With or Without You

by Lauren Sanders

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, more nervous than I’d been shooting. Even in the dark I could feel him looking at me, the kind of look that made me think of people waiting to order food at McDonald’s. He took a step closer and his chin almost rested on my head. I leaned back against my car or his, I’d lost my bearings, and he moved into me like we’d been with the gun, only this time we were face to face. When he kissed me I didn’t fight it. I pretended I knew what I was doing wrapped up in the softness of his lips and wondered if they were all like this. Loose and wet. Spit kept trickling down my chin. A few times he tried to get his fingers underneath my shirt and each time I pushed them back. I didn’t like him touching me. He broke away and exhaled through puffed out cheeks. Like a little boy. Then he traced his right hand along my arm until he came to the gun and pulled it between us. I felt the metal more intensely through his fingers, his eyes mining me for clues the way he’d picked my brains about Edie. He massaged my hands over the gun, and that’s when it hit me: I could shoot him if I wanted to, he’d just taught me how. He couldn’t fuck with me and he knew it. “You really like it,” he said, and I smiled. We were on the same wavelength. “Here, how about this?” he said, and, using both sets of our hands, shoved the gun in the back pocket of my army pants. He let go of me, I heard his belt clink.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “Come here.” He took my hands again, and it was okay. I was one move away from the gun in my pocket. He wrapped my fingers around his dick. The skin felt warm and silky and made me think of Edie. She’d said he had a velvet penis, but she’d also insisted she was from a place called Andromeda and told me cigarettes would make my pores swell. Who knew what to believe? But the minute I got my hand on Bobby Davis’s dick, all those nights we’d gone out looking for him made sense. It was incredible how smooth the skin felt, even as he got harder.

  “Stroke me,” he whispered.

  I tightened my grip around him, and he flinched. “Ow! Not like that!”

  “Sorry.” I tried again, grabbing him a bit lighter this time and squeezing.

  “No.” He put his hand on top of mine again. “Don’t grab it, stroke it … Have you ever done this before?”

  I didn’t answer, I was too embarrassed. I’d gotten so carried away in touching him, I never imagined there was a wrong way to give a handjob. I hated that word: handjob. It sounded like changing oil. Smelly, wet, greasy, and totally mechanical. This stroking business, nobody had ever mentioned it.

  “Damn, I gotta teach you everything,” he said, and slowly moved our hands over his dick in a pumping motion, stroking. After a little while we got a rhythm going and he let go, folding his hands back behind his head. I was flying solo. Up and down, up and down, up and down, as he moaned louder and the muscles in my upper arm strained, like I’d been lifting heavy furniture. I had to stop but stopping wasn’t cool, so I channeled all of my energy into my hand. He shouted, “Go!” and I pumped faster out there in the fog, feeling like we’d escaped to an enchanted forest, a place where his penis was a magic wand and my hand the tool of a wizard. He screamed the word go over and over, practically in a trance, and I felt good because I could do what Edie had done and also because I was learning something. A skill.

  When he came it was what I’d imagined: warm, sticky, and wet. I fell back on the car next to him and wiped my hand on my thigh, slowly, so he wouldn’t notice. Guys seemed attached to their stuff.Almost immediately, he hopped into his jeans and headed toward his car. Just like that. No smiles, no kisses, no thanks very much. I stood against my car, sniffling from the chilly wet air. A couple of cars roared by, honking like mad. Someone, a woman’s voice, shouted, “Whooo! Mets rule the fuckin’ planet!” and she sounded so much like Edie my heart jumped thinking she’d followed us, wishing she cared that much. I felt wet and hollow and thought about lying down in the pine needles to sleep away the winter.

  “Hey, Speck, I’m taking off!” Bobby shouted, above the roar of his Chevy.

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Can I follow you out?”

  “I guess.”

  I climbed inside my Saab and quickly turned the keys, my headlights spilling across the blacktop with its dotted white lines, the smoky trees and sheets of steel sky behind it. We were heading into a long, cold winter. Peeling out behind Bobby, I was again thankful for my foreign car with its safety seals, even though I’d already stunk it up with cigarettes and Coke spills and old french fries. I pushed in the lighter and flipped open my cigs, turned on the tape deck and Frank Zappa blared liked an alarm … a nasty little Jewish princess … with titanic tits and sand-blasted zits … I had the zits but not the tits—it wasn’t fair. And I was only half a Jew. Stuck between two stupid religions and not feeling either one of them. I was such a Gemini. So was John Strong. You really liked Geminis.

