Maybe Simon didn’t like Eddie and Paul because he couldn’t understand them when they talked about butches and queens, and men they referred to as “Grand Canyons,” and the cans of Crisco which appeared in every apartment, usually not in the kitchen. Or maybe because they talked rough sometimes, maybe because he overheard the conversation about Mario Black, which transpired in my presence.
“What the fuck do I care how good he looks?” Eddie had said. “You know what he does? I mean, what he doesn’t do? He doesn’t fuck, he doesn’t suck. You suck him—that’s it.”
And Paul said, “Well, fuck him.”
To which Shane replied, “No, he doesn’t do that,” then nudged Paul in the ribs and motioned in my direction. Shane reminded them sometimes how to talk in front of me. I liked it, though. I liked the way they talked, like it was okay for me to be there, like I was around, only not enough to hurt. But I also liked the way Shane reminded.
Simon must have picked up the Mario Black conversation, because he stamped into the house, unwilling to catch my eye. Shane said, “There’s just no pleasing some people.”
He said this in reference to Simon’s watchdog approach when he had thought they were all straight.
I had celebrated the end of the moving by buying a new bathing suit, and jumping in the pool, and lounging around to tan like all my new friends. Simon was away at school so much he didn’t even see the suit I’d bought, not for three days, and when he did, he hit the ceiling.
He sat on the edge of my chaise lounge, so nobody would hear how mad he was. “You’re seventeen years old, you’re the only girl in the whole building, and I just don’t like the way these guys look at you. Not one bit.”
So I looked around to see what he meant, but no one was looking at me. And as I looked around, Simon looked around too, and saw the same. A young red-haired man flashed Simon a big white smile that looked shy and searching, and Simon marched back inside without another word.
It was true, what Shane said, that Simon was getting harder to please. In fact, I had a date that same night to go dancing with Paul and Eddie, but I would have to tell Simon it was Shane and Jason. Shane had to work, I knew that. But Simon didn’t know.
“You sure you can’t go?” I asked Shane, taking that moment to look at him again. I loved to look at Shane.
“Sorry, Ella, wish I could. Why? You worried about going?” Shane always knew.
Shane was James Dean, only much better, in jeans and heavy black boots, and a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, worn and scuffed and faded to gray at the elbows. Not now, at the pool, but nearly always. And dark hair combed back with one loose strand falling into his eyes, and thin, strong arms with little muscles bulging at the top, at moments like this, and the best tan of anybody, which he’d show off by peeling back the leg of his trunks for contrast.
Shane was a whole choir of voices, all hitting the same perfect note, and everybody who hears it feels the spirit, and comes to life in everybody else.
Shane was everything in the world, except those things I already had, and I had so little.
After a while, when I took over my shift from Jason at the Lucky K Market, I would wonder if it was fair to like Jason, and be his friend, and have fantasies about him dying suddenly, all at the same time. I asked Willie, and that’s when we got to talking about Shane, and once we got started, it seemed like it might never stop.
“So what’re you scared of?” Shane asked next.
“Well, maybe asking Simon.”
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”
“But you’re seventeen,” was Simon’s immediate answer.
“Gino’s is a chicken coop,” I said, and treated Simon as naive for not understanding that reference. “You know, chicken. Underage. They don’t serve alcohol there.”
Actually, alcohol or no, you had to be eighteen, but Eddie was only seventeen, and Paul was barely eighteen and he’d been going to Gino’s for three years.
“I guess,” he said, and then Shane and I stood outside in the hall, which smelled of amyl nitrate, because the guys in 102 bottled and sold the stuff. It made the backs of my eyes feel numb, and my brain thick.
“What if he’d said no?”
“I’d still have gone.”
Simon worked and went to school so much, I really only asked his permission as a courtesy.
Shane invited me into his apartment—Jason slept behind a closed bedroom door—and asked what I was still scared of. I never asked him how he knew these things.
