Trading you for Barrooms
Back before I used to hang out in the shadows, back then, back before I used to hang out with anyone and everyone, I started talking to the door guy at the club with the Vampire and the tequila sunrise/date rape guy. This was before both of those fabulous gentlemen though, back when I wasn’t so horribly cynical. Back when I was just dabbling in the shadows.
I liked him because he liked me. He was cute, and since he was the club’s bouncer he was sort of intimidating and could lay it down – he got in fights and chased people down High Street on the regular - but he was a teddy bear to me, incredibly sweet. He was also a coke addict and an enterprising weed dealer.
Bouncer was falling for me, and I knew it. When he died suddenly of heart failure a year or so later, they found a bunch of poetry he wrote to me, along with all the F. Scott Fitzgerald books I had inscribed and given to him. Bouncer was a writer and a poet, along with being a fighter and a junkie.
I only know they found this stuff because someone sent me a text message saying so.
Back when I was dating the boy and he was beginning to break my heart, bouncer was my go-to guy, an amazing lover and a sweet friend – he had a young daughter who lived with her mom (also a curvy white girl), and he talked to his mother nearly every day. I often wondered what he would have been like if he wasn’t so mixed up in all the bullshit. But he was.
Our relationship lasted until the day before he died. He was sweet to me, and I always gave just enough to keep him interested.
__
The last time I saw bouncer, he invited me to lunch. It was always just me and him, me and him, me and him. This time, when I met him at his house, he and a random sketchy looking dude were passing a joint on the porch. They asked me if I wanted some, but by then I had started to lay off on the weed. Bouncer was always giving me free weed, which I never knew what to do with, as a couple of dizzy episodes with weed and whiskey had turned me off to the whole affair.
When the random sketchy dude left, bouncer said he was hungry and wanted to get something to eat. I think we had planned to meet up for lunch. I had envisioned something sweet and romantic, somewhere with brick walls and low lighting in the middle of the day.
Bouncer took me to the local Dairy Queen.
Something seemed wrong. Even for an addict, he was acting strangely, like his motions were slightly stilted, like he was just almost-but-not-quite missing his mouth as he messily ate his burger. I watched, horrified to have been taken to a DQ.
I couldn’t put my finger on his behavior, as it was unlike anything I had seen induced by drugs. Looking back, it was similar to the way my mother tells me I behaved directly before I had a fluke stroke at the age of three.
He wasn’t talking much, and I just thought he was high. He told me he had headache – but he always had a headache, and had seen a doctor about it recently.
We were sitting on a picnic table very close to my boyfriend’s house on a busy corner in my neighborhood. I tried to hide behind a large red and white shade umbrella, feeling annoyed that bouncer had invited me to lunch and then decided to get blitzed and take me to a Dairy Queen.
I drove us back to his house when he was done eating – I had gone on a silent hunger strike due to his insensitivity on the matter of lunch.
He stumbled inside, and turned on the television. He knew I hated television and so we had never watched TV together before. Now he pulled me onto the couch and tried to take my shirt off. His motions were still slightly off.
I struggled. A lot.
He tried to kiss me. I struggled and struggled. He was strong, and held me down. I kept dodging his probing mouth and telling him no. Loudly. No means no. I always thought that was a cliché, but apparently not.
I managed to escape to the bathroom, where I washed my face and sat on the edge of the tub, trying to decide what to do. I had never been forced before, never been in a situation where someone tried to make me do something I didn’t want to do.
I was a masochist, not a sadist. I was Not Enjoying Myself.
I returned to the living room to tell him I had to go. He pulled me down onto him again, but this time I slipped away. I told him again that I had to go, and ran out the door, angry and incredulous.
_
For two days, I glowered over the situation. Then I received a phone call from bouncer’s number.
I didn’t answer, because I never answered the phone unless it was my boyfriend or my family. It wasn’t bouncer, but his mother, in fact. She left a message saying that bouncer was in the hospital and she was calling because he wanted me to know. I was livid. Jokes like that weren’t even close to funny.
I got two more phone calls from his mom, and a text message from a mutual friend before I realized that this wasn’t just bouncer trying to get my attention after his bad behavior. He was actually in the hospital, in a coma now, hanging on for dear life.
I didn’t know what to do. Boyfriend was away playing a show out of state. I was lost.
The next day, I got a text message from the mutual friend saying that bouncer had passed away. I was in shock. I called my mother to tell her about the whole situation. I didn’t tell her that we’d been sleeping together for a year, but I told her about his weird and forceful advances. She assured me that there was no way I could have known why he was behaving oddly.
__
Like the time in Chicago that I saw a woman commit suicide by jumping in front of an el’ train, I knew it was time to leave Columbus. As with Chicago, I had miles to before I left.
Bouncer’s death was the beginning of the end. Sex and whiskey became my driving life force.
Bouncer’s funeral was at a Baptist church in the seedier part of Columbus. It was attended by a legion of goth kids from the club, whose make-up ran down their faces as they cried alligator tears and sweltered in the old church, which lacked air conditioning that the hot midwestern morning in July.