  Zappa made me too thinky. I switched to the radio, searching for the final score. The lighter popped and I lit up with one hand, tailgating Bobby as we headed north on the Meadowbrook. My speedometer said ninety. Every so often I passed him, and then he’d speed up and pass me, and it was like we were playing a game, seeing who could go faster, until he pulled off at the exit for the racetrack, and I followed him through the off-ramp, a long, silent cavern. We drove a few minutes down a two-lane road flanked by charcoal trees, passing a few lively traffic lights, until we came to a well-lit intersection with a gas station and a 7-Eleven diagonally across from it. I turned into the parking lot behind Bobby and watched him jump out of his car. Girls followed guys all over the place because guys would never wait up.

  I ejected Zappa from my tape deck and left my car, slipping the tape into my back pocket. Two guys were hanging out by an old station wagon near the front of the store. Someone hissed as I passed, and I wondered if they could tell I’d just given a handjob. Maybe there was something different about my walk, my face, the way I shoved my hands in my front pockets. I did feel sort of older and tougher with that gun in my pocket. I turned and hissed at them. They burst out laughing. “Come back and tawk t’us!” one of them shouted.

  “My boyfriend’s inside,” I hollered over my shoulder, then walked inside 7-Eleven. I liked the way that sounded, my boyfriend. You said it all the time and I could see why. Those two little words said there was someone in the world who cared what happened to you, someone to care about. And have sex with. Must have made you feel pretty normal.

  It was so bright inside I wished I had my sunglasses. Light streamed from the ceiling, beamed down on the aisles of reflective packaging, smothering everything in a multicolored shower. That much electricity has a drone to it. You could barely hear the cash register or Muzak. A few people moved through the light in slow motion, not black-and-white, but sepia-toned against the colored stacks. I couldn’t find Bobby anywhere.

  Walking down an aisle with potato chips, pretzels, corn chips, soaps, dishwashing liquids, bug sprays, I came out at the coffee station. A bearded man in a sport jacket tipped tiny plastic cups of cream into a large Styrofoam container, glancing over his shoulder before adding each cup like he was casing the joint The kind of thing that happens in convenience stores. I rubbed my hands against my back pockets. Zappa in one, the gun in the other, I was ready for anything. “Hey, slugger,” the man said, and I froze. Jack used to call me that whenever I wore my pajamas that said “Slugger” on the front and had Tom Seaver’s number on the back.

  “Hi, Daddy,” a wimpy little voice said, before the kid appeared. He was wearing a shiny blue baseball jacket and Mets cap. The hat was perfectly faded and bent on the left side of the visor, just like my old cap. Where did that kid get my cap?

  “What do you have here?” Daddy lifted the king-sized chocolate bar in the kid’s hand. “Oh, no way, kiddo, that’s way too big. You’re mother’s already gonna kick my ass for having you out so late. Go and get a smaller one. How about a Chunky?”

  “I hate Chunkys.”

  “How can you hate Chunkys? They
’ve got all those yummy raisins.”

  “Raisins blow.”

  The father chuckled, then looked around to see if anyone else had witnessed how cute his kid was, but I was the only one within earshot and I couldn’t care less about anything he said, all I wanted was my hat. The father turned back to the kid and told him to get whatever he wanted, but please, buddy, he said, just make it a little smaller, okay? The kid smiled and skipped down the candy aisle. I followed behind him, thinking I hadn’t seen my hat in years. At first I thought I’d left it in Scottsdale, but my grandmother couldn’t find it, and Nancy had given away tons of my stuff in the big move. I always knew it would turn up somewhere.

  The kid put the giant candy bar back on the rack and started picking through the bars and bags. I moved closer behind him so I could grab the hat by the beanie. He kept choosing candy bars, turning and squeezing them, then putting them back. Who was going to want them after he’d battered them like that? Another time I might have alerted the manager. There were rules, you know? But I had a plan. I lowered my thumb and forefinger on the button in the center of the hat and lifted so slowly the kid had no idea. Every time he bent his head toward the chocolate bars I pulled the other way, until I inched the whole thing off his head. Couldn’t have been easier. I tucked the hat close to my stomach, took a few steps forward, and smacked into Bobby’s stomach.

