Bye Bye Blondie

by Virginie Despentes

  This state boarding school was a lot less horrendous than she’d expected. Not full of punk rockers, naturally, because it was out in the middle of nowhere. But the local teenagers were mostly good-natured, neither easily impressed nor wanting to show off. They could hold their alcohol well, had a sense of humor and patience. Nobody over-reacted about her appearance, or her record, or anything. Nothing like the nightmare she’d expected. She quickly made two friends among the girls, strong Lorraine accents but good company. They listened to Exploited, which, with cows and tractors all around, gave you an extra kick.

  Eric was delighted she was out of the hospital. She wrote in reply that she wasn’t allowed outside school grounds. In fact, she regularly escaped to go for a beer and have a night out. She could perfectly well have arranged to meet him.

  She preferred not to tell him straight out that she didn’t want to see him now. She hoped he’d get over it without too much trouble, but it looked as if that was going to be difficult. Ideally, she’d have liked it best simply to go on writing each other letters. It would have suited her to have, on one hand, a grand epistolary passion, and on the other, real life with real boys. Without a threatening bridge linking them together.

  The boarders picked up their post in the evenings, after classes, from pigeonholes in the lobby of the residence. Almost every day, there would be a white envelope with his address on the back. The paper changed sometimes, or the color of the ink. A brief note or a thick bundle. This was her regular rendezvous. She liked the prestige it gave her among the other girls. But she wasn’t going to open up to them. It was her own business. Her link. Often, she didn’t read the letter right through. But she would have been in despair if nothing had arrived, or if the few sentences she did read hadn’t been loving and passionate. She knew the words he liked best, his expressions, the jokes he’d tell. It was sweet and reassuring, a landmark. So she wasn’t quite alone. In her letters back, she kept clumsily putting off the moment of seeing him again. But he wouldn’t listen: he wanted sex. He’d loved getting her letters, writing, all that stuff, but now it was time to fuck. He talked about her body in almost every line. It was hard to ignore. Gloria was not keen at all. She was the kind of girl—there were quite a few of them around in those days—who couldn’t reconcile sexual attraction with intellectual companionship. There was too much tenderness between the two of them, too many discussions on paper, too many confidences. That took her outside her erotic safety zone. A long way outside, in fact.

  She wrote him things like, “Wouldn’t you prefer for us to run through the countryside hand in hand?” pretending this was a joke. She was afraid that sex wouldn’t work, that it would be embarrassing, awkward. She knew enough about it to be aware that intercourse can seem very long when you’re not in the mood. Very long and very prosaic.

  But for the first time in her short life, she couldn’t manage to be brutal, to tell him she’d changed her mind. It would have been easy just to stop writing, even simpler to send him a short note along the lines of, “Do me a favor, get lost.” But although she didn’t want them even to meet, let alone touch each other, she didn’t want to lose him either. Obscurely, she felt she couldn’t allow herself to do without him. Or not entirely. He gave her moral support, bombarded her with his love, his esteem, his respect, his taste for her.

  She managed to stall for a few weeks, keeping him hanging on without giving him a date. She pretended she didn’t go home on weekends, whereas every Friday night she was back at the Campus, her local nightclub.

  In May she was expelled from the school. She’d been stealing cash from girls in her class, taking it from their bags in the cloakroom during gym lessons. It wasn’t the cleverest thing she’d ever done. At the time, she was in the habit of stealing. The moment circumstances made it possible to pinch something, she told herself it was provocation. Everywhere. All the time. She felt she was in a kind of cosmic test. Having the feeling that some mad education specialist had put cameras everywhere, and that it was her duty to show this person that she didn’t care and was going to steal anyway. These were years when she was playing games, but in a confused state of mind. Anyway, everything cost such a lot of money, beer and cigarettes for a start, and after all you had to live. So some stupid local girl had complained that she’d lost five fifty-franc notes (it was still francs in those days). Hard to deny it when the exact sum was found in her pocket. She’d denied it anyway, on principle. Summoned to see the headmistress: fiftyish, small and plump with huge breasts, lots of makeup, big tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and a smile. She was sincerely sorry it hadn’t worked out, and wished Gloria better luck elsewhere, as she told her firmly she would have to leave. Gloria was not unduly distressed at her expulsion: she didn’t mind school, but she preferred it in town.