I sobbed through the entire thing, sitting a bit apart from all the goth kids, leaning on a former student of mine who had also been a weed dealer under bouncer. I ran out of the church without talking to his mother, because I didn’t know what to say.
I got high and had sex with said student after bouncer’s funeral.
If there ever was a depressing misadventure in my story of prurient interest, this was it. I wasn’t in love with bouncer, but the way that events unfolded destroyed me, along with the fact that my boyfriend, who loved me but who couldn’t love himself enough to truly love and support another person, was largely absent during this time…
And that’s how I met a vampire, and a date rapist, and how I ended up in a sex hotel in the meatpacking district of New York City, and fucking a Christian dude in White Plains… and living my life just below the radar for so very long.
And why I’m now working so hard to give a fuck again.
But then again, old habits die hard.
Flashes in my mind of a tiny moment in time, grabbing a microphone out of unsuspecting hands and yelling to the 2am crowd that I know this one!
Flashes of me outside myself, just brief little pieces looking out at everyone, singing in public - something I normally only do in church when I’m visiting my parents.
Singing karaoke, to a familiar song from my youth, looking around wildly with eyes that won’t remember in the morning what they’re seeing now. A tiny moment in time, all other moments from that night lost. One of those nights.
But this time, it was sadism and not masochism. I fucking hate karaoke.
The guy from the guy from the shadows, from the night when Michael the Real Vampire was trying to seduce me with his knowledge of Nick Cave (…and the Bad Seeds…)… for some reason I let myself get caught up with hanging out with shadows guy a whole lot. What was strange was, instead of just fucking him, I also went places with him. I think it was because I felt so safe with him in bed.
He was an excellent lover, the kind who gives instead of takes, and in my depleted state, I needed someone to fuck me missionary style with their beautifully crafted cock, (just a little bigger than perfect) over and over whenever I wanted, hand on top of my head gently. I hated that I liked it, and punished myself routinely for feeling as much.
He had horrible taste in music - his favorite band was an embarassingly unnamable 90s alternative rock group. He also loved karaoke, where he would belt out the aforementioned unnamed group’s lesser known ballads. I was too numb to be embarassed by the whole thing, and too detached to feel anything as he sang these ridiculou songs directly to me in front of crowds of our friends.
He took me to a goth wedding in October, where I was aloof and got drunk right away. We got drunk a lot together constantly, and we fucked a lot. He loved me, and I didn’t have the faintest sense of love for him. I couldn’t feel anyway.
__
He knew I couldn’t hold my tequila. I don’t know what happened that night, except for the one brief flash of singing The Pogues “Fairytale of New York.” I know all of my friends were there, and I don’t know how anyone let me consume so much tequila - an apparently hidden ingredient in the karaoke night special Long Island iced teas.
I don’t know how anyone let me leave my car at the bar and let him take me home.
Especially when everyone knew that he loved me and that didn’t love him - I loved my boyfriend. Everyone knew. I told him constantly. He didn’t care. Or he thought he could win me over. With tequila and date rape.
I woke up in bed the next morning, naked. He was next to me, naked. I panicked, sat up. Puked tequila into my lap. Looked confused. Didn’t remember anything.
“Where are my clothes?” I asked him, balling up the sheets and turning slightly green. He felt like a stranger. Even his above average love-making skills couldn’t save him now.
“You left them in the bathroom.” He said, petting my back.
“What?”
“You left them in the bathroom. You said you wanted to fuck.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah, you asked for it. Begged me.”
I throw up again, this time in the trashcan. He rubs my back.
“What the fuck are you talking about, I asked for it?”
“You’re insatiable,” he laughs softly.
“I DON’T REMEMBER ANY OF THIS.” I tell him, falling back on the pillows.
I didn’t exactly have a death wish back then, but close enough. If I died, I wouldn’t have felt it. Nothing felt like anything. I wasn’t even properly traumatized by the situation I was in.
I just can’t figure out how anyone got me to drink tequila… and so much of it.
__
Two weeks later, I brought my positive pregnancy test to the gynecologist, having not slept at all the night before. I was pretty sure my life was over. I don’t even like kids. At all.
It was a false positive, and all of my STI tests cleared just fine. I took the rest of the week off from school and stayed in bed all day and night, watching endless episodes of “Intervention,” wishing someone would intervene with my own life.
When I finally talked to guy from the shadows, he said that I was making things up as an excuse to break things off with him.
He had sex with me while I was unconscious.
I decided then and there that I should probably do something else with my life.
Because I sure as hell don’t want to meet another tequila sunrise.
I’m dying the most beautiful death. Like stars shooting around us exploding into sparks on the ground. And it’s always more fun fucking someone you love and trust completely with your soul in the palm of their hands. This is a rare story. It doesn’t involve sin, but in fact sin’s diametric opposite. It doesn’t involve cunning, but rather simple submission to something much larger than us, something exploding in the brilliant, violent colors of the universe.
