My Life in Heavy Metal

by Steve Almond

  Years later, the casinos would go up and light the walk forever, blinding everything. The papers still carry items from time to time about some lost gull crashing into a marquee. Every night, the place draws slot zombies and card counters by the thousands, the amateur escape artists of our age, garish and hope-drunk, as if the fairy-tale kiss of fate might change their lives forever.

  I was only beginning to understand fairy tales on the night The Don hurled his glass and flew off. I was still mesmerized by his belief, by the myth of reinvention, as were his women, his many women, though fewer, probably, than in my memory. With The Don, when he returns to me now, he is always in that seaside bar: the warm summer fog and the smell of lemon rinds and gin and the lights soft upon closing and Gloria Apodoca folded into his cape, her lips red along his neck as they dance their last slow tango. In this version of my life, The Don looks up drowsily, winks, winks at me, a sweet bird of beauty winging new toward love.

  Run Away, My Pale Love

  This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up and remind me I was dumb with luck. Other times, I wished they’d turn the whole place into a homeless shelter.

  But the day I’m talking about was early spring. The callery pears were in blossom, thousands of tiny white camisoles. I was out in front of the Comp Lit compound with Legget, watching the undergrads. We were vaguely aware of the distinctions between them. Mostly, they were tan calves drifting past.

  A woman entered my field of vision from the right. She had the plumpest cheeks I’d ever seen. Her eyes were pinched at the corners, and blue patches stood out below them. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a year. Every other woman I could think of seemed stingy and coarse and obvious by comparison. She waved timidly at Legget.

  “You like that, do you?” he said.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s in my French class.” Legget stubbed out his cigarette. “Polish, I think.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Don’t know,” Legget said. “She doesn’t say much.”

  For the next week, I walked around babbling about The Polish Woman. “You know me,” I said. “I don’t gawk. I’m not a gawker.” This was more or less true. Somewhere in the mid-twenties it dawned on me that female beauty didn’t require any encouragement from me. Female beauty was doing just fine on its own. But I couldn’t get this woman out of my head.

  Legget diagnosed sexual infatuation.

  “Can’t I just have an aesthetic experience?” I said. “Like spotting a rare species, a species you might see once and never again, for the rest of your life?”

  “Spare me,” Legget said.

  Two months later, in the computer lab, a woman in a white blouse swept into the seat next to mine. “Is it all right?” she said. Her accent was excruciating: the burred diphthongs of Russian, the sulky lilt of French. My heart did a little arpeggio.

  “You’re Polish,” I said.

  She turned and there was her face again. Her lips drew together, as if stung by some impending calamity. “Yah. How do you know?”

  I explained about Legget. She nodded slowly.

  “Do you like Kosinski?” I said.

  “Oh yah!” she said. “Have you read Painted Bird?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Wow. It’s hard to find anyone who’s read Kosinski.” This was true. I myself, for instance, had not read Kosinski, though I’d heard he was quite good. “What a writer!” I said. “What sentences!” On and on I went until, finally, at a loss for what to say next, I asked for her phone number.

  She looked at me for a few seconds—I was in my teaching uniform, a rumpled white button-down and khakis—then wrote her name on a piece of paper: Basha.

  “I don’t do this normally,” I said. “But, I mean, I really love Kosinski.”

  And then she was standing on the median of Summit Avenue, lit up inside a beige windbreaker. She looked elegant and chimerical: the head of a lioness, the body of a swan. At dinner I choked on my chicken korma. That was just for starters. I got lost on the way to the theater. I misplaced my wallet, and had to race home to get cash. We were twenty minutes late to the movie—a British drawing-room melodrama—and sat in the darkened theater trying to figure out who was doomed and who fated. I spent most of the time smelling Basha, glancing at her profile, my fingers greasy with popcorn.

  The amateur psychologists in the crowd will perhaps sense the significance of the lost wallet: The subject subconsciously enacts a fantasy in which he is stripped of his identity through a powerful, exotic love.

