It was the summer I could not keep a job. The summer I discovered vodka, an ancestral beverage somehow drawn from the pale and starchy bodies of potatoes. That summer, the New England humidity which mostly grows thunderstorms collapsed my death-rock hairdo, a coiffure like a house of cards growing improbably higher and higher, unsustainable, hit with blasts from the can, the locks rendered sticky, clumping into a solid mass one could mold with one’s black-tipped fingers. The whole ratted mass of it, the back-combed glob of artificial jet black, glossy with its unnatural highlights of blue—blue-black, an impossible color. The dye would stain my neck the color of dirt for a week, Dalmatian splatters across my neck, drooling down my sternum. I was impatient and unskilled in my appearance, I was sixteen.
I knew how I wanted to appear and it was not how I appeared naturally. I had no time for my own transformation, wanted only to turn to the mirror and behold white, white skin, bloodless, the skin of girls in fairy tales, horror stories, and very old poems. A throwback to long ago when women took poisons to achieve such a pallor, when they let leeches suck away some of their hardy, living color. My technique used clown white, the thick, greasy pigment favored by circus performers, purchased at the beauty supply store in downtown Boston. You climbed a flight of stairs to get there and were served by an older girl with impeccable blue hair, the color of macaws, an electric shade, blue as a bottle of Windex. Her makeup, too, was stunning, precision lines around the eyes like an Egyptian corpse, a work of art. Thick, then thin, gliding around those big dark eyes. The place sold real beauty products, and then they sold costume stuff like the clown white, which came in a red tin stamped with the image of an old-fashioned clown. Unscrew the tin and behold the puck of shiny white, to be smeared over the skin of your face like a perverted cold cream. I would blend and I would blend, but still the irrepressible health of my cheek’s apples would glow pink under the oily veneer. I would have to take a palmful of baby powder, and somehow get it onto my face. Though I’d try to be gentle, delicately sprinkling it across my forehead as though dusting a pound cake with powdered sugar, it would cling in dense patches to the slick of my skin. The best way to use baby powder as makeup was to empty a mirrored compact of its original contents and fill it instead with the scented dust, using the soft round applicator to press the stuff to your cheeks, getting rid of the sheen.
It was the summer all my goth friends got locked up for cutting their arms, and these reconfigured compacts would inevitably be confiscated by the attendants at their institutions, sent to the lab to be analyzed. The summer, the blurred summer, of my homemade beauty products. A plastic spray bottle of sugar water was supposed to make my hair even more impervious to both gravity and the water-rich air of New England, but in fact only made the hairdo fall beneath the syrupy weight of the spritz, drawing all manner of winged insects as well. Egg whites did in fact stiffen your hair, as did the Elmer’s Glue the punks used to make their liberty spikes, but these formulas also made hair rigid—there was no room to fuck up a hairdo like that, and really more than anything my look was fuckup. My aesthetic, my nation. My work ethic.
I sat in the car outside of the Mystic Mall in Chelsea, Massachusetts, crying. This was a historic day, the day I told my mother that I hated her. My mother had a thing about the word hate—it was as taboo as cunt, a word it would take me another decade to violate in her presence. “You don’t hate anyone,” she would correct my vitriol. “You strongly dislike. Don’t hate anyone.” It was good advice but all it did was ensconce the word hate in a glittering dark cape and place it on the craggy mountaintop to beckon me with its evil charm. I was a dramatic teen, I was goth, the most dramatic subculture ever. All was wild and overblown, explosions of hair and frothing lace collars, passions and revulsions spilling over.
My mother was scared of me. My face was covered in what appeared to be vanilla frosting, nothing had prepared her for having a daughter who wanted to look like this. When I returned home each evening with the litany of the abuses I’d suffered—children hurling rocks at me, carloads of boys shouting “Freak!” as they careened past, girls who looked at me plainly and inquired, in the accent of the region, “What the fuck are you supposed to be?”—my mother offered little comfort. I was a freak; what the fuck was I supposed to be?
