“I’m taking my time.”
I didn’t want to go inside. I had a little brother and two little sisters who wrestled their clammy sheets in a shared bedroom while I stayed outside. I was somebody else now, my back brace hung to twist on a hanger in my closet, a broken cocoon, old skin. I felt like everything had changed. It seemed possible for the house to heave from earth in a whir of chewed screens and shingles, dust ruffles and dust. It didn’t. My father pulled the chain on the basement bulb and turned on the front-porch light. In the slow dilation of morning it burned like a golden pear, like fruit on fire.
And so I became the girl you see in a pack of boys. High, windblown from riding in the backseat. Someone’s arm slung around me, one day this one, another day that. (A mercenary, a tender nurse, a mother, angel. My father once said, “Be kind to boys. They’re not as tough as they seem. Don’t break their hearts.” He was drunk, confused. He’d cut his finger with a paring knife. I was twelve. I promised.) They needed me more than I needed them. Doesn’t it take a certain confidence to take in these boys, knowing their bound to become Atlantic City bus drivers? To offer some small condolence of the body before they go on to install parts at a Chrysler Plant somewhere? I was a soft spot, a comfort. And none of them had that. Or some did, I suppose. But I wasn’t drawn to them.
Once there was a cake and we were drinking rosé and we were at that lake. This was toward the end of it, summer, yes, and the end of all of it for me. There was a fight. A bloodied face. A boy running into the lake. Arms outstretched. One staggering onshore, calling him back. (See, they loved each other, too, not just me. They howled for each other. These beatings were born from the steam of desire and pride.) One passed out in the grass. And another one was with me under a tree, bare dirt. There was a cake, but it wasn’t anybody’s birthday. I was riding this one boy. So pretty, and when we were done, he sang “Happy Birthday.” And his voice was rough, but nice. I said, “Were you a choirboy?”
And he just smiled. “I can sing.”
And I sat up, topless, skirt bunched at my waist, and saw the other boys, and I couldn’t keep them all safe forever. The song had stitched my heart. The boys were dangerous. Each one was shining lit from within; their souls were torches. I had to let them go, let all of it go, and it was hard to do. And maybe even then I knew it was wrong to let it go, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
I loved it: the dirt, the cake, the skin, the cars, squealing tires, the radio pitched and reeling. But I was already seeing it through a certain head-tilted gaze. I knew it was something else. That there was a larger swirling, what? Import? Implication? I was reading it. I couldn’t stay in the body even though I tried.
Michael Hanrahan, second row, he was there as I show slides of Tibetan women hauling timber like crosses on their shoulders, and then of the veiled bedouin. I could feel him twist in his chair. I could see him, leaning in, watching me, my body carnival-lit, a reflection of color when I moved across the wide screen. I proceeded to the Gimi men in their gourd masks sticking their tongues through pigs’ teeth. I made the appropriate American correlations: consumer debt, spiked heels, football fanatics. Did my mother ever make such connections? When the National Geographic arrived each month, she put it in a wicker basket next to the toilet with its dreamy bright blue water, and she’d stack the old one in the attic, neatly, each month rising like a child, by quarter inches. Did she ever imagine her life splayed in captioned photographs: the female of the tribe taking a pot from the stove, ladling beans and chopped dogs onto plates? (Isn’t that what we do in these classes?) Would they have said she seemed invisible, that we grunted into our food? Once, she slapped my father, pleading, “Talk to me.” He said nothing, steam rising from the beans to his red cheek like a Raji at the base of a bus-sized tree trunk where he has lowered hive after hive and now sits stunned from bee poison, the roar of a million angry wings in his ears, and my mother, by the sink, cried like a Raji woman wringing honey from a comb.
I don’t want to be like my mother, but I sit at a window of sorts in a house that tilts forward with all of my urgency; academia provides the view. And the boy, now dead, he was so real. The class filed out. Someone threw on the lights. The projector fan buzzed. He followed me to my office, sheepish. Once inside, he said, “You got my note.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“It’s true.”
“I figured it was.” I’m sitting in my office chair. It’s old wooden slat-back on wheels. The floors are institutional tile. I tell him to sit down. There’s a small blue couch. He edges into it slowly, presses his shoulder blades back, cocky, but looks at the floor.
He looks like all of them. Do I have to go over it? Half pimp, half Little League. I want to tell him that I know him, drunk, naked, stung. I know him beat-up, passed out. I know how he drives, distracted, screaming lyrics. I know how he plays air guitar in the shower, how he lathers his head with his knuckles and how he shakes it when he comes up for air in a lake. I know how he throws up. I know how he’d put his hands behind his head when I’m going down—my mouth, my teeth, they remember too much—and I know how he’d like me to ride him so he can take in a view. I know him in his parents’ basement, on public golf courses, swimming pools. I know him on the beach, on a basketball court, up against a tennis wall. I know him in the school gym, along a row of clanging lockers. I know what his car smells like and that his dick curves because some overzealous doctor circumcised him too tight, an underestimation.