  To which I would respond: Doy hickey.

  I was ravenous for a love so grandiose as to obliterate my life. Most every relationship I’d formed in the past five years had gone south: romantic entanglements, friendships, professional alliances. One friend referred to me as a train wreck. Another suggested “emotional atom bomb” as perhaps closer to the mark. The ones I couldn’t scare away, I managed to drive off over some perceived slight. I was the world’s welterweight champion of the silent feud. I didn’t see it that way, of course. People just kept letting me down. It never occurred to me that I sought out rejection, engineered the drama of fresh grievances to distract me from older, stale forms of grief.

  But that’s not the story I’m telling now. No one—except those paid to listen—really wants to hear your musty songs of self-contempt. What we want is the glib aria of disastrous love, which is, finally, the purest expression of self-contempt.

  Her full name was Basha Sabina Olszewska. She pronounced her last name beautifully: Olshevska. It meant something like a birch tree, she said. I thought of Frost: the pale trunk, the quick fire. She came from Katowice, an industrial city in the west of Poland. She hoped to become a translator. English was her fifth language.

  She had a sense of humor as well. Imagine. She told me a story about dining with the Dean of Students at a welcoming banquet for exchange students. “They brought him steak,” she said. “I couldn’t believe the size, David. It was like a car tire. Everyone was quiet for a second and just at that minute I turned to him and said: ‘You have such a huge meat!’”

  This story thrilled me, its slapstick reference to the male part. Basha knew what a cock was! She understood the great harmless joke that all cocks come to in the end. And this idea, however improbably, led to the idea that she might touch my cock.

  We were eating at my place. She was sitting there at my table, daintily cutting her chicken. I told stories about my life that suggested—far less subtly than I supposed—what a terrific guy I was. I cleared her plate and took it to the sink. Wasn’t I the disarmingly liberated bachelor type? She stood. I stepped in front of her and let my face fall forward. She executed a brisk little sidestep. My lips smeared the side of her cheek. A pinecone fell from the tree outside, striking the roof with a soft thud, as if to close the subject.

  Later, standing outside her dorm, I said: “Will I ever get to kiss you?”

  Her lips pursed, like a waiter who is out of the most popular item on the menu. The light fell across her in frets. “Such an American question!” She told me about some Finnish jerk she’d fallen for first term. And now she was returning to Poland and felt too vulnerable—the word seemed to swirl around her tongue—to get involved.

  To which I wanted to say: involved? Who needs involved?

  This was one of the advantages of age. I’d been rejected enough times to understand that prudence meant little in the face of sustained negotiation. Virtue was a better guide, all things considered. You could maybe depend on virtue. But a guy like me, with my wonderful rage, my American case of Manifest Destiny, I wasn’t about to back down from a little prudence. “Sure,” I said. “I understand. I hope we can still be friends.”

  Basha was so relieved at m
y grace, she gave herself to me. She needed the help of a large bottle of inexpensive sauvignon blanc, which disappeared down her throat, cup by cup, while I watched in cautious rapture. It seemed terribly important that I do nothing to startle her. Slowly, perceptibly, my kitchen grew warm with the promise of contact. I can’t recall a word that passed between us. There was only the wine, my silence, her mouth fixing to the rim of her cup, the slight, glottal pull of her underlip against and away from its surface, her white throat reaching up, descending.

  We kissed and she smiled, her lips turning back on themselves. Her teeth were faintly discolored, as if she’d had a quick bite of ashes. I had never seen the classic Slavic facial structure at such close quarters. When she laughed her cheeks rose with the strange, graceful bulk of glaciers and her eyes became Mongol slashes. Frowning, her face took on the milky petulance of a Tartar princess. Even at rest, impassive, her face expressed the severe emotions I associated with true love, which I had always known to be exquisite and doomed and slightly stylized.

  I felt the pleasing thickness of her, damp beneath her garments. We were on my mattress, yanking off clothes. She had narrow shoulders, tiny budded breasts. Her arms and belly were robed in baby fat.

