It took Patty a long time to shake it off. Whatever it was. She couldn’t come up with any label for the fuzzy, detached way she was feeling.
Focusing on the town helped, because moving here was part of a personal salvage operation. Raising her sunken hopes from the bottom of the muddy river that was New York.
Pine Deep was nice, but she wasn’t sure it was home. She desperately wanted it to be, because New York had never really been that. Or, maybe, it had been home for a while and stopped. Like a battery running dry. Wherever she lived and worked had to matter to her on a lot of deep, important levels. And so far, Pine Deep seemed to hold that promise. The street where she’d set up shop seemed like it might be the kind of street in the kind of town where Patty felt she could breathe.
Moving here hadn’t been an accident. When she lived in New York, there always seemed to be a reason to come down to Pennsylvania, to Bucks County. It always seemed to be autumn in this part of Bucks County, as if the rest of the year and all the other seasonable changes were nothing more than garments it wore briefly and then discarded. It was an October kind of place, even when the sun was blistering its way through an August sky or snow heaped up on the pumpkins left unharvested in remote fields. October people lived here, and although Patty was born in a place where it was never cold and always green, even during the grayest monsoons, that climate had never defined her. It was always October in her heart.
Bucks County, and particularly towns like New Hope and Pine Deep, felt like they should have been where she was born. Maybe Pine Deep more so because it was a little strange. Darker and less obvious than her town in Vietnam. Beautiful, too. It invited the artist’s touch, drew the artist’s eye. She drove down here at every opportunity. To shop at the organic farms and coast the fringes of happy crowds at the apple festival. To drum up business at the biker rallies and the fringe festivals. To be where there were people who were all alike because none of them was alike. It was the first place where she didn’t feel like she was actively fleeing from somewhere else.
Life in New York had been a lot like washing your hands in acid. You got clean, but there’s such a thing as too clean. Her tattoo parlor there had been a refuge, but Boundary Street was home.
Cold, strange, broken, but home.
The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED, but Patty didn’t notice. She hadn’t done that. Had not seen the customer do it.
She stood and watched the rain.
It was like the downpours back in Tuyên Quang. The kind of rain that looked like a wall. Her mother once said that it was like ten thousand arrows falling, but that was too poetic for Patty. To her it was a wall. Gray and unbreakable.
The kind no one could get through to touch her.
As she had been touched.
She liked the wall of rain.
But this wall, in this town, was translucent and Patty could see lights come on in clubs that opened early and stores that closed late. She turned off her own neon, except for the one right above the door. INK was all it said, in harlot red. The color was named that in the vendor’s catalog, and though Patty tried to explain to the salesman that it was offensive and old-thought bullshit, the man’s eyes glazed and he had no good comeback. She bought the sign anyway. It wasn’t harlot red to her. She was Vietnamese and that color represented happiness, love, and luck.
Putting it up over her door was like a talisman. It was like putting up a cross in vampire country. And it made her happy to know that it was burning bright, night and day, clear weather or storms.
Where was Monk? she wondered. But she still didn’t check her phone. It kept not occurring to her to do that.
She turned away and went through the studio, through the beaded curtain, past the customers’ bathroom and then into her apartment. Her bright-red raincoat and hat were in one of the unemptied boxes and she found them, pulled them on, and went out into the storm.
The rain smelled like tilled earth, moss, incense, and ozone. With her hands buried deep into pockets, drops pattering on the broad hat brim, Patty began walking down the side street. Down Boundary Street.
Boundary Street.
The fact that Pine Deep had a street with that name was a big part of the draw for her. There’d been one in New York, though try and find it on a map. GPS couldn’t. Uber drivers back in the city could, though, which was weird.
The street wasn’t on MapQuest, Google Maps, or GPS here, though. She’d had to ask, and the first five people she’d stopped when she first arrived didn’t know. It was a guy with a lot of skin art, a flannel shirt, and a lumbersexual woodsman’s beard who gave her directions. Boundary Street was just off the main drag, which made her wonder why the other people didn’t know.