“It’s clown white!” I shrilled, plonked in the front seat of the little Ford Escort. Inside the mall was It’s Tops, a place that sold T-shirts and rock pins and the only place in Chelsea that would give me a job. I had PMS, was rushing on progesterone; three or so years into menstruation and the hormonal surges still caught me wildly off guard, could plunge me into despair with sudden violence. Even I could see that the clown white wasn’t working. It wasn’t giving me the stark, otherworldly complexion of a Patrick Nagel painting, I just looked crazy. Still, it was as close as I’d come to achieving my ideal. My mother was starting in on me, “You can’t go into work like that!” and blam came the tears. You just can’t cry and wear clown white. The salty streams cut through the grease, make the smears smearier. My face reddened horribly beneath it, puffy and bright. “Great!” I shrieked. “Great, look!” I yanked the visor down and stared at the disaster of my face in the tiny mirror. “It had looked okay,” I lied, “and now it’s ruined! I hate you!”
There, I said it. The word had too much power for me to resist its pull indefinitely. In the powder-blue Escort, surging with estrogen and melting petroleum-based makeup, I professed my hatred for my mother and her lack of support for my lifestyle choices, and my mother either smacked me, sullying her hand with greasepaint, or she did not—the blare of emotion distorts my memory. Sobbing, I took the inside of my long black skirt into my hands and wiped and wiped the clown white from my skin, taking my shaky eyeliner job with it. Oily and fragile, a crust of clown white ringing my hairline, I climbed from the car and strode into the mall to be fired from my job.
“We like you so much,” the owner said. Her voice was a plea, she was not the sort of owner comfortable with firing her employees. “We just don’t need you anymore,” she lied awkwardly, topping it off with a shrug. The owner lived out in Gloucester in a modest castle on the beach. Earlier in the summer they had invited me to a barbecue there and allowed me and my friends to drink beer after beer. My boss would vanish behind closed doors with her husband—a doctor who had advised me against piercing my nose lest I hit a particular nerve and become paraplegic—and emerge with freshly bloodshot eyes and a scratchy nose.
I’d known that I was about to be fired. I had been caught reading on the job far too many times; lacking any books of my own I’d resort to copies of Mistral’s Daughter or Portnoy’s Complaint tucked into one of the bottom drawers beneath the register. I alienated the customers with my odd appearance and choice of soundtrack—extravagantly gloomy Cure songs, the militant chant and snarl of Generation X. “I don’t want to have what a steady job brings. / Don’t want security / don’t want responsibility / ’cause that’s youth!” I never stole from It’s Tops, but so many shirts were ruined in my attempts to adorn them with glitter decals and fuzzy letters, I’d have to smuggle them out of the mall to be thrown into dumpsters. Under my lazy watch the shop unraveled into disarray; it simply did not occur to me to clean certain areas, they escaped my radar. It was kind of the owner to pretend my termination was not the result of my own shitty work ethic.
It was simply not possible for me to find work in Chelsea. I could find slurs and ass-kickings, but not a job. A friend from school hooked me up with a receptionist position at a hair salon in Boston called Penelope’s Place. My friend’s sister was the salon’s manager and a very nice person, but she, like everyone, ultimately answered to Penelope, a skinny woman with fake red hair, frantic with all the stress of running a failing regional chain of hair salons. I had hoped, initially, that Penelope and I would be fabulous friends; I had recently dyed my hair a fake red, too, though a decidedly different shade. My hair was the loud, cheerful color of the clown on my old tin of clown white. Which I had stopped using, having discovered a ghostly shade of foundation available at the downtown beauty supply store. The beauty supply store also sold a line of hair dye called Crazy Color, which offered a variety of vivid hues—fuchsia, cyclamen, ruby red. I chose ruby. Eventually I chose them all, but first I chose ruby. The color of a can of Coca-Cola. Penelope flinched in the face of it, as if the color radiated its own light and hurt her eyes, or her feelings. She scowled at me, whispered to the manager, then ran out the doors, up onto Boylston Street. The manager came over glumly. “You have to dye your hair,” she said.
“But it looks great,” I protested. It did, especially with a bright red lipstick. It looked excellent. “Penelope doesn’t get it,” I explained to the manager. By sitting behind the reception desk with my fabulous hairdo I would be drawing people into the salon. My hair was like a carnival barker luring marks with its loud, braying color. The manager chewed her lip and said she would speak to Penelope on my behalf. When the owner next visited the salon there was no mistaking the evil in her eyes when she looked at me. She conferred with the manager and dashed out of the place, leaving a powerful perfumed wind in her wake.