  “What are you doing?” he said, and wrestled the hat from me. The kid turned around and, seeing Bobby with the hat, reached up for the visor. “Hey, that’s mine!” he shouted. “Daaaaady!”

  His father waddled up, a gargantuan cup of coffee in his hand. “What’s going on?”

  “He stole my hat!”

  “Hey, man, it fell off his head, I was just returning it,” Bobby said, handing the hat to the kid, and I felt so stupid. Like I needed him to protect me. I had a gun in my pocket. I could shoot up the whole place if I wanted to, and it was my hat. I used to wear it to games when I went with my father.

  The kid returned the hat to his head, the father thanked Bobby, and they made their way toward the checkout counter. Bobby stared at me. I was hot as hell and my heart was whizzing like the microwave.

  “It was my hat,” I said.

  “You took it from that kid. I saw you.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, whatever, I don’t give a shit. You’re too fuckin’ … I thought maybe, but … you know, you shoulda hooked up with Noz when you had the chance, you’re as crazy as he is …” A series of tones sounded by the coffee station. “Shit … my burrito!” Bobby said, and jumped to the microwave. I followed him.

  “What now?” he said, obviously annoyed when I was just doing what he’d said: following. He made a spitting noise between his teeth and grabbed his burrito by the edges of the plastic.

  “I have your Zappa tape.”

  “Keep it, okay. Keep it. Just get off my case.”

  “But it was my hat. Come back to my house, I’ll show you pictures. We can get high … c’mon.”

  “Are you deaf?” He stuck the forefinger of his free hand in my face, his burrito limp in the other like a thick plastic snake. “I said, get out of here. I’m sick of your face.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring the photo album tomorrow. We can—”

  “You are fucking pathetic.” He brushed past me.

  “Why? What did I do? Bobby!”

  He turned around and for a second I thought his lips were softening, but his eyes looked meaner than ever. “And if you even think about saying anything to Edie,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”

  Then he walked to the cash register, and although I was tempted to follow—we were playing the boy-girl game, right?—I watched him pay for his burrito in the maddening white lights and disappear into the parking lot, thinking he was making a big mistake. Who else was going to buy him six-packs of tall boys and draw Zappa pictures for his dashboard? Give him handjobs along the side of the highway? Listen to his problems? I was the best thing that ever happened to him.

  The next time I saw him I was wearing handcuffs, and he was completely shocked, he said. He couldn’t believe I’d actually used the gun.

  BACK IN COURT AGAIN. Your mother barely cracks a tear she’s so poised, as if she’s gone way past crying to a much darker place. A holy place. She’s been giving interviews saying she prays every day for guidance and the courage to forgive. She has returned to the church and her faith is deep. She doesn’t question. Doesn’t condemn. She tells reporters you were an angel who mistakenly fell to earth as a human being. An angel who spread love all over the place but was really just burning to get back to heaven.

  This blows my mind. I am many things, but not a martyr. The agent who helped you transcend the crystal boundaries of heaven and earth. I acted not out of conviction or philosophy, and on that sweltering day in July, I never set out to kill you. You were everything to me. God, or whoever’s out there, please listen: I would do anything to bring you back again. I’d kill myself in a second if I thought it would repay your family for the grief I’ve caused. If I could extract the pain from your father’s eyes. In the halfhearted light of the courtroom his face sags like globs of ashen clay. So does your mother’s, despite her tales of angels and long meditative breaths. I want to smack her.

  You deserve better. A mother who shouts for justice. Like your fans outside the courthouse holding posters with the years 1965–1987 scrawled across your face. When the police vans roll up they start shouting. Words, some less true than others; words so monotonous they blend into each other: stalkerbitchdykemurdererwhore!

  I keep my head down, even after the police officers steer me through the crowd and into the noisy courtroom. It’s weird, so many people here to see me and I don’t know most of them. I’m as famous as you were. But I would never want to be an actress. It’s too depressing.