It would be unjust to describe as much, except to say that it’s familiar, and it demolishes me, breaks my heart while at the same times gives me a million raisons d’etre. Deep drinking from a well that’s gone missing for so long and has suddenly been happened upon again. Deep drinking in of each other, and there’s always too little time. And I never know how the story ends.
But I guess the explosions and not ends are the point, the same as I have stars and bombs and fire inked all over my body, the same as I fell in love and that love resurfaces every now and again, the same as infinity and the way that death and birth, destruction and creation are all exactly the same.
You give me the sunset when I ask for the stars, you give me dusk as well as night, and morning as well as day. You give it all and then again we both cry as we’re torn apart, not necessarily by choice, but necessarily by necessity. It’s like summer nights that last forever, spent in nothingness with everything, and everything is only you and I. It’s like summer nights that always fade away, only to come back again, predictably, and right on time, when the winter has had its fill.
I saw how they looked on, how they were floored by what they saw. A million years and a thousand miles, and I’m falling again, free falling through space, on top of you, beneath you, beside you, and afterward, when we’re tired and sweaty and we know that it will only be a few hours until we are so again.
The love I have is boundless and infinite; even as it is bounded by time and space, it never really is. And my love, I trust you have had your rest.
Fucking Christ
One evening, I took the Metro North to White Plains because I was curious.
He had paid for a really nice hotel room and drove to meet me in his shiny new red Mini Cooper. It was alternate-universe-land; my usual encounters took place in urban bars and alleyways, other peoples houses, and, before I moved to New York, at my apartment in Columbus. But this was a new era.
I was in White Plains, and I was ambivalent.
He didn’t drink because he was a Christian; he didn’t want to go to a bar. He said he would pick up some beer for me, even though I insisted otherwise, but he didn’t know what I meant when I asked for a lager, so I insisted again that it wasn’t necessary. I had known that he was a Christian when I started talking with him, and as usual, curiosity killed the cat.
He wasn’t as cute as his pictures online depicted him, but we made easy conversation. I felt like I was playing a subversive role - a spy, maybe. A girl nicer and more pure than myself. He took me right into the dark bedroom of the cushy hotel suite.
Like any man overcompensating for something, he was incredibly good at licking pussy. Maybe it was also how very, very dirty I felt about the whole thing that was getting me off. I knew from what he’d told me of his “escapades” that he had nothing on me, nothing on even a month in my shameless life. I grabbed his head and he spent at least forty five minutes with me on the brink of demolition.
When it was finally over and I couldn’t take any more, he said he wanted to fuck me in my favorite position, one I had described as being absolute ecstacy. It’s not very complicated, and I’ve never not been able to do it with anyone (though I certainly don’t do it with everyone).
We tried, for at least fifteen minutes, but he seemed to have a couple of problems. He was nervous, he said. He was a big fan of a bottle of KY, which I kept wondering about in relation to my lady parts; but more urgently he wasn’t very well endowed at all. And that’s being kind.
Focus, focus, I insisted to myself. Be present and do what you can with what you have. He couldn’t fuck me like I’d wanted, so he threw himself on his stomach, facing away from me, cursing God. I wondered what his God thought about picking up girls online and fucking them (or attempting to) in hotel rooms.
He started to talk about religion and church, and told me he thought Catholics were crazy. I told him that my family is Catholic. I didn’t remark on his Christianity except to say I didn’t mind if he was Christian - he seemed very concerned about what I thought of this.
Eventually, he went down on me again forever. I fell asleep afterward. I was so happy to be in a cushy hotel bed, as I didn’t have my own bed or space yet in New York, that I drifted away immediately - despite him being next to me, which I usually find alarming.
He was sweet, gentle, kind, naive. His idea of “crazy” sex was my idea of what sex must be like after years of marriage before you get your second wind.
In the morning, he wanted to get creative. He asked me if he could put whipped cream on my tits. I laughed and said I didn’t mind, but where was he going to get whipped cream? He had some. Of course. How crazy.
It felt better than I thought it would. He got all hot and bothered and tried again to fuck me… but couldn’t. He talked to me about music, children, and God instead. He loved them all. He was incredibly sweet. I actually liked him a lot, there in the alternate universe vortex.
But fucking Christ, I also really like getting fucked, really hard, me on top, while getting my tits bitten and my ass smacked. And I really like whiskey and beer. And rock n roll. And sin.
Russian Roulette
I once played Russian roulette. With a student.
She was from Moscow, and she was cunning. She’d lived in Cincinnati since she was ten, so there wasn’t a trace of a Russian accent in her English, but her Russian, when she spoke it, was too fast and fluent for me to fully understand. It kinda turned me on.
She liked me. A lot. On my end, it didn’t help that she was pretty, with a beaky Russian nose, long, thick black hair, and that porcelain Slavic skin. Once, she tried to entrap me by baiting me with her transgendered friend who needed to “talk to someone.” A dutiful women’s studies instructor, I took the bait at face value, and stumbled at the deception, but didn’t fall . Turned out her friend didn’t give a shit, didn’t need to talk, and was just there to tell me Russian girl was hot for teacher. She was all kinds of crazy.
