APRIL 1998
OLD METAIRIE
“Just wait, wait a second. This is my song.” Gaby leaned over, squinting at the radio and then turned the wrong dial, filling the car with static. “Fuck, fuck. Rosemary, how did you get me so damn drunk?”
“Me? It’s not my fault. You were the one taking your two drinks to go.” I pointed at the two cups in the holders, the melting remains of seven and seven and ice cubes. I was reclined in the passenger seat, watching my dirty sneakers tap time on the glove box. I considered sitting up, but she would figure it out in a minute without my help. It was her car anyway. “That is such a weird drink, who orders seven and sevens?”
“Plenty of people.” She thought for a moment. “I got it from my mom, I think.” Then she laughed. “It’s good, you should try it.”
“It’s like what I imagine old ladies drink on cruises or something.” Whenever I teased Gaby, she would put me off with a bunch of dismissive little sounds that I always felt in my body like pats on the head or quick little hugs. Her tolerance made me feel special, a quick affirmation of intimacy. She was doing it now.
She twisted the dial and found the station again and Brandy’s and Monica’s voices fluttered into the car. We were obsessed with this song, and Gaby sang along, eyes closed, cigarette and beer in the hand that she raised toward the sagging cloth of the roof’s interior. The tan velour already had quite a few cigarette holes above her seat from the same gesture. She had turned it up so loud, I could feel the music in my ribs and since our windows were cracked, I worried just for a second about attracting the neighborhood watch. We were parked and the engine and lights were off, but people were touchy in this fancy part of Old Metairie after dark. I guessed no one living here was a huge fan of R and B, but then the music caught me up and I joined Gaby, singing with her off-key but with great enthusiasm. She shook her head at me, still dancing in her seat, the car swaying a little from the movement of her body. Our voices rose higher and louder with the music, acting out someone else’s rage, two other girls’ animosity.
There was nothing in the whole world I loved more than being this dumbly, blindly, exuberantly drunk with my best friend. She had moved on to beer and stopped singing to take a sip. It had turned foamy and that reminded me that I was almost done with mine, so I half crawled into the backseat and dug around in the plastic bag from the 7-Eleven that had our supplies: a case of Bud Light, a box of Lemonheads and a large bottle of lighter fluid. The voices on the radio devolving behind me into an epic crescendo seemed to echo the surging in my chest, an escalation of triumph and excitement. I had been getting just a little into punk lately and I wanted to share this new, liberating feeling of badness with my best friend, the straightest, most polite person I knew. She got it coming and going from everyone at the fancy Catholic high school we were both at. I was poor, and that made me pretty unpopular, but she was black. People there treated her like shit. I wanted her to know what it felt like to give a big fuck-you to all the assholes at school, to stand up for herself, to cause some trouble. She deserved that much at least.
Gaby had spilled beer on her cigarette and was waving it around, trying to dry it off with drunk concentration. I slid back into the front seat with my beer and the lighter fluid and cracked it open and toasted her. “To us. To us being fucking awesome.”
The song had ended and without noticing she had sunk into a low kind of bobbing dance to the new song that was now playing, but she stopped to point at the lighter fluid. “Rosemary, this doesn’t even make any sense.”
“I know, but doesn’t it sound awesome? Just the idea of it? Setting that mean bitch’s bushes on fire?”
“But what if we kill someone?”
“We won’t. Look—” I had to stop because the familiar, irrepressible chorus of the new song came on and I had to join her in dancing for a minute. It was hard to dance with your butt while sitting in a car, but we both tried anyway. The obscene suggestions we were singing along to simply required it. “We will just do these little bushes by the road,” I said when the verses whose words I didn’t know started up again. “Just to prove a point and then we take off. Imagine that nasty-ass Ms. Mancuso getting out of bed all confused, like what the fuck, she probably wears rollers or something, and then she’ll just see fire. Like divine justice.”
Gaby looked me up and down. “Oh, so we are doing the Lord’s work here?”