“You have to wear a scarf,” the manager said. She felt a victory had been scored—she had saved my job. My hair just had to be covered at all times, with style. “No baseball hats,” the manager warned.
I gasped. “Do I look like I wear baseball hats?” I demanded. I wrapped a long pink scarf, shot through with golden threads, around my head, turban-style. Customers looked at me with a new suspicion: Had someone at the salon ruined my hair? What was hiding under the strange, bulbous wrap of fabric? Penelope seemed unsatisfied with the compromise; she stared at me blatantly. Mine was not the face of Penelope’s Place.
Saturday night and I was wasted off a half-pint of hundred-proof Smirnoff vodka, mixed into a jar of Veryfine fruit punch until I was drunk enough to handle it straight. Having polished off my alcohol too swiftly, I bopped around the line of kids camping out for New Order tickets, begging sips off people’s cocktails. A mouthful of thick, sweet Manischewitz, a shot of something dark and amber, some rum and Coke, lots of beer. When all my cigarettes were smoked, I bummed those too. I wasn’t sleeping out for New Order tickets—I didn’t have the money—but the alley that led to the Orpheum Theatre box office was the place to be. It was like a death-rock block party. Vinnie was my perpetual ride home, he lived a city over from me, in East Boston. I had been due home hours ago and could only pray that my mother had gone to sleep. I frequently didn’t make my curfews; Vinnie had no curfew of his own and could not take mine seriously. He’d get me home when he felt like it.
Meanwhile, I made out with Joshua. Joshua was pink-cheeked and freckled. His hair was bleached the most perfect, barely attainable shade of white and still looked healthy, looked natural. Most people’s hair got kinked from such an effort or stalled at a nicotine hue, but Joshua’s was perfect. In the night alley it gleamed like the moon. It had never before occurred me to make out with Joshua, who spoke with the strange lilt of a California surfer despite living in Brookline, Massachusetts. Joshua’s father owned a chain of photography supply shops, probably he was very wealthy. Unbeknownst to me, most of my new Bostonian death-rock friends were quite well-to-do; many of them would inherit trust funds in a few years. Everyone wore shitty thrift store outfits like I did, and so I assumed everyone had grown up swinging between welfare and marginal employment, borrowing occasional shelter from relatives and living on cans of Chef Boyardee. Joshua and I sort of fell into each other and boom his tongue was in my mouth and I was touching the silky pale bangs that flopped over his eyes. Joshua was a violent kisser, and I interpreted the force of his mouth on mine as a confession of a deep and long-smoldering desire. I pulled back from his face and gazed at him. There were three of him, three Joshuas. I waited, mooning at him, until the triad shimmered back into a single boy. “What?” he asked. Instantly I was in love with Joshua.
“I don’t know, what?” I asked back.
“What?” he insisted. This went on for a moment. “You’re just looking at me with those big eyes,” he finally said. “You’re staring.” He didn’t sound unkind. It was hard to sound harsh with that accent.
“Joshua,” I said grabbing his shoulders. Joshua favored an old man sort of look—faintly plaid pants, wing tips, cardigans. Most all the boys did. A little newsboy cap on his head, those albino bangs hanging out. He rode a skateboard and smoked cloves. “Joshua, what does this mean?” I asked of him. “Are we going out now? Does this mean we’re going out?”
Joshua stammered. He seemed a bit slow but I don’t think he was; he was too well put together, and could stay on his skateboard. I think it was his affected speech, and the general bewilderment of being fifteen. “I don’t know, I don’t think so …” He looked around as if there were someone standing by, an adult perhaps, who could answer this for us. We drifted away. I had liked being kissed violently like that.
At home, hours later, everyone was asleep. Four little girls, ages two through eight, were sleeping in soft lumps across my living room floor. I had forgotten my little cousins were spending the night. I drunkenly wound my way around them, careful not to kick a small head or fall onto them in the dark. I climbed into my bed and slept for two hours, setting my alarm for my morning shift at Penelope’s. When I woke, I wanted to die. I had been poisoned, something was happening to me. I seemed in the throes of an alien birth, my body was trying to expel something. I was dizzy, the walls of my bedroom bent and curved, the floor bobbed like something at sea. And the sweat, the sweat was bad. I was coated in it, a fine mist of venom. I leaned against the wall in my closet and tried to select an outfit from the rack of swaying black. There was my scarf, I wound it around my hair, which seemed extra crusty, particularly the ends. I tried to remember if I had thrown up. The thought made my stomach convulse. I stumbled through the kaleidoscope of my house, starting at the sight of so many little girls strewn across the living room carpet, cocooned in their sleeping bags. I made it to the bathroom. Into the toilet I vomited. It tasted like rum. Mostly rum. I puked, but the vertigo remained, the nausea remained. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and got a stomach flu, upchucked, and felt better. This was different, this was sinister. I imagined, with dread, feeling this way forever. The force of my sickness seemed powerful enough to never leave, to live out its lifetime in my body if it chose.