I taught her in spring quarter, which ended in June, and after the quarter ended, we kept in touch (as I did with many of my students). A couple weeks later, I mentioned to her that I was going to Cincy, where she was staying with her mom for the summer. She asked me if she could join me on my Ikea excursion.
I never bought the bookself that was the catalyst for my trip, but I did have sex with a teenager (she was almost twenty!) in a pool, and could have definitely been arrested for providing alcohol to a minor. I was twenty-six. Clearly, I was crazy, too.
_
The storm clouds don’t move swiftly in the Midwest like they do here on the coast, where the ocean winds toss them around and push them out to sea and toward Europe. The Midwest is stagnant, lightning-filled, and torrid in the summer; maybe that’s why things are so much slower there. The late-June sky was arcane shades of green as I made my way down to almost-Kentucky, supposedly in search of a new bookshelf.
When I arrived, Russian girl introduced me to her mother, in Russian. I knew a lot about her conservative mother from the stories she told me, and I just barely caught her telling her mother that like herself, her teacher had sex with girls. Her mother looked scandalized, and disappeared.
We sat in her room, and she showed me the copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments that she’d bought because I’d mentioned in class that it was my current favorite theoretical work. She was obviously reading it, because she was well-versed in Barthes’ theories of longing and love. She moved close to me to show me a specific passage. She smelled like jasmine.
She took me outside, to the pool area. Her mother’s white Mercedes sped out of the driveway furiously.
“Ya skazal yey, ya hotelya, chtovui yeye pokinut.” She whispered carefully to me, looking up from under her hair. I told her I wanted her to leave.
“Uzhasno!” I replied. You’re awful.
She took my hand – I was wearing a black sundress over my bright pink bathing suit – and led me to the pool. Static electricity everywhere. The sky rumbled furiously.
“Devai!” She said. “Let’s swim before it rains.”
I kicked off my Chuck Taylors and she flung her flip flops to the side, and we hopped into the tepid pool. Her bikini bottom sagging, she hopped back out and grabbed the bottle of Ezra Brooks that I’d left on the patio table. Sitting on the steps of the enormous pool, we slugged from the bottom a few times, and then she kissed me.
She was beautiful, supple, and her long black hair was flying everywhere in the hot wind. It was like a really bad porn film. She slid onto my lap, straddling me, and kept kissing me and chugging from the bottle. It was a small bottle, but half of it certainly did the two of us in.
She tried to undo my top, but I wouldn’t let her. Even though it was surely going to storm, I wasn’t super into the neighbors getting a full frontal view. She took hers off, though, and rubbed her beautiful, full chest in my face. She grabbed at me like she’d never been properly loved – I’m pretty sure that between her terrifying mother, her father still in Moscow, and her sordid tales of “swinging” with much older couples, that this was probably true. I met her insistent bites with slow, deliberate kisses.
Unsure of how to proceed in the water, I flipped her over so that she was sitting on the pool steps and kneeling below her a step or two down, slipped a finger inside of her. It started to rain. Really.
I was disappointed that she mostly talked to me in English as I had my way with her. She told me, amidst gasps, what I already knew – that she had had a crush on me since class first started. But then she said she loved me and that it was killing her and I would never understand because I had a boyfriend and I was twenty-six and she was nineteen. I looked up at her, searching her eyes, and having no idea what to say. She was right.
So I pushed a little harder and a little farther, making her explode gently in the warm water. She had her head back and was looking up into the clouds. Then, sitting up she pulled me toward her, and kissed me, dragging me back to the sheltered patio table, in out of the rain.
_
She tried to keep me in Cincinnati for the night, telling me that the storm clouds, now pelting us with lightning and thunder, were sent specifically for that reason. I broke away from her and said I had to drive back to Columbus. It was getting late.
I kissed her in the rain on her front step. She begged me not to go. I went.
I called my boyfriend when I was near Columbus. He was at our favourite bar, he said, with a girl I knew he’d been sleeping with. He didn’t invite me. I knew then that the world had turned, even if just a little.
Two of Us
When I was almost-twelve, my favourite band was The Beatles. It’s a long story, but basically I had thought my cousin had told me that “I am the Walrus” was by Counting Crows (hello, instant age-giveaway), but when I looked it up on the proto-internet, I found out it was by the Beatles. Magical Mystery Tour, the cassette I saved up to buy, changed my life in a million ways. It was like going from silent film to talkies, or from black and white to Technicolor.
Part of this life-changing experience meant experiencing puppy love for the first time. Ally was the first person I was ever infatuated with.
Twelve is when I developed the curves that today are the catalyst for many-a sleazy Brooklyn street holler. I remember that by then, I had to buy bras in a cup size bigger than my mom’s – and if you look at my 8th grade graduation picture, without looking at my face, you might have thought I was an adult… curves for miles. I might have looked like a woman, “but,” to quote Robert Zimmerman, “she breaks just like a little girl.”