I lean over and put my hands, one on each of his knees, and let them slide down his thighs. There’s a small window in my office door. It isn’t locked. I tell him that he can call me at home. I write the number on a slip of paper. He looks at it, folds it, and puts it in his pocket.
Once upon a time, the high school administration developed an arsenal of filmstrips. What had once been the uplifting story of an armless woman (she could trim her sons’ bangs, bake a cake, stir batter, swat a fly, all with her toes) was replaced with stories like Cathy, Cathy! about a promiscuous girl who needed love and a virgin football player talked into having sex with her in a van. Projectors were wheeled into stuffy, chalk-dusted classrooms. Lights off, the room took on a backseat feeling, the expectation of groping. The filmstrips did no good. Jealousy, I preferred it to sympathy. Afterward the beleaguered eyes of the ethics teacher dogged me all the way to the door. “I want to talk to you.”
But she had nothing to say. She kept things vague. “Is there something wrong? Do you need help?”
I stared at her. An underbite and stitched eyebrows, concern knotting at her nose. “No,” I said. “I’m as fine as you are. We’re all fucked-up.”
“Don’t speak that way to me! I’m reaching out.”
“Was there a teacher memo on that?”
“I should give you detention.”
“Okay, but in your professional opinion, do you really think that would help?”
I’m proud of this now. Can you tell? I didn’t have a vocabulary for any of it then. I thought I was alone. There was a movement going on, but not in Asbury Park.
Michael Hanrahan called once it was dark. His voice was hushed, like he was calling from his parents’ kitchen phone. Or his roommate was around. “Should I come over?”
There have been grown-up men. A techie who appreciated that I could dance to Ozzie. An engineer who confused work and love. A Harvard grad, fallen on hard times, selling his hand-me-down golf clubs. I’d been good for a long time. But this kid was one of my people. I’d be able to recognize him anywhere. Smart, but beaten, that dogged accent, rough hands. “I think you should.”
My mother called, too, at dusk the night she died. It had only been six weeks. That’s relevant. She said, “Why don’t you get married? I thought you would get married young. But no, you and your boys, boys, boys. I saw you once. Your father and I were driving to your aunt Rita and uncle Marty’s. They were going to play calypso music. And, out on the highway, you were there, doing a backbend out a car wind
ow with your shirt pulled up. I didn’t tell your father.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“It doesn’t last. That’s why. Do you do that now?”
The kid was knocking at the front door in fifteen minutes. He picked up a gourd off the coffee table. “Nice gourd.”
I was going to tell him about a tribe, but didn’t. It was a lecture. I didn’t want to be rehearsed.
We sat on the floor. I lit a candle. We drank wine. It made my nose itch. I asked, “Do you believe in original sin?” I asked, “Do you know Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane’?” I recited, “‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness and in the heart’s pride.’”
A true feminist, a single woman, should keep condoms in the house. I should have had them in a candy dish on the coffee table, like at the campus health center. But I didn’t. Once my mother and father were doing it in some parking lot somewhere, two stupid kids, and they didn’t either. It’s why I exist. And Michael Hanrahan didn’t have anything either. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll go out and get some.” He was being grown-up, mustering all of his adult manners for me. He buttoned his shirt, his chest disappearing.
I looked out the window. “It’s started raining. Do you want an umbrella?” My umbrella was a Monet print, bought at a museum gift shop on a day they’d forecasted sun.
He shook his head, and I thought of him pawing out across a certain lake at night. I can’t make it okay, only understandable. That’s the most I can hope for. When I think of him now, I imagine the radio cranked, the scrim of water, an intersection nestled in a forest of telephone poles, Michael, his dick tensed against his jeans. I could have saved him, right? And while he was gone—he never came back; all night as I waited, no one called me; he didn’t, after all, even have my ridiculous umbrella in his car—I thought of what I might tell him. I’d tell him, of course, “Don’t love me.” I’d confess, “My mother died not long ago.” And “I was once someone else.” I would stretch against him and marvel, “My house, my old street, my entire raucous hometown, how could you walk around carrying it with you and not know, and not have the tiniest idea?”
author inspiration
Walker Percy once wrote Springsteen a letter appreciating his Catholic imagery. This literary gushing is nothing new. My letter, if I were bold enough, would center on Bruce’s women. Maybe I’d confess how his line “You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right and that’s all right with me” was a relief at sixteen, when I was a scrawny girl living just south of Jersey. I’d tell him that his women are strong and flawed, ordinary and real—Sandy, Wendy, Mary. He wants to save them, but it’s clear that he needs them if he’s to save himself. Even in the middle of a song about drunken rowdiness like “Spirit in the Night,” he slips in the line “I’m hurt,” and it’s Crazy Janey who offers to heal him, and the song takes on a new weight, a dirty ache. When I was asked to contribute, there was no hesitation. I’d been following Crazy Janey in my mind for years, and she rose up, heroic, nostalgic, still desperate as ever.