“Ma!” I gurgled weakly. To shout pulled too much on my body. I rested my forehead, my sweaty, flushed forehead, on the toilet seat. It was one of those puffy toilet seats that warmed slightly when you set your rear onto it. The feeling of it warming beneath my sweating, poisoned head filled me with new nausea. “Ma!” I shouted, this time with a bit more gusto. My voice shot down into the toilet and bounced around acoustically. Outside in the living room the little girls stirred; like an army of elves they pattered into my mother’s bedroom and brought her to me.
“What did you drink?” she asked.
My tongue flailed around the dry, disgusting cave of my mouth, searching for a dominant flavor. Yes, rum. “Rum,” I said.
“Rum!” My mother was horrified. “Don’t drink rum! I never drink rum!” It was true I had never seen my mother drink rum. I had only ever seen her drink Kahlua poured into milk, and this only rarely, like when she graduated from nursing school. “Michelle,” she said sternly, “if you’re drinking every weekend, that’s a problem. And you should nip it in the bud.”
Her warning would become an oft-repeated catchphrase among me and my friends, akin to Faye Dunaway’s “Tina, bring me the ax!” or any number of lines from Rocky Horror. “Oh Mary,” my gay friend Bobbie sighed. “The bud has bloomed.”
I knew when I called out sick to Penelope’s Place that there would be no second chance. The receptionist does not call out sick on a Sunday. Better the manager, better three of the hairdressers—called designers at Penelope’s—than the receptionist. And I had been on such thin ice, with my hair and my turban. I was fired.
My next job, at Chuck’s Ice Cream at Faneuil Hall, lasted almost the rest of the summer. Chuck’s was another regional chain. Their big thing was mix-ins: a customer selected a flavor of ice cream and then requested, oh, crumbled Oreo cookies and mashed-up Heath candy bars to go into it. I would scoop out a mound of ice cream and slap it down on a slab of countertop. With metal spatulas, I would pound and smash and beat the shit out of the ice cream until it was softer and flat. I would pour a scoop of cookie and a scoop of candy into the dairy glob and moosh it all together, using the spatulas to fold and chop. Finally, I would scrape it from the counter into a gigantic, chocolate-coated, sprinkle-encrusted waffle cone, as was popular at the time.
Faneuil Hall was a great tourist emporium. People flocked from all over the world to eat oysters at the Salty Dog, to have a beer at Cheers, to look at expensive robotic appliances at the Sharper Image. The Banana Republic seemed, back in the day, to actually sell weird safari-ish clothes, and a fake jeep was fake crashed through the store’s exterior. If you looked, as I did, like a freak, you could frequently catch a tourist taking your picture and intimidate a dollar from them. There was a gang of postcard punks who hung around specifically for this purpose; clustered by the street performers, they would menace and smoke, scanning for cameras aimed at their Mohawks.
Chuck’s was very popular, even during my shift, which began at eight in the morning, when nobody should be eating ice cream. Right next door to us was a Finagle A Bagel, across the way was a Coffee Connection, and both had barely a customer all morning long while we had losers lingering outside our stall before we even opened. The freezers, shut tight all night, had frozen the ice-cream bins into impossible blocks; my wrists were sprained within a week. But it wasn’t a bad place to work. The manager was a thin, angry man with little eyes and little hair, but he wasn’t there very often. Mostly I worked with an Irish girl, Heather, whose hair was lush, long, and glossy red, tipped in ringlets like a princess from a myth. She seemed to like me especially, she was interested in my fashion, the music I listened to, where I would go after work. I liked Heather’s voice, a brogue. We worked closely, smeared in cream. We took turns wearing stickers that read “It’s My Birthday!” in magic marker, designed to squeeze more tips from the customers. We would make up disgusting ice-cream combinations and write them on the chalkboard. Squid Crunch with dehydrated banana mix-in. Roast Beef swirl with tripe nugget mix-in. The days Heather didn’t work were lousy days. My wrists ached and my hangovers were more stubborn. I would mix lemon sorbet with pineapple juice in the frappé machine, and still dehydration kept my temples throbbing throughout my eight-hour shift. I would prepare my most favorite treat—a cup of crushed walnuts doused in hot fudge and chased with milk so cold a scrim of ice had formed across the surface. It got to be my phony birthday all day long and the tips accumulated in my jar, but still. Work was better with Heather.