Perhaps because I was so innocent for so long… twelve whole years… I spent the rest of my life making up for lost time. My friends had crushes and boyfriends when we were in sixth, seventh grade… but I didn’t. Or so I thought.
I even made up a crush on a completely unobtainable celebrity – Paul McCartney (circa 1965, btw), in order to fit in. I was just quirky – that girl who dressed like a hippie and knew everything about the Beatles.
But I wasn’t the only girl, as it turns out.
Ally and I went to elementary school together. She was soft and pale and awkward and good at art. We were never friends in elementary school – I was friends with bitchy Natasha, one of the popular mean girls, who ended up dumping me because I was “fat” the summer after sixth grade. (It sort of makes me feel vindicated these days to know that while we both ended up in Brooklyn, Natasha is a vapid hipster in Williamsburgh, designing New Balance shoes for a living, while I am a teacher and live in BedStuy).
Anyway, Ally and I didn’t hang out until middle school – we really met each other at the beginning of seventh grade. We had a mutual friend, a girl of Ukrainian heritage with a scary Lutheran priest father, and while our mutual friend liked the Beatles, too, she did not love the Beatles like we did.
Ally loved the White Album and John Lennon, and I loved Magical Mystery Tour and Paul McCartney. We were best best best friends from the beginning of middle school until Ally became a junkie and dropped out of school in tenth grade.
But, she was the first person I was ever infatuated with. She was mess. Her brother, a high schooler, was in a Misfits cover band, and his tour van had crashed in New Mexico, killing his bandmates and severely injuring her brother. Once he recovered, he had lost his sense of taste and fell into a massive depression. The whole family spiraled into an out-of-control mess, and little Ally, only eleven at the time, was left to fend for herself. Like me, she lost herself in music.
Ally carved John Lennon’s name in her thigh with a razor. We wrote lyrics – her in her awkward, messy, boyish handwriting, and me in my scripty, hippie calligraphy – all over the army green walls of her room because her parents said they were remodeling anyway. We watched A Hard Day’s Night and Help, which were not very easy to find in the days before The Beatles Anthology revived a public interest in the band, and stole rum from her parents’ liquor cabinet to make our own rum and cokes. We smoked weed with our Ukrainian friend at her trailer park. We sat in the tall grass on College Street with a boombox, wearing cut off jeans and tie-dyed shirts, listening to Abbey Road. I was as in love with her as a seventh grader can be in love.
I always assumed that the difference between me and Ally was that she was more 70s and I was more 60s. Ally liked Pink Floyd and tried tripping on mushrooms. I liked The Who and The Kinks and preferred uppers. Ally was a brilliant writer, musician, and artist, but never did her homework. I was a good writer and liked maps and history, and got straight As. Her teachers often implored me to guide her, to help her. I still have a photograph of us doing an eighth grade French project on my bed, pictures of the Beatles plastered to every last spot on my Prussian blue walls. Voici le salle de manger. Ici la cuisine…
Ally’s grandmother made her a pair of bellbottoms. This was also before the comeback of flared jeans, at least in rural Maine, and people still sort of embodied the dying remnants of My So-Called Life. Ally brought them home and was so excited – they were huge at the bottom. A slight, pale girl, Ally swam in them – but she loved them, and most of her clothes were baggy on her slight frame.
She insisted that I try on her bellbottoms. She shimmied them off, exposing her pale legs, the pink “John” scar visible like a light in the dark. I tried not to look, but I loved her soft, milky legs, her slight bottom, her femininity under all those baggy clothes. I had to look away quickly. It was too much; she was too beautiful and perfect.
I slipped the giant bells on, and standing in the hallway, we both peered into the full length mirror. The pants fit me like a glove – but so very differently than they fit Ally. My thighs took up every last inch of the pants, making the bellbottoms not appear baggy until they passed my knees – having a sort of 70s blacksploitation girl effect. Ally’s mom walked by and made a comment about how I shouldn’t wear them out of the house. Ally slunk back into her room, her baggy boys jeans held up by a belt on the smallest notch. I quickly changed back into my dark bootcut jeans and put the bellbottoms back in the drawer next to Ally’s magic mushrooms.
We spent so many nights sleeping next to each other that when Ally started to fall in with the wrong crowd in eighth grade – I remember her telling me how she gave a high school boy from the trailer park a blow job, and how she needed to drink a whole Mountain Dew just to get through the whole ordeal (I didn’t go to the trailer park anymore, and only drank Coke because it was supposedly what the Beatles drank) – it was like a slow and painful divorce.
Ally started smoking weed on the regular, instead of just when we were watching Beatles movies, or our new obsession – Monkees episodes on Nick at Night. She hung out more and more at the trailer park, in the shadows. I was doing well in English class and had taken up playing trumpet, getting special private lessons from the middle school band director because he too loved the Beatles (I learned to play music from a Beatles songbook, and went on the win awards for brass in trombone, baritone, and trumpet).