I told him I didn’t know how to dance, and he laughed and put on a Spinners record, and told me nobody knows how to dance, because there’s no right or wrong way. He danced for me through two songs. After a while I tried to imitate him, and he said I was already better than half the guys at Gino’s.
I tried it in front of his mirror, and got so depressed I had to go sit down on the couch.
“Hey, come on,” he said. “You were doing okay.”
“But I hate my hair and my face and I look like a jerk, even when I’m not dancing.”
Shane stood me up in front of the mirror and pulled one of his big, V-neck white T-shirts over my own. It hung like a dress. Then he gently twisted up my hair in back and slipped a white painter’s cap over it, pulling the brim down partway over my eyes. And in the final touch, which made me gasp, he took off his black leather jacket and put it on me.
“What do you think?”
“Wow.” It was all I could say. I had no experience, no preparation, for liking myself in front of a mirror. “But I can’t wear your leather jacket to Gino’s.”
“Sure you can. I can’t wear it at work, anyway. But be careful with it. Don’t set it down anywhere and turn your back.”
“I’ll never take it off. I promise.”
He showed me how to push the sleeves up above my elbows, but then I looked in the mirror and saw my ugly bands of scar tissue, and I told him I liked it better flopping over my hands. He turned the cuffs back one turn.
“What’d you do to your wrists, Ella?”
Nobody had ever asked me that before. Everybody wanted to ask, I could tell, but nobody ever did.
“Oh. I burned myself.”
“By accident?”
He turned me to face him, flipped the collar up around my ears.
“I don’t know. Not really. It was a mistake, I guess, but not an accident.”
“That’s what I thought.” He turned me back to the mirror and I looked so damned good, so in control, with his hands on my shoulders and his face right beside mine. “First time I saw you, I thought, here’s a girl who’s been to hell and back again.”
I smiled at Shane’s eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know if I’m back yet.”
He kissed me on the temple. “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, Ella. It’ll happen.”
I heard Jason’s voice then, breaking my world apart, calling from the bedroom. “Sha-ane,” as if it had two syllables, “you’re either coming to bed or you’re not, honey.”
I left with Shane’s hat and jacket. It was more than I’d ever expected. It wasn’t enough.
OWNERS OF THE DREAM
The sun is merciless overhead. Time to rest in the shade, but there is no shade. There is no water. Why do I think there ever will be?
Reaching deep into the unfamiliar sensation, I see that I am afraid. This is a good sign. If Willie were here, she’d be proud of me. Simon will be proud, too, if there is a Simon.
My fear is that there won’t be, but I am just as afraid for myself. I’m afraid to die out here, afraid to survive. I’m afraid of the pain of heat and thirst without relief. More than anything, I’m afraid Yozzy will die. Then I’ll be alone. Without her heart to fortify my own, without her judgment, her heroism, her horseness.
She begins to drag her front hooves and stumble, and I slide to the ground. If we can’t rest in the shade, we will have to rest in the sun.
I turn Yozzy free to graz
e on the dry, scrubby grass, and I unroll my sleeping bag. I find a parcel of white butcher’s paper, and, inside, a thick stack of beef jerky in uneven sheets.
I mouth silent gratitude for Everett and May and eat one piece. I set my little packet of belongings aside and stretch out, pulling out the photo of Simon. I wonder why I still carry it. Because it strikes me that if Simon exists at all, he does not exist as the man in the photo. He has changed, inside and out. If this was not true, he’d be home with his wife Sarah. And I’d be at work, because I’d be my old self, which I’m not. This is no time for a frozen image of Simon, or of myself. We are fluid, like the sky. Like water, if I ever see water again.
I lie awake for hours before I fall asleep, then I wake suddenly. Even with my eyes open, squinting, watching Yozzy graze, I still see the dream.
I see a cave opening, covered with a flap of animal skin, which moves in the breeze. I know the cave is Simon’s house, but Simon is not home. I see a fire burning inside, see it flicker and glow through the skin, but I never see Simon. Only the wind in attendance; the dream fades.