One day my friend Katrina stopped by for my break. I cleared my tips for fries and a Coke from the Great American French Fry Co. and together we sat outside, smoking and snacking and staring at the tourists staring at us. Near to the street magicians and jugglers and mimes on unicycles, I let the tourists snap their cameras. I had a real job. Katrina lived in Brookline and didn’t have to work. She got money from her parents. She also got booze from them. While they were out Katrina would take a mason jar and fill it up with a bit of everything in the liquor cabinet. The best was a combination that included Triple Sec and tasted exactly like Froot Loops. Katrina opened her army bag and showed me the jar, full of amber liquid. The plan was, she would pick me up after work and we would sit in the Boston Common, beneath a willow tree by the pond, and drink till we were plastered. Then we would walk up Newbury Street, to the library at Copley Square where all the goths and punks and skaters hung out. “See you later,” I said. I returned to Chuck’s, stuck my time card into the time clock where it was bit with a crunch.
Heather turned to me. “Who was that?” she asked, sort of breathless. I looked around Faneuil Hall. Who was who? Had a celebrity stopped by? Faneuil Hall was stupid, but once I’d seen the singer from Missing Persons strolling around in leopard stilettos and a matching raincoat. “Your friend,” said Heather. “That girl. Who was she? She was beautiful.”
“You mean Katrina?” I asked, shocked. I hadn’t known Katrina was beautiful. Katrina was just—she was Katrina, she was regular. I thought her hair was kind of weird, actually. Her bleach job was mediocre, and one half of it was a short bob, with bangs, and the other half was completely shaved, with just a skimpy yellow rattail snaking down her neck. Katrina was beautiful? I felt a punch of emotion. “No she’s not,” I wanted to say. I didn’t know why it bothered me to hear Heather call Katrina beautiful. I smacked and I smacked the ice cream, splattering my apron with chocolate, getting bits of Reese’s Pieces in my clumpy red hair.
Katrina came with her jar at four, and we walked quietly to our place in the park. I studied her. Her nose turned up. I pondered it. I had read in books about noses shaped like ski slopes, had gathered that this was seen as a positive thing, the pretty way to have a nose. I guessed Katrina had a popular nose. I guessed Katrina was beautiful. I liked hanging out with Katrina—her parents went away frequently, giving us a place to congregate. She liked to get drunk, as did I. She was a regular target of skinheads, so she had a sort of tragic danger about her. The skinheads didn’t like her hair, called her a poodle, threatened to kill her all the time. Personally, I had a feeling that Katrina was not as invested in being goth as I was, but I kept my suspicions to myself. Katrina’s family had a lot of money, their house was really nice, and Katrina herself spent Sunday afternoons baking cakes from scratch with her mother. I thought there was probably a really great, really normal life available to Katrina if she wanted it and inevitably she would. Beautiful Katrina. I almost told her what Heather had said, but I couldn’t.