Ally’s sketchiness broke my heart. She would call me on the phone and not say anything for hours, but never wanted me to hang up. When Paul McCartney’s Flaming Pie came out, she called me to talk about it, but had nothing to say. I have anxiety about the phone to this day.
Ally attempted suicide and was committed in eighth grade. I knew that she was suicidal, and was sitting in English class one day, apparently looking traumatized. My English teacher was my favourite teacher, and she pulled me into another classroom to talk. Because I wasn’t supposed to tell, I was very resistant. Finally, I broke down crying.
Ally was already in the hospital having her stomach pumped. After the whole ordeal was over and Ally was about to go back to school, her mother told me sarcastically, “Thanks a lot for ratting on her.” It was like she had wanted Ally to succeed.
And nothing was the same after that. Ally attempted suicide again. She stole a bunch of my records and sold them for drug money. She finally dropped out of school after ninth grade. Whenever our high school creative writing teachers would ask me how she was – we were in the same class for one semester – I would change the subject. It was just too painful. I had loved her.
For the longest time, I just pretended Ally had actually succeeded in committing suicide. It was easier that way. The first time I dated a girl was the first time I realized that I had actually been in love with Ally, but not realized it because girl-girl love hadn’t really occurred to me or been a part of my lexicon.
Last summer, Ally friended me on Facebook. She told me she is a recovered junkie (sober one year!), and has a little girl who looks to be about five in her pictures. She asked me if I have any kids, and told me it was too bad when I said I didn’t. She had links to juggalo music all over her page, and talked about “raver life.” She looked almost exactly the same as the last time I saw her, when we were maybe sixteen.
She asked me if I was ever in Maine, and I said not often. She said we should get together if I was. I mentioned a few names of new restaurants in our hometown, where Ally still lives, but she had never heard of them. I thought of her milky white pre-teen skin, her baggy shirts and her fine, brown hair, now dyed streaks of red and black in a cut that New Yorkers would recognize as ten years too late. I remembered her painful stories and her broken heart. I remembered her as a child.
And then I pressed delete.
Liar
It is possible that I am the most untrustworthy narrator of my own life. Especially when it comes to sex. Few people (until now, I suppose) actually know what I do. Am I ashamed? Not really. But I also sometimes feel that I have so little of myself that hasn’t been taken or given away, that I have to protect some secrets. Like my friend from New Jersey.
When I was sixteen and he was twenty-nine, I had the biggest crush possible on him.
It all started when I went to a show in Providence and his band was playing. They did a cover of “Take ‘Em All” by Cock Sparrer, and I thought it sucked. In true me-fashion, I reviewed the show for the online section of the city paper I wrote for, and wrote all about how bad their cover was.
In the early days of the internet, I inevitably received an almost immediate response from the band. They put me through the ringer, writing me an email saying that I was probably just an ungrateful little rich (untrue: we were very poor) suburban (untrue: I lived in rural Maine) kid driving around in my mom’s BMW (untrue: my mom had an old Buick and I didn’t have a driver’s license) who had no idea about music or subculture (also untrue, for obvious reasons). We went back and forth for a few days until we called a truce and apologized to one another. The rest is, of course, history.
Once we were on friendly terms, things turned far too salacious for any sixteen-year old-with a conscience. Fortunately, it was me, and I had no conscience. Clearly, neither did my new twenty-nine-year- old now life-long friend.
Digital cameras had just started to become affordable. I begged my mother for one for Christmas so that I could “take pictures at shows for my articles” I took a lot of pictures, but rarely at shows, and never for my articles.
On a dare, I mailed my friend several articles of clothing. Guess which ones.
I never told anyone about our hours-long phone calls, and our pre-sexting internet revelry. I never told anyone that even though I had a boyfriend in high school, my friend from Jersey and I would steal away at his shows in Boston, Providence, and Portland and ravish each other… sometimes on street corners, in full view of cars passing by.
I don’t know that he ever told the other members of the band that he was basically a child molester. But I guess for him to be a child molester, I would have had to resist in some way… and if anything, I was the one inciting the riot.
When I went to grad school in Chicago, I had just broken off a relationship, and Jersey boy almost immediately came to visit me, under the auspices of knowing some people in Chitown and wanting to hang out with them as well as to visit me. We did go to their house for an evening, but mostly we went record shopping, had cocktails, and stayed in bed.
He refused to have sex with me in Chicago, saying he was ashamed for having debased me when I was a kid – I was now just barely twenty-two – and he slept with all of his clothes on next to me. Try as I might, wearing the sexiest bed-outfits possible, I couldn’t get him to submit. The last morning, he was on top of me, and reached to unzip his jeans, but quickly jumped off the bed and apologized profusely. I was incredibly frustrated and took out my aggression on the awesome water pressure in my shower.
Our strange multi-state affair pushed on, and when I moved to Columbus, he drove out, again under the premise of getting together with some guys from another punk n roll band from the area. This time he never got to see the guys, but he did annoy the fuck out of my boyfriend.