Maybe the dream was sent to me by Everett. If you’re that good, Everett, send rain.
We walk half a mile before I find a rock big enough to ease me onto Yozzy’s back. Muscles inside my thighs scream in chorus with my feet.
We ride until the sun dips away. My mouth is thick and dry, my head fuzzy. I want to find the road, because the road might lead us to Sam Roanhorse’s store. Surely we must have traveled close to twenty miles. But the road is gone, I can’t even guess in which direction.
I have never completely believed in a god, but suddenly I hope there is one, and that he knows where we are.
As the first pale star appears on the horizon, I pick up my head from a half-nap against Yozzy’s neck. I see a house. Yozzy has found a house.
I make out a man on the front porch, smoking a pipe, and he steps down and walks to greet us. I blink my eyes, recognize the dried-apple-doll face, but it is not a dream. It stays.
He reaches out to pat Yozzy’s shoulder.
“So, Ella Ginsberg, we meet again.”
In Sam Roanhorse’s sink, I fill a stewpot with water and carry it out to Yozzy, who drinks her fill.
“Give her another one later,” he says. “Not all at once.”
When Yozzy is satisfied, I accept a glass and drink.
My leg muscles stiffen, and it hurts to sit at his table.
Sam opens a can of corned beef hash and fries up three thick slices, topping them with a cooked egg from his own chickens. He sets this feast in front of me, and for the first time in my life I feel I’d like to pray silently before taking my meal.
“Are all Navajo this hospitable, Mr. Roanhorse?”
He smiles. He says, “The Navajo are a good people, like everybody else. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad people. This isn’t about us, Ella. It’s about you. Can’t you see?”
I wipe my mouth on my napkin, and Sam pours red wine into my empty cup. He must know by now that I can’t see.
“You have a mission. Most of us only wish we did. It’s the purest, most untarnished way to live a life. All the universe envies you. All the people, the animals, even the sun and the clouds and the night. If we could trade places with you, we would. So we line up at your back in admiration. We are all with you, Ella.”
He offers me his couch for the night. I thank him but decline. Night is the time to travel.
He offers me a bottle to carry water, but I refuse. I choose to believe he knows why. He must see that every pound of water I carry increases Yozzy’s burden. I can’t carry enough for her—only for myself. I will not make her way heavy to lighten my own. It is enough to borrow her feet.
I place my knee in Sam’s laced fingers, swing onto Yozzy’s back. She is refreshed now; I feel it. We are ready to continue.
I reach my hand down to grasp that of my host.
He says, “Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I saw your brother Simon.”
“Where?”
“Where? I don’t know. Somewhere around here. Up near the mesa, maybe. I didn’t think much about where. I guess he had a camp somewhere around here.”
“And he was in it? I mean, Simon was there?”
“I think he was.”
In his dream, no skin. In Everett’s and mine, no Simon. I like Sam’s dream the best. “That dream gets around,” I say.
“A dream has more than one owner. It belongs to everyone it may choose to touch. Whomever it concerns.”
I say goodbye to Sam and move off toward the mesa.
I feel the warmth of the Roanhorse home at my back, but I don’t turn to look.
THEN:
Three Friday night dancing at Gino’s and I became something of a status symbol. The guys tripped all over each other for the privilege of dancing with me, some for the novelty, I figured, or to show a liberal bent, others to thumb their noses at their own dates and lovers.
I got kisses on the cheeks, on the forehead, sometimes on the lips, and no matter how much they fawned over me, I never felt the need to hide away.
On the third Friday, I wore Shane’s jacket again, but I left the cap at home. I’d gone to a salon on Sunset Boulevard, and had my hair cut off short, and thinned, and I wore it slicked back, so the waves lay flat along my skull, like a freeze-frame of a windblown wheat field, only darker.
On the third Friday, Eddie and Paul and I were joined by Queenie and Harley Mike, a tentative couple, the only other guys in the building our age. After we got our hands stamped for paying the dollar-fifty cover charge, Harley Mike took us all into the alley and got us high, and Queenie brought out a pewter flask of gin to fortify our fruit juice drinks.
