrous. Despite the smell, I hadn’t had the heart to do anything about it yet, almost a month now. The bookcase stood in ruin between the main living area and my bed. Every now and then, I’d try to pry one of my favorite volumes of poetry—maybe the first edition Whitman Daddy had given Mama for Christmas one year, maybe my beloved clothbound copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo Mama had read to me 4,327 times at bedtime growing up—from the expanse, with no luck. It was heartbreaking and somehow haunting to me, the perished bookshelf.
I must have been standing there pawing at the rot factory like an absurd librarian for some time, because when my buzzer finally went off and I checked my vintage men’s Rolex, it showed 7:17!
Almost an hour and twenty minutes late?
Buzzzzzzzzz.
In one movement, I ducked as low as I could, then stuck my hands in front of me like a synchronized swimmer and dove through midair as far as I could across the main room, sliding a good distance on the slick hardwood, then slither-slunk-slither-slunk-slither-slunking a little farther behind the more beige of the two beige love seats, heart galloping.
My first instinct was this: hide.
What in the helicopter is that man thinking showing up an hour and a half late? I hissed very loudly in my most infuriated inner voice.
Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away Page 6