I thought my boyfriend and his friends might like to meet Jersey, considering that they shared interlocking music scenes, and because my boyfriend really loved one of the bands Jersey was in. What ended up happening was my boyfriend gripping my hand territorially all night, and Jersey brushing up against my leg on the other side. They got on okay, but it was clear that my boyfriend was annoyed slash envious slash whatever feeling it is when dudes feel like they need to make their territory.
Maybe he could sense the fact that, very uncharacteristically, Jersey had fucked me the second he made it into my door, saying he regretted not doing it last time when we were in Chicago. It could have been the fact that, because I was very much in love with my boyfriend, I guiltily showed up at his house the next morning while Jersey was still asleep in my bed, and snuggled up on the couch with him while he tuned a guitar. Whatever it was, I don’t know, but it was simply the next chapter in mine and Jersey’s super-secret-scandal-affair.
When I moved to New York, too, we managed to find time at Coney Island, and on a deserted sidewalk in Brooklyn at three in the morning, to consummate yet another city and another chapter in our ongoing, strange relationship. The ironic part of it these days is that I’m now just as old as he was when we first met in person in a dark corner of a now-defunct club in Providence… and soon after dragged each other outside into the freezing cold January streets to warm each other up.
26/F/Available
The only people I ever found on online dating sites were already my friends in real life, or I knew them through the music scene, or we were already somehow connected. My one bearded metalhead friend and I used to send each other fake scandalous messages back and forth on okcupid. At least, they were fake on my part. I’m not into beards.
Once, I got bold and starting messaging this girl, who clearly had nothing to do with the scene or any of my friends (though as it turned out we had mutual acquaintances that were part of the fetish/goth scene). We wrote Walt Whitman quotes back and forth to each other for about a week, and ended up going on a date.
I felt like I needed a change of pace. Cyber girl was married and in an open relationship. She seemed sweet, and for being older than me she was very innocent. We met at the local food co-op – her suggestion – and walked down to the ravine for a picnic. Also her suggestion. I hate the outdoors.
She was very earth-mama, with flowing skirts and sensible-but-not-ugly shoes. She had gorgeous, wild, curly hair and perfect skin. She was an artist, and she was not unlike a newborn baby in many ways.
We ended up having a lot in common – open relationships, we were both French and spoke the language, both curvy, and both slightly crazy. But she was a very different brand of crazy.
She had lots of questions for me about sex. She considered herself polyamorous but she and her husband were new to the subcultural sex scene. I thought polyamory was a dirty word, associated with bored and usually unattractive or crazy middle Americans who couldn’t get laid otherwise. Generally, I didn’t label things and just did whatever the fuck I wanted. Such as picking up a married lady on the internet.
She was pretty and curvy and soft, and I loved her skin and her light smattering of freckles across her nose – and when I first met her, I wanted to make love to her for sure, despite her rapid-fire, wide-eyed birds-and-bees questions.
We hung out all day – she took me to her house and we had tea and talked about sex. I was going to my boyfriend’s show that night, so I invited her along – mostly because she seemed devastated when I said I had to go home and get ready. She wanted to come to my house with me.
It was spring, and the days were getting longer. The sun stretched our shadows as we tumbled through Clintonville toward my apartment. I was wearing a denim skirt and cowboy boots, and was a bit self-conscious about the boots making me taller than her. I also wondered how many houses we’d passed of people I’d slept with.
I was feeling pretty slutty and somewhat ashamed in her somewhat virginal presence when she suddenly piped up boldly: “So you know how Michael and I are new to this whole polyamory thing?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
“Well, I’ve only actually slept with one other person, besides Michael. Like, ever.”
“Oh?” I felt like a dirty, dirty predator. I tried to calculate a little in my head, but gave up.
“Yeah, so, Michael has a girlfriend,” she confessed in a tone that resembled gushing. The fine, downy hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I tried not to react physically to the fact that her husband had a girlfriend while she, being in her thirties, had only ever had sex with two people. Earlier she had divulged that her husband also basically made her have an open relationship or he was going to leave her. I clenched my fists and prepared myself for the rest of her story.
“He has a girlfriend,” she continued thoughtfully, “and now I do too!!” She grabbed my hand excitedly. I looked at her and smiled. Traumatized, I gave her hand a little squeeze and let go. “Oh, oh,” she continued, “Not to be presumptuous, but I really like you.”
“I like you, too,” I said cautiously.
“There is something I should tell you, if we’re going to your house to have sex,” she said knowingly. I had actually just intended to go to my house to change my clothes for the show.
She gripped her flowing skirts in her hands and looked at the ground as she walked. I narrowed my eyes and watched her carefully. “I was in this relationship with this guy in Athens,” she recalled, referring to the college town in southern Ohio. “He was awful, really into s&m – and at the time, I was kind of interested in that too. He was terrible to me, though, super jealous and domineering, so we broke up. He was the only other person I’ve had sex with.”
I kept looking at her.
“But I found out later that he gave me herpes.”
I did everything in my power not to balk. She was just so innocent. “Oh God,” I said, “That’s awful.”
