‘Genet was the best thing that ever happened to literature, Mira,’ Michael said flatly. ‘He writes for people like me – “a child-roughneck whom chance had given gold.”’ Michael recited those words with his eyes closed.
John agreed, he was nodding his head vigorously, but I knew that John had never read Genet. He barely read any books. He just wrote, which was so stupid. How can you write and not read?
‘Fuck you, Johnny-John, you don’t really know how to read!’
Michael said that the second after I thought it.
I thought it was amazing that Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers twice. He was in prison for stealing and he wrote the entire manuscript out on the paper bags they had to make there. When some guard figured out what he was doing, he stole the manuscript and destroyed it. But Genet just started it all over again.
‘Only fucked-up people are truly great in this world,’ Michael said. ‘Genet was a fucked-up, masturbating genius.’
I told Michael that the part I liked best in Our Lady was when one of the characters kills his girlfriend by banging her head against the brass bed, then just looks out the window and thinks the sun is malevolent. I didn’t know how Genet did that, made me follow that exact train of thought: ‘To love a murderer,’ he wrote. ‘I want to sing murder, for I love murderers!’
I started an Our Lady game with Michael. The next time he came to John’s and we were all drinking, I stared at him, really seriously, and quoted from the book. ‘Your dead man is inside you,’ I said. ‘Mingled with your blood. He flows in your veins, oozes out through your pores, and your heart lives on him, as cemetery flowers sprout from corpses … ’
‘Yeah, that’s good,’ Michael laughed. ‘You’re smarter than I thought, Mira.’
‘It’s the part that reminded me of you.’
John looked hurt.
I rolled my eyes. ‘It reminds me of all of us, John. Our Lady of the Flowers is going to vomit out all our carcasses!’
Michael smirked, so I continued quoting from the book. I knew it was kind of dramatic: ‘The night, which has come on, does not bring terror. The room smells of whore. Stinks and smells fragrant. To escape from horror, as we have said, bury yourself in it.’
I don’t know why that passage made me and Michael crack up. I think because we both knew that John didn’t really get it, I mean that him and Michael held their dead men inside them and I was the stinky fragrant whore!
Our game happened a few more times. Michael quoted something to me about me from the book and I quoted something back to him about him. But then I didn’t see him for a while, a few weeks, and the next time he came over, it was strange, it was like we’d never even had the Our Lady game, or the inside joke that we were both smarter than John.
If I asked John where Michael was when he wasn’t around, John would get mad. He’d say: ‘Mikey’s a businessman, Mira. He can’t always come over and educate you.’
I missed Michael though. Being with John was boring without him.
But Michael never came over alone again. He brought some big weird guy once who drank beer with us. I felt nervous because Michael was acting like a completely different person. He didn’t say anything smart or talk about books. He just kept drinking and smoking and scratching his arms.
The only thing he said to me was: ‘You’re always making Johnny jealous, Mira.’
I didn’t get why Michael and John were acting like they were friends with this disgusting new guy. They were all flicking their bottle caps into the middle of the table, cheering when they hit each other.
I was pissed off that Michael was acting so stupid. As the night went on I kept waiting for him to change. But he didn’t change, he just got more drunk.
It was three in the morning when he finally told John to set up the camera. ‘Take Joel with you, Johnny, show him how it’s done.’ Then Michael leaned over the table to me and said, ‘Joel likes you. He wants to do it with you.’
‘Why are you so into this dirty-video thing?’ I asked.
Michael stared at me with his heavy pink eyes. Then he spoke very slowly: ‘Because I am a bum. If you do this tonight, I will not be.’
That big Joel guy had thick yellow hands. I made myself fall from his crooked lap before anything happened. I started screaming at John to turn the camera off. He didn’t do it right away. That guy was disgusting. I didn’t have my underwear on.
‘Turn it off! Please! Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!’
‘Fuck, Johnny, she’s freaking out,’ I heard Michael say nervously. I looked at the screen. My vicious red face. My cunt was a monkey’s ass hanging behind me.
‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’
‘Okay, shhh, it’s okay. It’s off, baby, look, it’s off.’
My palms were nailed to the ground. John came down quick, crouching around me. ‘I’m sorry, Mira, baby, I love you, come on.’ John’s arms were tight around my shoulders. ‘Guys, I think you should go … ’
Hurting black fluid was filling my nose. John’s arms were sweltering. I couldn’t stop crying. I realized that Michael didn’t give two shits about me.
But he did quote me back from Our Lady of the Flowers. After another month away, he gave John a note to give to me. His handwriting was slanted and bunched-up like some psychotic person’s scrawl.
‘Her life stopped,’ the note said. ‘But around her life continued to flow. She felt as if she was going backward in time, and wild with fright at the idea of it – the rapidity of it – reaching the beginning, the Cause, she finally released a gesture that very quickly set her heart beating again.’
Adi wasn’t in her room when I banged on the door. I went downstairs to the change rooms to ask the girls if they had seen her. It was six o’clock in the evening. We had to work in a few hours and I’d slept most of the day. Lani was down there, smoking and looking fucked up on coke or something.
‘Looking for your girlfriend, Meeeera?’