Loose and giggly, dancing wilder and better than I ever had before, I heard Eddie suggest we go to Spike, and the guys all froze, and said nothing at all.
Paul piped up with, “You want to take Ella to Spike?”
“What’s Spike?” I whispered in Queenie’s ear, and he said it was a leather bar, which didn’t sound bad; in fact, I felt like I was dressed the part in Shane’s jacket.
“But you gotta be twenty-one at Spike.”
Eddie laughed his shrieky little laugh and said he knew the guy who checked IDs—no, not knew him but knew him, and if he let us in that night, Eddie would know him again.
So we all piled into my Studebaker, squealed too fast around a few corners, and ended up in a whole different world. Dark, especially in the back. The men wore leather caps and leather pants and chaps and studded dog collars, and stared with a venom that I supposed was meant to pass for some dangerous brand of sexuality.
I ordered a beer, and as I drank it I became aware that the whole place smelled of amyl nitrate, which made me groggy, and I wandered to the back to find a ladies’ room, but there wasn’t one. Having no special backup plan, I slumped into a corner, ended up sitting on the floor, almost invisible. As my eyes adjusted to the light I realized what it was about Spike that brought on all that silence. Rather than finding a man to take home, the men at Spike were doing it right here, in the dim booths and against the back of the bar.
Almost half of them wore leather pants that unzipped or unlaced up the back, as they allowed one huge biker or another to take a place behind them, grunting and thrusting, and reaching around in front, searching, I assumed, for assurance of their good receptions.
I tilted my bottle back and swallowed long slugs of cold beer, and wondered where the guys might have gone, but then I saw Eddie in a booth in the far corner, holding his hard penis in one hand and a strange man’s head in the other, seemingly pleased with the way the two joined together.
A tall black man sat on the floor next to me, nuzzled me with his shoulder.
“What’s your name, honey?”
When I told him he vaulted to his feet, laughing. “Oh my god, you’re a girl. I had no idea. Honey, do you know where you are?”
I said as best I could figure I was in a butch le
ather bar in Hollywood, watching a bunch of guys making it in the corners in the dark. He nodded and wandered off to try again.
I nursed the feeling of the alcohol and the watching, the familiar warm buzzing energy that I stole from them, and when I wrapped my arms around myself, it made me think of Simon, holding me around the waist on the landing, telling me I shouldn’t grow up to be an animal. I remembered thinking the watching was fine until he told me it wasn’t. But Simon wasn’t aware of my every move anymore. Just when I really started having fun Harley Mike found me and pulled me out the front door, where the guys waited on the sidewalk.
They seemed relieved to see me.
“Where the hell were you, Ella? You scared us.”
Mike answered for me, saying he found me in the back, with great, ominous emphasis, and all mouths dropped open in grudgingly impressed disbelief.
Queenie sidled up to me and hissed in my ear, “Ella, what the hell were you doing back there?”
“Watching.”
“Damn. We thought you were a nice little girl.”
On the way home it was Eddie who got it in his head to go to the Rooftop Baths. “Ever been to the Rooftop? It’s the only bi place in town. A hundred men to every one woman, and she’s always a bow wow. One cute little girl in the whole place and she’s with us. Get it? What do you think, Ella? You want to do some real watching?”
Harley Mike said, “No. She doesn’t.”
I said I did, and I really did, I wanted it a lot, except not that night, because of Shane’s jacket, because of my solemn promise not to take it off and leave it anywhere.
And since I was near ready to pass out for the night, the idea was called until the following Friday
When Friday came I left Shane’s jacket at home with its rightful owner, and drove the four guys to the Rooftop in Atwater, where they paid my way in the door. In the locker room we changed into towels, then slinked down dark halls lined with private rooms, most with open doors. A waiting man lounged in each one, toweled, or naked, most leaning with outstretched arms on the door frames over their heads to make their stomachs look flatter, their chests more developed.
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