  Her parents hadn’t made a fuss, not the way they would have before the hospital interlude. In the family, these days, everyone avoided making scenes. They had enrolled her next in the Lycée Chopin, not far from the city center. You had to take two buses to get there, it meant getting up rather early. But this was a lycée with no lodge at the gate, so the pupils could come and go without reporting to anyone. Gloria loved this. And the lycée was a little way off center, so the local bars were mostly full of high school students. Better and better, as she told herself.

  She hadn’t written to Eric to tell him about her latest escapades. She had stopped opening his letters, which were forwarded from the boarding school. She just piled them up, unopened, one on top of the other. Category: the past.

  One Saturday afternoon, not long afterward, the whole gang was at the Foy. A chic bar, with windows looking onto Place Stanislas. Leather banquette seats, marble tabletops, glittering chandeliers.

  As usual, the proprietress was sulking, wondering, as she did every day, what she had done to turn her establishment—normally catering to tourists and the well-off—into the rendezvous of choice for all the local punks.

  Gloria was drinking shandies, because at the time, although she liked getting drunk, she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, preferring sweet things.

  There were a whole lot of them in the bar that day: Victor, shaved head, gray jacket, fan of German bands. Mathilde, a divine anorexic, eyes entirely redesigned with eyeliner, thirty centimeters of black hair impeccably gelled up on top of her head. Léonore, a punkette with a shaved head, blue eye shadow, long nails, very short skirts. Little Lorelei, scarlet hair, crucifixes everywhere, a walking religious festival, wearing her crosses right way up, upside down, in her ears, around her neck, on her wrists, green miniskirt, red tights with black stripes, two front teeth missing. Poulbot, a tall girl with curly fair hair, a friendly face, a big mouth, and a long skirt, thirties style. Plus a big guy called Herbert and his mate Roger, not what you would call intellectuals, in their green bomber jackets and rolled-up jeans. At the time, there weren’t so many punk rockers in Nancy that it was worth picking fights with skinheads. They left that kind of thing to the Parisians, not enough talent locally.

  Night was falling when Ratus arrived, looking the worse for wear. Ratus, an authentic punk rocker, way ahead of everyone else. Seniority among punks was a sign of street cred, it gave you prestige and various advantages. One of the rare points in common between punk and the civil service.

  The story was that Ratus had run into a gang of neo-fascists, a mixture of mods plus two skinheads with southern accents. When they saw him, they’d started insulting him, calling him a filthy stinking punk. He had advised them politely to go fuck themselves, and they had all fallen on him.

  He’d hardly finished telling his tale than everyone was on their feet—apart from a few girls with overcomplicated outfits, and the odd boy who wasn’t keen on a fight. Once they’d paid—this took a good twenty minutes, what with finding enough coins between them—the gang was on its way, determined to persevere all night if they had to, to find the motherfuckers and give them hell.

  They cheered each other on with howls of laugh
ter. Their bad luck, eh, Ratus, they didn’t know who they’d picked on, or they’d have stayed home with their mamas, doing their nails. Herbert was carrying a small police baton inside his jacket—just in case, he said, and now the moment had come. One of nature’s vigilantes. He ended up, poor dope, spending ten years in prison, what a waste. Roger had gone to fetch a pickax handle from his car—again, you never knew, might come in useful. And Victor was fingering his teargas canister. Gloria, like Ratus, had simply smashed a Kronenbourg bottle against the pavement. She held the bottleneck in one hand, while a full beer bottle was doing the rounds. When they finished one, they stopped to buy some more.