Toward the end of the summer I bleached my hair. There was a day, the first day, when it was so flat, so straight and pale on my head it looked almost like Joshua’s. I looked, I thought, like David Bowie. I couldn’t recall him having my exact shade or my exact choppy haircut, it was more of an overall David Bowie feel. I wore my new color to work, to show Heather. Was it beautiful? Swiftly the color turned, became that tarnished yellow. Nobody wanted that color, everyone wanted white, a white so silver it flashed lavender under certain lights. Gay Bobbie, who was in beauty school, told me I had to get a special toner and then a special shampoo, but I had spent all my money on the plastic bottle of developer, the forty-volume peroxide, and the envelopes of Super Blue. I had no more cash for hair dyeing, not if I wanted to drink vodka and smoke cigarettes. I was stuck with yellow hair. And it was falling out. It fell into mounds of ice cream, customers complained. One man bellowed, “Forget it! I just saw your hair fall right into my ice cream!” The manager was around for that one. He made everyone start wearing hairnets. I had ruined it for the staff. My hair looked terrible, squished down, dry and frizzing beneath the black web. Katrina sometimes tucked her asymmetrical hairdo into a little crocheted sack pinned to the back of her hair and it looked good, very elegant, very French, very goth. I tried to do something creative with my hairnet but it was impossible, the thread was thin and flimsy. Even Heather looked bad, her long, magnificent hair snagged. It looked like a shot and bagged fox on her shoulders. “You bleached your hair!” she exclaimed when I came in with it freshly blonded. That was it. “You look beautiful,” I’d wanted her to say. “Your hair is beautiful. That shade is beautiful. You did a beautiful job.” I just wanted to hear that word, beautiful, coming out of Heather’s mouth, directed at me.
We went to see the Ramones—me, Vinnie, Gay Bobbie, Joshua, Beautiful Katrina, and a new boy named Jessie who called himself Zebediah. We drove down to Providence to see them at an all-ages club. Zebediah was a runaway from Los Angeles who wanted to be my boyfriend. He worked at the Store 24 in Harvard Square and slept on a mattress in a Cambridge lot. Zebediah had a story. He had run away from a mother who repeatedly told him she wished she’d had an abortion. He did too much of something called crystal meth and set her couch on fire. Then he ran away. Zebediah was sweet; he drank a lot, as did everyone, but he didn’t do drugs called crystal meth, and it was hard to imagine him setting his mother’s couch on fire. He wore eyeliner and long black prairie skirts, painted his nails black, and was totally straight. Zebediah spoke in a truly authentic California surfer accent. He didn’t seem very bright, but I wondered if such accents made people sound dumb. Perhaps I was prejudiced against Californian voices. Because I feared Zebediah was not smart, I resisted his advances, unless we were both drinking vodka—which was any time after sundown—when I would make out with him forever and later pretend it never happened. “Why won’t you go out with me?” Zebediah pleaded, and I’d make up some intense reason why I couldn’t go out with anyone at all. Something having to do with the deep, dark state of my soul, my impenetrable loneliness, my unfathomable inner pain.
I drank too much at the Ramones. We drank in the parking lot and then stumbled inside. Vinnie and Zebediah went to the men’s room to barf. I was okay as long as I leaned against the wall at the back of the room. I leaned and waited for the show to start. A man walked up to me. He was luminous, so pale he glowed, and his hair was long, dragging down his ratlike face, a pair of glasses stuck to his nose. It was Joey Ramone. “Do you have an aspirin?” he asked me. I stared at him. I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said weakly. The shaking of my head had made everything spin, and I had only just gotten it all to stay still. He wandered off, and was swallowed by his crowd. Vinnie and Zebediah returned. “Joey Ramone just asked me for an aspirin,” I said. It was a magical night. We almost died on the way home, Bobbie was so drunk. The car veered violently to the side of the road. Everyone screamed, then laughed and laughed.
It was late by the time we got to Katrina’s. Her parents were away, so we all stayed over. Most of my new friends had parents who went out of town. They went on vacations. It was wild. My parents never went anywhere.
At Katrina’s we drank an improvised punch siphoned from the liquor cabinet. I had sobered up from the show and could start drinking again. “We saw the Ramones!” we all cheered, though I at least had only seen a hallucinogenic mass of throbbing people moving as one, bouncing up and down, the blob. Occasionally light would glare off Joey Ramone’s glasses, like an SOS sent out to me across the ocean of moshers. Even the music was a loud, sonic blur. I had spent the night staving off vomit and Zebediah. Now at Katrina’s I could start anew. Where was Zebediah? I walked around Katrina’s roomy house, mystery cocktail swishing in a crystal goblet.