“Yeah!” She nodded rigorously. “I know. He gave it to me from his mouth.”
All the pictures in my head involved a man in a full latex head mask, possibly with a riding crop in hand, going down on this naïve hippie girl, with huge sores all over his mouth. I shook my head to clear my mind and to express my disgust.
“So you know, I mean, if we have sex, you could get it,” she told me seriously. Libertine that I was, I had never contracted an STI, nor had I ever met anyone who told me that they had one. If I was a man, I would have lost my erection.
She grabbed my hand again and swung it happily. “So exciting!” She repeated. “I have a girlfriend!”
Snow Day (Falling in Love, Part One)
The story of how we met is innocent. It’s sweet and pretty and like any good romance it is in the end bittersweet and tragic. But falling in love was most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. So, here it is, in parts. I think I could talk about it endlessly, but I’ll try not to. Maybe.
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It was the first snowstorm I’d experienced in Columbus. Earlier in the day, I trudged across the street through six inches of snow in my LL Bean boots to the grocery store. There were maybe three employees in the store, and no customers, and the employees all looked very impressed that I’d made it. I snapped a picture of the “blizzard” with my phone and sent it to my dad in Maine. We laughed together about school being closed for this little amount of snow.
Later on, I trekked down the street to the coffee shop where I always did my school work. I was almost there – clad in a ridiculous black down puffy coat with a furry hood and weighed down by a book-laden messenger bag – when I was stopped in my tracks by this guy I’d been seeing around the neighborhood. He had long black hair and dark eyes and always looked at me like he was seeing me without my clothes on. The last time I saw him in the grocery store, I quickly zoomed to the opposite end of the building. It wasn’t necessarily him, though – I was extremely skittish around men at the time.
He stopped me in the snow. He was on his phone and shoveling out his car at the same time, but he asked the person he was talking with to hold, put down his shovel, and started to talk to me about the snow. I laughed in a tone that was almost a scoff and explained to him that I was from Maine and that this
“storm” was no big deal. He introduced himself and I smiled politely, introducing myself as well. He quite adorably challenged me to a snowball fight. I asked for a rain check due to my massive amount of homework, and trudged over to the coffee shop.
That night, I got together with my girlfriends at the downtown bar that we went to when we were feeling fancy. My friends were almost exclusively lesbians and women’s studies graduate students (and before you picture a motley crew of butch women, I really must say that all of my friends were very pretty and for the most part very feminine). We were a great bunch, though, and got along well together based on our shared appreciation for the female form. I was still in a relationship with my (evil) girlfriend of two years; she still lived in Chicago, from whence I had moved that previous summer. At the time, she had just insisted that she be able to have an open relationship, while I could not reap the same benefits within our long distance fight to the death.
This bar that we frequented was dark with soft lighting, high ceilings, exposed brick and wood beams, and velvet curtains. It was dark and snowy outside, and I relayed, sarcastically and flippantly, the story of my meeting with “my new boyfriend.” I was such a child in those days. I only had two tattoos. I couldn’t name a Thin Lizzy tune. I wasn’t even twenty-five. I had never really been in love.
We laughed off the boyfriend/snowball fight incident and moved on to other topics. Eventually, our group would become too incestuous – including the break-up of a marriage due to an affair within the group – and we would all go our separate ways. Eventually, I would get myself a boyfriend.
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After we’d been introduced, there was apparently no turning back. We saw each other all the time at the coffee shop; at first I hid from him, sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace that was in the center of the room, just out of view but still able to see him watching me. Eventually, we sat near each other, and eventually we started to talk.
We had so much in common: evil exes (well, my soon-to-be-ex), a burning passion for music, the desire not necessarily to be loved by just one other person, but for love in general. I would tell him about my studies, which included the study of love and revolution, and he invited me to his shows. Apparently he was in a couple bands.
The first time he invited me to his show, I went. I hadn’t been to a show in about two years – the longest stretch I’d experienced since I started going to shows at fourteen. Once, when we were first dating, my girlfriend had taken me to see Devotchka – but only because they were playing with the Dresden Dolls and she wanted to see the latter. I politely tolerated the Dresden Dolls and wished she wasn’t holding onto me protectively while I tried to enjoy Devotchka.
I arrived at the boy’s show – it was metal, and this was back before I really listened to metal - about halfway through his set. For some reason, I thought being on time would have seemed silly. I made my way to the front, and stood there with my Newcastle, listening to some very unfamiliar chords. After he was done, he came running up to me and squeezed me so hard that he lifted me off the ground. I was taken slightly by surprise, but I followed him to the area where he kept his coat and bass case and other equipment, and sat with his friends as directed, and had some drinks.
When the next band came on, he shuffled me out the door, which I thought was odd, because I had intended to stay for the whole show. I wasn’t devastated at this point, just slightly bemused. We locked eyes like we would do repeatedly for a solid year, with the most love I have ever conveyed, or have ever had conveyed to me, without touching or speaking with someone. He hugged me and said he’d see me for coffee in the morning, so I tumbled back down High Street to my home.