  We made love, or fucked, did that thing where our center parts fit and unfit, a half dozen times, in panicky sessions, ten minutes or so, until she cried out tak! tak! then fell still. She consented to my movements with her body and spoke only once, toward dawn, saying, as my hand brushed up her thigh, “I am having so wet.” I knew then—at that exact moment—Basha had been sent to rescue me from the dull plight of my life.

  This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

  I saw her across the street, her arms poking out of a red dress with white polka dots, the fabric tight around her bum. She came to me and kissed me and I could smell the rot of her mouth. And the rot of her mouth turned me on! (Is there nothing the early days of love won’t fetishize?)

  We went to the mall to buy last-minute gifts. Basha circled the pavilion, fretting over a belt, a bottle of lotion, blushing at the inquiries of the sales staff. She was a nervous shopper, which I took to be a mark of her unfamiliarity with the ritual. I had all sorts of crappy ideas rattling around my head about life in Poland. I knew, vaguely, that the Poles had broken from the Soviet Bloc. But I still imagined a lumpen gulag: endless lines, bare shelves, faces like potatoes in kerchiefs. And my poor Basha trapped amid this needy vulgarity! I stood behind her and called out to the clerks: One of those! Make it two! Why not? Do you have this in black?

  Our relationship was filed under dalliance, which allowed us to write one another without much pressure. Basha was an excellent correspondent. She made it a point to send me sexy photos of herself. My favorite showed her leaning toward the camera, kissing at a cigarette, mascara smeared, hair tousled—a Bond girl at the end of a long vodka party.

  That summer I got stoned, sat on my porch, tried to figure out where everyone had gone. Across the street, guys with whistles were running a girl’s soccer camp, which I could watch if I wasn’t too obvious. The girls were sweet and clumsy. They lacked the essentials of the sport—the ability to steal and confront and tackle—but their legs enjoyed flirting with these ideas. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation.

  My answering machine was the enemy. Often, returning from the grocery store, or the Greek diner where I took suppers, I gazed at the red zero flashing smugly and punched the machine. Then, one day, there was a message.

  Hayizmeimeezyucullme.

  When I called her back, Basha wanted to know, immediately, if she would ever see me again. “I made a breakup with my boyfriend,” she said.

  “What boyfriend?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have my vacations at end of August.”

  At the airport in Warsaw she came running, her eyes blurry hazel, a skirt shaping her hips, and she was far too beautiful for me, my sharp face and chickeny bones. I felt (as I often feel) a dramatic error in the accounting, though she pressed herself to me and made me feel, thereby, in the midst of that lousy airport, with its plastic counters and vague feculence, different from myself, heroic.

  We found a cheap hotel and signed in as man and wife. Basha did the talking, while the concierge squinted at her.

  “She thinks I am a whore,” Basha said in the elevator. She smiled, her gums like a second, wetter smile. “Maybe I am a whore.” She shut the door to our room, and tore the button off my pants. I’d seen this sort of thing, in films hoping to suggest reckless passion. But this was the first time I’d been inside the animal experience, so famished for physical love as to overleap the gooey crescendo of intimacy. We never even got our shirts off.

  Basha wanted nothing to do with clitoral stimulation, tricky positioning, langorous gazes. Put it in, was her agenda. Let the flesh speak. Her face went rubbery. She took on the aspect of a mad-woman plucked from one of Hogarth’s Bedlam prints, ready to tear her hair, throw shit, which pleased me, as did her internal muscles, which yielded in rings of contraction. Sun from the window lit a glaze of perspiration on her small white breasts. Her hips rocked.

  “Make big come,” she said. “Make big come in my pussy.”

  “Tell me—”

  “Now. Now-now-now.”

  Afterward, her body looked like something tossed ashore.

  Basha reached down and took hold of me: “You have huge meat.”

  I laughed.

  “Really,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure I have normal meat,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I remember the first time we were together, when I first saw, thinking this.”