  Gloria adored this kind of escapade. She loved being in a gang, looking for trouble, the intoxicating rush of adrenaline, just before. Fear, mingled with determination. She loved the fellow feeling, the camaraderie it created at once. And she loved being a lone girl in a crowd of boys, without it being a big deal. She took this as a proof of her worth, “Good as a boy, you are,” whereas it was just proof that the world is badly organized. Herbert was yelling at the top of his voice, “Here we go, last pogo in Nancy!” a local adaptation of the “Hymne de La Souris Verte.”

  On their way, they asked passersby for directions, sometimes politely, sometimes threateningly. A young kid—an apprentice amphetamine dealer—guessed at once who they were after.

  “I saw them just now, they’re at the Excelsior. They’re waiting for me, ’cause I’m supposed to take them some stuff. I didn’t find none, so they can wait. So what did they do?”

  They’d reached Place Saint-Evre now. Moving along, almost at military pace, in a group, this time it was Roger who was howling “Ethylique” in a sepulchral voice. As they approached the bar, Victor signaled for them to stop and be quiet. “I’ll take a look on my own, but not go in. See where they are, so we can rush them.” The Excel was a café near the station, lots of glass frontage.

  Then in they went. Roger, the biggest of them, signaled to Gloria to keep beside him in the frontline, “Come with me, a girl psychopath always impresses ’em.” She knew how to behave, alongside the leader, his trusty sidekick. Baring her teeth in a sinister grin, like in an ultraviolent film. She wasn’t planning on using her broken glass on anyone, it was just to look good and scary. Unless the situation deteriorated badly, she was thinking of dropping the bottle, pushing over some tables and throwing chairs. Noisy and visual, but not really dangerous. As for the others, she couldn’t have sworn they were thinking the same way. But it was up to the assholes facing them to understand and get out of there fast.

  They had walked the length of the bar, a dozen of them, with everyone staring. Silence had quickly fallen in the room. A tableful of young boys, shaven heads and crew cuts, wearing lodens and khakis, was waiting for them as indicated.

  Gloria put on her broadest smile, like in a Western, life was good.

  She didn’t recognize him at first. The group of boys stood up, with mocking grins, ready for a fight. Not having found their amphetamines, they’d had plenty to drink instead, they were up for it too. A few waiters intervened, pushing everyone toward the exit.

  “If you’re going to make trouble, do it outside.”

  Wasted effort. The first fisticuffs were the signal for the start. Gloria had barely had time to aim a kick at the balls of a teddy boy—quite cute-looking actually, she noted—before someone had grabbed her sleeve and was dragging her outside, yelling, “Run, the pigs, the pigs!” She was propelled forward, the first to make it through the revolving door, losing her breath she went so fast. Two seconds later and she’d have been picked up—a vanload of police was in the area and had spotted them immediately. Still running, she could hear their whistles and male voices ordering her to stand still at once, which she took good care not to do. Gasping for air, she made it to Place Carnot and slowed down. The guy who had warned her did the same, and only then did Gloria recognize him. He’d shaved his skull, it made him look quite different. He’d put on weight. His face had lost its androgynous, almost unreal beauty. But his body, his overall appearance, was a lot more attractive. He now gave off a more powerful, more animal air, something that wasn’t there two months earlier. He was wearing a Harrington jacket and cutoff jeans.

  They both stopped to catch their breath, side by side, Gloria managed to get out a few words: “Fabulous! So romantic!”

  Eric smiled as he looked at her. They were under a streetlamp. He signaled that he agreed, his hand on his heart, trying to recover. Pointing at her he said, “I’d never seen you in punk gear before, suits you, bitch! Why did you throw me over?”

  “Dunno what you mean!” Overcome by a convenient coughing fit, she had to lean against the wall, sliding down to squatting. She smiled up at him. “Scared you, eh? What were you doing with that bunch of morons anyway?”

  “Mates from the South, not morons, quite the opposite. What possessed you, coming in and picking a fight?”

  “They beat up one of our pals!”

  “What, that tramp? Pal of yours?”

  He had crouched down beside her. With a sniff, she leaned over to look at his badges. He put his arm around her waist. She read “Skrewdriver” and “Komintern” and pulled away, shocked.

  “Know who they are, those pukey bands?”