  Turns out my mother is the crier. From the moment the judge slaps his gavel, she wails. It is the first time I have ever seen her cry. She used to be a rock. Like me. A woman sitting next to her puts an arm around my mother’s shoulder. She is my mother’s sponsor. Jack sits in the row behind them, alone. Unshaven, his Italian suit rumpled as if he’s been wearing it for days, he rocks back and forth in his seat like an autistic kid. Where’s his sponsor? Helplessness pours from him, and it freaks me out. I wish he hadn’t come today. It’s just another bail hearing, my third since I’ve been at Rikers. The way I see it, Brickman has one more chance to get me out of here or he’s history.

  The judge is a Chinese man with a round face and thick glasses he removes to look over my records. He reads silently. Heat steams from the pipes like a clamoring waterfall, making me sleepy.

  All I do is sleep since the scene with Angel’s tattoo landed me in a new cell. Back on suicide watch, I’m monitored 24/7. I lost my job in the laundry and any chance of growing tomatoes. I have dreams of fiery red tomatoes. Dreams of waking up at dawn and working the fields. Someday I am going to live on a kibbutz. For now I eat hard mealy tomatoes in my cell, and every couple of days they take me to the showers, when nobody else is around. I miss talking to Angel, listening to warnings of the world outside, her world of ice-cold forties and salsa music and infected babies. The weird thing is, I bet Angel’s a good mother when she’s not too junked out of her head. I try not to remember her stoned, just as in the coldest hours, when death seems easier than living, I try not to long for Mimi. The way her hand doubled on top of mine when I first held the tattoo gun, just like Bobby’s hands on the old Smith & Wesson. It’s stupid the way people teach you things and then get so surprised when you actually go out and use what you’ve learned.

  I slept through Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On January first they let me into the fishbowl. Barely anyone there, the orange chairs and vinyl couches felt oppressive. Streams of light from the window pricked my skin. Better to be in my cold, dark cell, with no reminders of what I’m missing. I made a collect call to my grandmother in the desert and asked her to tell me
stories about her childhood. She said the ceilings in her apartment building were so thin she could hear the man upstairs boiling water for his bath every morning before the sun came up. Rats patrolled the hallways as if it was their space and these immigrant people with their pale skin and pushcarts had wormed their way in. The only toilet was at the end of a long hallway with a broken window above it. In the winter it was so cold my grandmother peed through her underpants instead of pulling them down past her thighs.

  The worst, she said, was having to share the toilet with so many people. Their smells clung to the air like the flecks of feces hugging the white porcelain basin. “Where do you go to the bathroom?” she asked me.

  “In my cell.”

  “You have your own toilet?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, there’s always something to be thankful for.”

  I had to hang up before I started hating myself. How did I do this to her? This gray-headed woman whose eyelids hung low with the weight of history, a woman who at the age of sixteen had to quit school even though the teacher said she was the brightest in the class and work ten hours a day packaging bottles in a factory to support her family. At night she came home to a smelly shared bathroom.

  Now she lives with a man who sometimes can’t remember her name, but she won’t let them put him in a home. Just as she won’t abandon me. She makes long-distance calls to Rikers to see if they’re feeding me. She’s got the number programmed on her speed dial. The thought of her leafing her swollen knuckles through the instruction manual and learning how to connect to a jailhouse when she pushes my name makes me so sad I’m soggy. My internal organs, beginning with my banged-up heart, are dripping away. In a dream, I scoop up my grandmother, put my hands over her ears, and buzz like a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System, drowning out the noise, the persistent chorus tapping like an old-fashioned telegram: stalkerbitchdykemurdererwhore!

  When the gavel falls a final time, I am ordered to return to my cell. Brickman has failed once again to prove their holding me without bail is cruel and unusual punishment for a firsttime offender whose indictment is clouded with circumstantial evidence. My behavior on the inside has not helped. All of the tattoos and stolen needles. Licking Angel’s tainted blood from my lips. If she has the virus, why shouldn’t I? One guard testified to confiscating my Walkman and Bic pens. It’s not worth going into any more of the proceedings, they do it better on the soaps. Know only that your mother breathes a sigh of relief as they escort me out of the courtroom.