Maybe it was because this part of town was new, built since the Trouble. Maybe nobody bothered to tell the people at Google Earth about it. Or however that worked. She didn’t know and really didn’t care. It was here, that’s what mattered. And, sure, there were some sideways mentions of it in the kind of downbeat indie documentaries hipster filmmakers concocted for their thesis. Strange, but then there were a lot of strange things in life, Patty knew. She was one of them. Monk sure as hell was another.
At times, when she was really drunk, Patty wondered if Boundary Street wasn’t on the map because it was more a state of mind. Not always a good one, but that spoke to perspective. The kind of place that Tom Waits had to be talking about when he said you couldn’t find it unless you started out with bad directions. Maybe every big city had a place like Boundary Street.
Probably. After all, the debris has to wash up somewhere.
It was home to her in New York, and now it was home to her here.
She passed a small knot of drenched twenty-somethings huddled under an awning. Short skirts, push-up bras, makeup applied with a trowel, and a lot of money wasted at the hair salon during the rainy season. Patty hated them and feared them. Every single one of them was prettier than her. Prettier and younger, and there wasn’t a single person on the street who didn’t know it.
Patty had one really good trick, though. Most Americans can’t read an Asian face worth a damn, and she went full Vietnamese as she passed. Eyes that said exactly nothing, mouth that offered no emotion, teeth locked together to create the wax mask. It had been foiling white people for thousands of years and it gave these women nothing to go on. No lever for the scorn in their eyes.
Even so, they shared conspiratorial grins as she passed, but Patty could see shadows lurked in their eyes. Trying to fool each other that this—whatever tonight’s plan was—was still a good idea. The Joker grins were plastic but necessary, because none of them had reached the point where fiction was going to buffer them from the realities of life down here. The shadows in their eyes told Patty that they were each feeling it. The Boundary Street vibe. That look must be similar to what young zebras showed when they realized that being a young, tough herbivore didn’t mean a whole lot to the tawny cats smiling at them from the dark shadows beneath the trees.
She walked on.
Seeing the women started Patty thinking. The Fringe had become a destination, drawing people from New York, Philly, and elsewhere. It was a place you wanted to find, because art and music and acceptance were exploding there. But Boundary Street? No. People who came to Boundary Street seldom understood how they got there. It was not even the real name of the street, though it’s what everyone called it. Somebody—an artist, maybe, or a drunk—made up a bunch of street signs and glued them over the official ones. The department of streets kept taking them down, but they were always back up a day or so later. After a while, the town stopped trying.
Pine Deep didn’t try to do much else down there, either. Took so long to get the gutters clean that people used persistent items of trash as meeting points. The rain washed some of it away, but even Mother Nature wasn’t trying all that hard.
Patty Cakes was chewing on all of that as she aimed herself in the direction of the package store. Morty’s Cold Beer. The wind drove the rain at her like needles, opening raw spots on her cheeks and nose. It made her eyes hurt. On nights like this the wind was hungry for blood.
She walked along, listening to the clicking of her heels in the hope that the beat would conjure a song in her head. Music was everything to her. She had an iPad crammed with songs, and if that ever failed her it was linked to Pandora, Amazon Prime, Sirius, and Spotify. There wasn’t enough music in the world for Patty. Music kept the doors locked and shades drawn; it kept the monsters in their closets.
There were plenty of monsters. Always monsters.
Beer helped, too.
The window was crammed with beer signs and they painted the wet pavement in Christmas colors. Corona blue and Budweiser red, Stella orange and Heineken green. Patty paused outside, looking up and down the street. To the left of Morty’s were three clubs in a row. The Bonesman’s Blues, named after a local ghost legend. Hopalong, which was a gay cowboy place. And the lesbian bar, Tank Girl. To the right was a piercing place, a queer bookstore, and the inevitable Starbucks. Nondescript EDM pulsed out through the open club doors and was crushed by thunder and rain.
Closer to this end of the block was a storefront that always seemed to be rented out for some kind of twelve-step. Everyone she could see through the window looked bent over. Like people at a kid’s funeral. She couldn’t tell if they were crying or reading or praying. She turned away. Whatever was going on over there hurt to look at.
“Beer,” she said to the night.
The neon signs glowed with happy colors. It’s safe in here, they seemed to say.
So she went in.