I found Zebediah in a bedroom. His shirt was off and he was slicing his chest with a razor. His big, black hairdo flopped down over most of his face, all that showed was his mouth, the curl of his lips. His body was lean and etched with light scars. White and pink, they rose up from his brown skin. I thought of the marks skate blades left on a rink of ice or of stone shot through with marble. Blood beaded up along the freshest cut and slowly slid down his body. It was incredibly sexy. I ran over to where he sat upon a chair and jumped onto his lap. He looked up at me. I took the razor from his hand. “Don’t,” I said dramatically, and touched his scars. No one was going to be locking Zebediah up. Unlike the others, these kids from Brookline with big houses and vacationing parents, Zebediah was free to slice himself to ribbons. We made out for a while, until he started trying to get me to suck his dick, ruining everything. “Forget it,” I said. He looked at me with mournful eyes. I didn’t mind touching it but fuck if I was going to put it in my mouth. He put his hands on my shoulders, weighing me down toward his dick. Subtle. I got up and went back to my goblet of alcohol. “Just put it away,” I said, motioning to his crotch.
“If you were my girlfriend I’d treat you like a princess,” he said, zipping up his tight black jeans. Huh. Princess Blowjob, I figured. I went back into the house, looking for Katrina and the others, leaving Zebediah alone with his skin and his razor.
I woke up the next day around noon. Katrina had prepared some sort of fishy lunch for herself and, having grown bored with it, placed it in front of the fan, to blow the vile smell across the living room where I had passed out on a couch. I crept out in the bright, bright sun, onto the porch where Katrina and Joshua smoked cigarettes.
“I was supposed to be at work,” I said. “At eight.”
“Oh no!” Katrina gasped.
I thought about what I should do. I had the next day off, so that gave me an additional twenty-four hours to strategize. It seemed like the simplest thing to do would be to pretend I had forgotten. I’d been confused about my schedule. Could happen to anyone. I spent the day longing for Zebediah (who had walked out into the Brookline night after I declined to blow him) to return to Katrina’s. I did love making out with him. I loved the way he walked in his combat boots, especially with a skirt kicking out around his legs. Perhaps if I stuck to making out with him in public I wouldn’t have to deal with his dick. But if I was making out with him in public all the time wouldn’t that make him my boyfriend? My head buzzed with nicotine and hangover. Eventually Vinnie and Bobbie woke and we all walked through Brookline pretending to be droogs from A Clockwork Orange, kicking over trash cans. We walked to the movie theater and saw Wings of Desire, and then I took the long train ride, the long bus ride, back to Chelsea.
Two mornings later I walked into Chuck’s with my normal smile on my face, my hairnet scrunched in my hand like an extra-large dust bunny. The manager stepped into my path, blocking me like I’d come to rob the place. “Hey,” I said. I said his name, whatever it was.
“Sorry,” he said. “This area is employees only.”
I laughed. “I work here,” I said. “I’m Michelle.”
“You do not work here. You did not show up for work, so you do not work here.” The tourists waiting for their mix-ins were getting a show.
I stayed in character. “I had yesterday off!” I cried. “And the day before!”
“You did not. Two days ago you did not show up.”
I gasped and feigned outrage, feigned indignation. I snatched at the schedule and looked at the hours written on my slot. “Oh my god!” I feigned shock, feigned apology. “You’re going to fire me? It’s a mistake!” I tried to move past him. “I have things back there!” I feigned entitlement. Heather stared at me, sadness in her face. She wasn’t wearing the “It’s My Birthday!” sticker, the manager wouldn’t allow it. In fact, he’d been threatening to take away the tip jars altogether.
“I have your things,” he said, and thrust the book I’d left behind at me. The Basketball Diaries. “Leave,” he said, “or I’ll call security.”
Outside I sat on the broad, stone steps, a few feet away from a clown pulling rolls of rainbow ribbon from his mouth. Tourists lined up to throw money at him, his upturned felt hat glittered with coins. I wondered how much money he made. Wondered if I had any skills that could be performed publicly for change. In a few hours Katrina would come by to share my break with me and I would not be there, but Heather would. Maybe they’d take her break together. I dug out my cigarettes from my army bag and pulled out the last one, my lucky cigarette, upturned in the pack. I lit it with a match and wished for a new job. I smoked it slowly, meditating on my wish. A flash went off and as the glare cleared my eye I saw a tourist smiling at me. “Uh-uh!” I hollered at him, melting the smile from his sunburned face. “That’s a dollar!” I yelled, stood up, and started toward him. He reached into his pocket.
Originally published in Columbia Journal in 2011.