‘You’re not going to find her here, cocksucker.’ Coco was in a bikini top and plucking pubic hairs from her moustache patch.
They both knew that I started living upstairs only because I was friends with Adi, that only the visa girls were supposed to live upstairs. I thought that Coco must’ve come here like Adi, fucked and fucked and fucked in small rooms.
I started walking toward the washrooms. Lani ran up and blocked me. She turned me around. I smelled her rancid breath, salted skin.
‘You think Gio wants you?’
Her spit sprayed my lips.
‘He can’t even look at you!’
Coco came up and joined Lani the bitch. ‘Who gets your money, huh? How much you give him?’
‘How much you give, Mira? How much you give downstairs?’
‘I bet she sucks his crap dick so she doesn’t have to give thirty.’
‘She’d suck a pig!’
I hadn’t ever given my money to anyone but Adi.
‘What? Tongue only comes out when there’s cock?’
‘Why are you so fucking mean?’ I finally said.
Lani passed me the butt of her joint. I took it from her and sucked the burnt end. Lani and Coco returned to their preening. The sides of my throat felt like they were glued.
I don’t know how or why I stayed with John for so long. I was fifteen. Maybe I was just new to the game. I broke it off for good the night John told me he wanted us to be together forever. He said he’d felt a space open up in him the very first time he ever saw me. He told me that he always wanted to know me. Forever, Mira. He actually said those words. And that possibility of eternity made me remember all the things I’d ever done with him when I’d thought I was okay, when I’d thought I was being myself – when I realized that I was acting like an automaton. Thank god he used condoms.
I’d let him lick me for hours. John went down on me even when I was bleeding. He always wanted to be between my legs. He liked it even
when I wasn’t clean. He made me spread my legs, saying, ‘Please, please.’ He wouldn’t take no even if I really didn’t want it. Sometimes it was the first thing he’d do when I came over. He’d get straight down on his knees, pull off my underwear and stay there for an hour.
It started taking me longer and longer to get into it, to get any kind of feeling down there. Sometimes I imagined that it wasn’t John’s head. I pretended it was some guy I didn’t know, that I was sitting at a table and some stranger was reaching under there, eating me. A few times, I even imagined that John was Ezrah.I knew John didn’t care about my fantasies. It got to the point where he was like, ‘I just want to be your dog, Mira.’
But I didn’t need a dog. I cared for him, sure, and there were times when we had fun. John told me everything about him and Michael growing up, how their families lived down the street from each other near the slaughterhouse, and how they used to have these contests to see who could get closest to a dead cow. Once, some guy stopped and let Michael touch the still-warm skin of a carcass through the fence. That was when Michael said it was barbaric, John said, and stopped eating hamburgers.
Sometimes neither of their families had heat in the house, and there were times when they couldn’t wash for a few weeks because the shower was too cold. John’s mom kicked him out when he was eighteen because she just wanted him to get a job. No one in either of their families had ever been to university. John lived on the street for a while after high school until Michael convinced him that he wanted to go to university. John didn’t make it past the first year. He didn’t like all the reading, he said. But Michael had stayed, on loans, for three and a half years before it got to be too much.
‘Michael hated all the bureaucracy,’ John said. ‘I mean, all the fucking administration. He had to pay to take his exams. Total bullshit. And then it was like karma or something, seriously. The day after he quits school he meets the guy who’s exporting our tapes at a bar … ’
‘That’s how you guys got into porno?’ I interrupted.
‘We don’t call it porno, Mira,’ John said, offended.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s erotic entertainment. Porno is illegal.’
‘It is not!’ I said, laughing at him. ‘There’s porn in every single video store, in every single country, in every single city, on every single screen! How the fuck is it illegal?’
John looked at me skeptically. Sometimes he could be so dumb. John used to talk about the theatre company he wanted to open to produce the plays that he and Michael wrote. John sometimes let me read his stuff – it was always typed out with no breaks between the words. I didn’t understand all of it, but I sort of liked it. John was actually funny when he wrote.
‘Ilovethe/manwhotakesthebusinhisunderwear/andswears/ thathewillneverhaveawife/ortellalie.’ That was the name of his first play. It was about a man who falls in love with a woman he always sees on the bus. It turns out she’s the head of the big electricity corporation that has just turned off his heat.
John could talk about his writing forever. He always held it to his chest after I read it and asked, ‘You liked it, you really liked it?’
I told him I did. But I would’ve rather read Michael’s stuff. If I ever asked John what Michael wrote about, John wouldn’t tell me. He said that Michael’s plays were genius, though, because Michael was a genius.
‘Have you read them?’ I asked.
John shook his head. ‘He’s waiting for a big audience, you know? He doesn’t want to waste his time on any community theatre shit.’
‘Why doesn’t he ever come back to see me?’
‘I think he’s working on something big. He’ll come back soon, don’t worry, Mira.’
Maybe I stayed with John because he seemed okay in the world. I mean, that he was okay considering everything he’d been through. I’d never been through any of that stuff. I didn’t want to be with him though. I knew that. Especially not the way he wanted to be with me. I remember thinking it was okay if I did it for a little while, but after that time they tried to film me with that guy Joel, I really just wanted to spit it all out. I knew Michael wasn’t coming back. And I hated John’s smoke-and-beer smell. It was always there now, as if it were my smell too.