author bios
LESTER BANGS has been regarded as the most influential and irreverent critic of rock and roll. Although an untimely death in 1982 cut short a writing career at a premature thirty-four years of age, his hyperintelligent and impudent pieces for such publications as Creem, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and London’s NME (New Musical Express) conveyed his aggressively candid and honest style with prose that echoed Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. His subjects in his many travel essays and general music criticism ranged from Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones to more obscure musicians like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart. The piece featured in this collection, “From ‘Maggie May,’ 1981,” was one of many pieces that became lost in his vast catalog of work and has been resurrected for this collection as a celebration of his sometimes experimental work, which helped to inspire the other pieces in the book.
JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He’s also the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia and The Da Capo Year’s Best Music Writing 2002. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
AMANDA DAVIS is the author of the novel Wonder When You’ll Miss Me and Circling the Drain, a collection of short stories. Davis was raised in Durham, North Carolina, and lived in New York City and Oakland, California, where she taught in the MFA program at Mills College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have been published in Esquire, Bookforum, Black Book, McSweeney% Poets and Writers, Story, Seventeen, and Best New American Voices 2001. She was killed in a plane crash in March 2003 at the age of thirty-two.
JT LEROY is the author of the international best-sellers Sarah (being made into a film by Steven Shainberg) and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (being made into a film by Asia Argento). LeRoy’s third book will be out from Viking in 2004, and his work appears in the short story collection The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggars. He is the associate producer of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which premiered in competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or and Best Director prizes.
LeRoy’s writing has appeared in such publications as McSweeney’s, Black Book, Film Comment, Spin, GQ, Paper, Interview, The Face, and Filmmaker. He will soon be published in The Sunday Times of London and writes a monthly column for the magazine 7 × 7. LeRoy is also slated to write a book about Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho for the influential BFI Film Classic series. He is working with Last Gasp publishing and artist Cherry Hood on a graphic novel version of Harold’s End.
LeRoy is part of the rock band Thistle, currently recording their debut release. He is working with No Hands Productions, the creators of the hit series Blue’s Clues, on an original children’s feature film.
TOM PERROTTA’S most recent novel is Little Children. His other books are Joe College, The Wishbones, Bad Haircut, and Election (the basis of the acclaimed 1999 film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon). Perrotta’s nonaction has appeared in Rolling Stone and GQ. He lives in Massachusetts.
TANKER DANE is an accomplished guitarist and street poet. He has been serenading in the New York City subways for several years and still finds it strange why the tips were fewer and far between during the heyday of the dot-com era. This is his first published work.
LISA TUCKER is the author of two music-inspired novels: The Song Reader and Shout Down the Moon. She grew up in small towns outside Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, and has toured the Midwest with a jazz band and worked as a waitress, writing teacher, office cleaner, and math professor. She has a graduate degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and a graduate degree in math from Villanova University. Her fiction has appeared in Seventeen and Pages magazine. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. She currently lives with her husband and son in New Mexico, where she is at work on another novel.
Visit the author’s website: www.lisatucker.com
AIMEE BENDER is the author of two books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her fiction has been published in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, GQ, Fence, McSweeney’s, and other journals, as well as heard on NPR’s This American Life.
ANTHONY DECURTIS is executive editor of Tracks magazine and a longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He is the author of Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters and editor of Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, both published by Duke University Press. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set Crossroads won a Grammy in the Best Album Notes category. He holds a PhD in American literature, and he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.
HANNAH TINTI grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her wor
k has appeared in Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, Sonora Review, Story Quarterly, and Best American Mystery Stories 2003. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, will be published by Dial Press in March 2004. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine.
NEAL POLLACK is the author of three books: the rock novel Never Mind the Pollacks, Beneath the Axis of Evil, and the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. He is a columnist for Vanity Fair and writes regularly for many other fine publications. Visit his website, www.nealpollack.com, for daily satirical commentary on important matters of the day. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.
TOURÉ is the author of The Portable Promised Land, a collection of short stories published by Little, Brown. He’s also a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the host of MTV2’s Spoke N’ Heard. He studied at Columbia University’s graduate school of creative writing and lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. A novel called Soul City will arrive in September 2004. Visit his website at www.toure.com.
VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of a short story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus (Vintage), and a novel, The Ecstatic (Crown/Vintage), which was chosen as a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award.
HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of two novels, The Mineral Palace and The Effect of Living Backwards. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Time, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Harper’s Bazaar, among other places. She is a founding editor of The Believer.
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