  She stood up, making a face of total outrage, so as to be able to leave him.

  “You go around with fascists, you listen to shitty groups! What do you think you’re doing, little boy? Growing some balls? I wouldn’t do it that way.”

  She sneaked a glance at their reflection in the bus-shelter window and thought they made a nice couple. A Destroy punkette and a psychopathic skinhead, impressive, no? Plus “we met in the mental ward,” very modern, in her view. Still, not a reason to let herself soften toward him. Not that at the time she was too fussy about what people thought. On the contrary, the more outrageous it was the more she was up for it.

  It was just a strategy so that she could leave him there without having to explain. Yes, she was glad to meet him again, and amused by the circumstances. But she had to find her way back to the others and get away from him. She didn’t want to explain why she’d stopped writing to him. Too confusing. Best just to split.

  She was about to get angry and walk away when she saw Herbert running across the square. She just had time to wave to him and hear him yell without slowing down: “Get away FAST. Cops everywhere, they’re after us.”

  Eric grabbed her hand firmly. “I live around the corner, come on.” And since she was hesitating: “Want to get clobbered and blamed for everything in the bar? Hurry!”

  She consented, struck by his common sense.

  He did indeed live about two streets away from Place Carnot. In the entrance hall, she started to wonder what the hell she was doing there. Wide wooden stairs smelling of furniture polish, silence. Gloria was spitting like a cat, it was too quiet and peaceful, arrogance and opulence, too much for her to bear. Everything that as a teenager she feared: order and prosperity.

  She stopped on the stairs, exactly like a mule that refuses to budge.

  “Look, never mind, I don’t want to come in. Your parents will be there.”

  “We won’t see them. Don’t worry, I’m not going to introduce you to them right now, mademoiselle vanishing act.”

  Gloria shook her head, obstinately.

  “Don’t make me laugh. Just leave me here for five minutes. I’ll go home, I’ll get away with it.”

  Eric sighed, and sat down beside her on the stairs.

  “You’re pushing it. You’re lucky, you know, every time I see you, you’re trying to beat someone up, and that really turns me on.”

  “It turns you on?”

  “Yeah. Makes me really want to fuck you. Already before, it was quite strong, but now, seeing you . . .”

  “Oh really?” Gloria asked, impressed by such certainty. She felt her reluctance melting. All the reluctance of the last few weeks. He put his hand over hers.

&nbs
p; “See, frankly, you look a bit crappy in that punkette gear. But since it’s you, I like it. Any other girl, looking like that, I’d feel like vomiting. But you, well, you turn me on. I don’t know why. You just turn me on. Coming?”

  She rolled her eyes up to heaven, like a saint ready for sacrifice. Then she stood up. Dusted off her behind and asked, “Is it a long way up, to your place?”

  “Yes, but we don’t have to take the stairs.”

  They went up in the elevator, and when they were in front of a huge door, a door so imposing that it could have been a dentist’s office, he rang the bell. The door was opened by someone Gloria thought might be his sister. Very beautiful, youngish, but sad-looking. He greeted her and she signaled to them silently, in complicity, indicating they should tiptoe along to the right. The apartment seemed as big as a hypermarket. They went up a flight of stairs, then along a narrow corridor with gray carpeting and high ceilings. His bedroom, on the top floor right, was spacious, with several windows. Gloria understood better now why he so much wanted her to go back home with him. He explained that since he’d spent that week in the hospital, his status had completely changed—he was regarded as seriously ill now. And that wasn’t bad at all, because everyone tried to be really nice to him, concerned. It was cool.

  Hi-fi speakers, record collection, tape recorder, TV, video games, consoles, model airplanes. Gloria was both touched and appalled that he wasn’t ashamed to let her in to see all this.

  He had some good weed, she’d slumped onto his bed and dropped off to sleep. He’d woken her not long after, carrying a load of chocolate cakes. He rolled another spliff. They watched Mad Max. She had almost nodded off against his shoulder, it felt nice. They were getting used to each other. He kissed her on the lips, his tongue was delicate and nervous. She regretted coming here.