  I studied her expression for some sign of caginess. But caginess was not her style. She didn’t speak about the particulars of sex in the same way an American woman might. And she appeared quite serious in her assessment, as if my size were a matter she had considered privately.

  My ego flew in wild circles overhead. Is there nothing man desires more than to be regaled about his own huge meat?

  Basha didn’t remember her father, who had died when she was two years old. He was no more than a blurry figure in photographs, with her tiny arrow of a nose. Her first love—her only great love, from what I could tell—was her stepfather Tomas, a gentle mathematician who had worshiped Basha’s mother.

  “What happened to him?” I said.

  “He died when I was eight,” she said. “Returning from a conference in Germany. There was snow on the road.”

  “My God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I reached for Basha, but she slipped to the side of the bed and sat up, regarding me curiously. “Don’t be sorry. I barely remember.”

  In Kraków we went to see the palace, but it was closed for repairs, so we walked to the other end of the plaza. The tourist bureau had organized a folk dancing festival, surly teenagers spinning in peasant garb. Basha herself wore a summer dress, loose around the legs, and open-toed sandals. I thought about all the girls in their summer dresses, and tried to understand why I cared only to look at Basha.

  We made love in our muggy pension room, lathered one another in the shower, then returned to the plaza, to feel the breeze on our limbs, which were sore in secret places, to watch the stars against the drape of night, and browse the stalls of painted eggs and cigarette cases. The cafes were open, the tabletops lit by bouncing candles.

  My own tranquility astounded me.

  “What do you think about?” Basha said.

  “Night,” I said. “A beautiful night like this.”

  She squeezed my hand and leaned in for a kiss. Her eyes were deep green and perfectly serious. In a soft, almost embarrassed voice, she said: “I want to come to America to make a life with you, David.” Her hands were trembling. Her breathing was ragged. This was all terribly real. I had to remind myself.

  “Yes?” she whispered. “What do you think about it?”

&nbs
p; Hadn’t I come to Poland in the hopes of just such a plea? Don’t we all, in the private kingdom of our desires, dream about such pleas? And yet there was something deflating about the declaration. Without warning, in one sentence, Basha had called an end to the hunt, laid herself before me, forced me to make good on the promises of my extravagant furious charm. I felt my heart chop.

  We were ideally suited to the long-distance relationship, with its twisted calculus of wish fantasy and deprivation. We wrote long epistles full of desire and ardent grief. We perfected the art of nostalgia: extracting the finer moments from the tangle of actual experience, burnishing them with new longing. We took the inconvenience of our love as proof of its profundity.

  And so, Christmas in Poland. Katowice struck me as suitably impoverished. Men selling carp on the corners, slashing the fish until blood soaked their aprons, while the wives peddled roe. Everyone looked glum and underdressed; the sidewalks ran off into mud.

  Basha lived with her mother, but they were both at work. She’d left me the key to the apartment. Her building was part of a massive Soviet-style panelak, crinkled like a fan, five stories of concrete smeared with soot, stairwells sharp with piss. Her room was the size of a cell: a single bed, a dresser, a desk with my letters neatly stacked in one corner. Over the bed she’d taped a picture of us kissing on a street corner in Kraków. I’d taken the photo myself, holding the camera with one hand while hauling her into an embrace. The white pelt of Basha’s cheek was draped across the frame, her eyes closed, her mouth thrown toward the kiss. The photo was blurred: as if the action captured had been terribly swift, or the moment dreamed.

  Outside, snow fell like confetti, dissolving on the pavement. Every time I heard the tock of a woman’s shoes my body tensed.

  Basha burst into the apartment finally, out of breath, her eyes glassy. I experienced the brief paralysis of gratification. You mean this is actually mine? Her hands slipped beneath my sweater. Her minty tongue touched mine. Basha backed me into her room. The smell of her rose up, a sweet bacterial tang. She let out a luxurious sigh as I slid into her. Such drama! It was like leaping onto Broadway cock-first.