The night we broke up, I really didn’t want him to go down on me again, and when he started to anyway, I pushed his head away.
‘Let me, babe!’ John begged. ‘Come on, let me eat your pussy. I love it so much, it tastes so good.’
I started coughing uncontrollably. John lifted his head and got up off his knees. He went to the bathroom to get me some water. When I didn’t want the water, he said, ‘What’s the problem here, Mira?’
I was thinking: How does anything ever really end?
‘What? What’s wrong with you, Mira?’
‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I said.
John’s eyes sagged down. ‘Hey, I just want to be your dog. How many times have I told you that, babe?’
‘But I don’t want to anymore.’
John got an old joint from the table beside the bed. He started smoking it and didn’t offer me any. He was really angry. The room started to shrink. ‘You don’t want to see me anymore, is that it?’
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my back to him. I was looking around for my bra.
‘Why? Huh, Mira? You tell me.’
‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘Aw, fuck.’
‘I’m sorr– ’
‘Don’t say that. Just don’t say that. After everything we’ve been through together. Fuck it, I don’t fucking believe you.’
‘I’m sorry, I just – ’
‘I said, don’t say that!’ John was pacing around in front of me. He started pulling at his chin.
‘John … ’
‘No. Shut up. If that’s what you want, Mira, then just go.’
‘Go? Go where?’
‘Goddammit. Just go. Get out!’
‘But it’s too late right now.’
‘So?’
‘How am I going to get home?’
‘I don’t know. A smart girl like you will think of something.’
John grabbed the sheet off the bed from behind me and wound it around himself. He was blinking wildly. ‘What’re you worried about? Get that look off your face. C’mon, they’ll think you’re a whore. All men think a woman alone at night is a whore. For fuck’s sake. You gonna cry now? Don’t be a baby. Fuck. You’re not a baby anymore. You’re the one who wants this.’
‘Does the bus run all night?’
John started laughing. ‘You’ll find a way home! Go back to your mommy and daddy. Go back to your little life.’
John poked my shoulder to get me moving. I heard him exhaling hard. I was looking around on the floor for my bag.
When I finally got all my stuff together and was walking to the door, John stayed close behind me. He was making pissed-off breathing sounds. For a second I was worried he was going to push me down the stairs.
‘She thinks it’s all just going to end when she wants it to?’ John opened the front door so hard that it banged the wall and sprayed plaster. ‘You finally getting the fuck out of here, huh?’
I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t look at John’s face. I ran down the stairs and heard the door slam behind me. I stood outside on the porch for a few seconds, swallowing hard, sweating under my hair. I heard a huge crash upstairs. I thought John must’ve kicked in the TV.
Fleeing through the dark streets, I kept hearing his voice: ‘All men think that a woman alone at night is a whore.’
I thought she was brave in the dark in her high heels, standing tall while I was running. She could face the thing that wanted to lodge itself inside her.
Adi was sitting on my bed like a man.
‘You scared me! Where were you?’ I’d been getting myself ready in the bathroom. Red cheeks, red lips, hair in pigtails. ‘You we
re here the whole time? Aren’t we working? What are you doing? You’re not dressed. It’s late.’
Adi was hunched over. Her foot was sticking out over the straps of her shoe. The top part, the bridge, was swollen like a little anthill.
‘I have to go home.’
‘What? To Volgograd?’
‘No, Jamaica.’ Adi started laughing. Her foot looked infected. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before.
‘No. Where are you going? Tell me.’
‘Israel. Wanna come screw some Hasids with me? They like the Russian pussy.’ Adi shoved her hands in her lap. ‘Fuck, I always forget you’re not Russian, Mirushka!’
Adi was shaking, she was white, that anthill on her foot.
‘What’s going on, Adi? Come on, can’t you just tell me?’
‘Exodus.’
‘Is he going with you?’
‘I told you to stay away from him!’ Adi shouted. ‘He hates you because he still hates me.’
I got nervous. Adi was grinding her teeth.
‘Gio said to me, Mira, that you are a Jew.’
Adi looked at her feet. The hurt one wouldn’t move.
‘Yeah? So what?’
A car beeped outside. Adi dragged herself to the window.
‘You are a Jew.’ She was grinding her teeth and cracking her jaw. ‘I can’t believe it!’
Then Adi turned from the window without looking at me. She hobbled toward the door past me, shifting her weight from the bad foot to the good. I tried to stop her but she used her elbow in my chest.
‘You stay away from me, Jews,’ she hissed, and limped out my door.
After six weeks of hanging out with her every single fucking night she was dissing me now because I was Jewish? Fucking God.
I went to the window and waited to see her in the lot. After a few seconds, Adi stumbled out the back door. Her arms were rigid by her sides. There was no car. No one was waiting.
God, it made me sad that she was so fucked up. Adi swayed side to side, picking at something on her cheek.
Then a small white car drove past the club. I watched Adi wave her arms and run to it. She ran like a goat, dragging her clod. She leaned down into the driver’s window.
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