Here is a memory about Cal.
We met at a party near Tana Beach and it was in a sweat-filled nightclub that spewed out noise and splayed stumbling people down a little side alley set back from the sea. The walls of that alley were plastered over with posters for music festivals and parties that were out of date and the colors were fading away and their edges were peeling off and flapping in the hot night breeze.
And there was a metal door at that nightclub, I remember the metal door, on rollers that opened and closed. It was covered in graffiti and flyers like the walls of the alley and there was an ugly old bouncer who stood leaning to one side.
Anyway.
I was there with a few friends. Back then I was living in the first apartment I had ever had on my own, not an apartment really, but a living room with a sofa bed in the corner. There was an actual bedroom in that place too and the bedroom was owned by my roommate whose name was Mimi, as she had been in the apartment first. I didn’t mind, or at least I don’t remember minding.
I had not known Mimi before I moved in. She’d written a For Rent notice on a small piece of paper and pinned it to a bulletin board in a supermarket and my aunt, who I had been living with before, had found it and written down the number and given the number to me. At the time my aunt and I were not getting along well. I was in my final year of school and I wanted to leave.
The place was small and dingy and the white walls were so old they were turning gray. There was a little sort of kitchenette in one corner of the living room on the opposite side from my bed, so that one corner was the kitchen and one corner was the bedroom and then everything in between was the living room, and all my life at the time was held between the pale grayness of those walls, boxed in there.
Right after I went to live with Tricia, I moved to her school on the other side of town because my aunt and uncle thought it would be easier for us to go to the same place, and they thought it would be better for me.
They said this will be better for you.
Tricia was a few years ahead of me in school, and I didn’t know anybody. She tried to look out for me and in the beginning she would come looking for me at break times and in between classes and say are you all right and I would say yes. But the school was big and she was busy and went to sports clubs and had friends and as the months went by she came to look for me less and less.
Other kids at school didn’t like me.
There was this one girl called Anita who once tried to push me over a double row of desks for no reason, and I turned around and lashed out and caught her full in the face. I think it surprised her.
It surprised me.
And I felt at first shocked and then loose and euphoric and not guilty until much later.
I found that the teachers didn’t like to say anything to me because of my mother.
Instead they would take me to one side and tell me they wanted a word.
“Are you happy with yourself, Anne Marie?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Are you proud of yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to be proud of yourself?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
At first they all looked at me the same way, which was a little pitying and also a little irritated, and then after a while I think their patience wore thin and they weren’t pitying anymore.
They moved me down a few sets and for the most part let me slip off into the unseen.
By then I was fighting with my aunt and she found the number for this place and I moved out and the girl Mimi was nice enough. I was working in this pizza place a few streets away and that was nice enough too and I could have free pizza and survive off the scrounged crusts left greasy in their cardboard boxes on the street tables outside, and I always smelled of takeout and of frying things.
Then I met Cal.
I had gone out with a group of Mimi’s friends, not mine, but they were good enough people and they had come around to the apartment first of all because it was the birthday of one or other of them, and then they had said let’s go to Blue Lagoon, which was the name of the club where the party was, and so we had gone to Blue Lagoon, the sleazy alleyway place with the metal door.
The music was bad and yammering and the people were too close.
I turned around and there was someone behind me and it was Cal although I didn’t know that then. I looked at this person between a few moving bodies, and there was an odd frozen moment which sounds stupid and false but that’s how it felt, and I was caught there suddenly in the way he was looking at me, the intensity, and the moment stretched and stretched and then went by.
He pushed through a few other people and came over and asked me my name.
I found out later he was supposed to be there on a date, but I never saw her and he never left my side.
Later we walked out together.
It was a hot night and the heat held down on us, and there was the sound of the waves and over that almost as loud the drilling of the cicadas in the palm trees on the avenue at the end of the alley, the avenue that led to the sea, and when we got down onto the sand there was the paleness of the beach in the dark and away to one side the ocean flat and black and showing as a rip in the bottom of the sky. To our other side the lights of the crumbling city lined red and orange and yellow along the oceanfront and stretched away in a muddled chain, and Cal and I stood on the sand in the middle of everything.
The two of us were small under the vault of the universe.