“We are. She’s an asshole. She’s been so unfair to you.”
“Just so we’re clear, you know I sleep in rollers sometimes.”
“Well, whatever. You know what I mean. It’s only fair. All those detentions.”
She got quieter then and rubbed the faded leather around the steering wheel thoughtfully. “It’s true she hasn’t been the most understanding with me.” She was weighing her words carefully, that same equivocating way she voiced everyone else’s point of view that drove me crazy. Sometimes you were just right and that’s all there was to it, no equivocations.
I wanted her to be mad. I was already mad at everyone all the time and I was frustrated for her, on her behalf. “Dude, last week she gave you detention for being late to lunch. That’s not even a thing.”
“Girl, I know,” she said, forgetting to be judicious for a second. “Only person in the history of that school who has gotten in trouble for being late to fucking lunch. Why does she care so much whether I am on time? It’s like an obsession. I’m starting to think she just likes spending Saturdays with me.”
“Maybe she’s in love with you.”
She looked sideways at me and then the silliness of it made her start to giggle. “Can you imagine having sex with that woman? She probably still makes that bitchy face the whole time.”
This was the kind of thing that was especially funny when drunk, and I started to laugh too. As we both tried to outdo each other with impressions of our hated principal doing it, we giggled harder, helpless in waves of hilarity. At some point we both stopped making any noise, our laughter totally silent except for a gasping wheeze every now and then as Juvenile rumbled on and we struggled for breath. “Oh no.” Gaby held a hand to her chest like an old lady. “No, no, no, you are going to kill me here.”
I was crying by now and so was she and I saw that little tilt to her head as she wiped her eyes that meant she was giving in. This was the wonderful thing about Gaby. Sober, she was Little Miss Perfect, but drunk, she could be wonderfully, explosively, delightfully game for whatever dumb ideas I came up with. She was going to do it with me. “Woo-hoo,” I said, banging the roof of the car.
“This is because you’re hanging out in the Quarter with those Quarter rats all the time, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re getting crazy ideas from them. You know those guys are losers, right? None of them are going to college, because they all run around huffing glue and doing dumb shit like this.” We were going to be seniors next year and talked a lot about going to college. We were definitely both going out of state, out of this fucking place.
“Brilliant shit like this, you mean. Fuck Ms. Mancuso.”
“All right.” She opened her door and the light popped on for a minute and seeing her face all lit up like that made me so glad to see her. Like we had been sitting in the dark for hours and I had forgotten what she looked like. I suddenly leaned over to give her a hug. “I love you,” I said.
She patted my arm. “Love you too, you lunatic. For better or worse. Now you’ve talked me into it, let’s go set some shit on fire.”
I stepped out of my side of the car and the soft humid night fell across my shoulders. Everything smelled like roots and grass and dirt, the kind of wet jungle night of the suburbs with old-growth oak trees overhead and big sprays of palmetto bushes, and lawns, and a funny smell that I had only ever associated with the one football game I ever went to, which I now realized was just the smell of this rich, quiet neighborhood at night. There was a floodlight somewhere on another block, but its sharp beam was turned away from us and everything here was dark and quiet.
Until Gaby hiccuped. “Oh shit,” she whispered. “Sorry.” Then she did it again, louder. “Beer,” she whispered again. “You know beer always does this to me.” She tried to hold the next one in and made a strained croaking sound instead and I could see in her eyes that she was about to start laughing again, and if she started I wouldn’t be able to stop either, so I ran around to her side of the car, prying open the lighter fluid.
“Wait,” she said suddenly. “I gotta pee.”
“What?” I had the bottle of lighter fluid open and ready. “Now?”
“Girl, you know my bladder can’t wait. Hold up.” She still had a beer in her hand. She transferred it to her mouth and clamped the thin metal ridge in between her teeth as she undid her jeans and squatted next to the car.
“Gaby, we are going to get caught. This is not the best time for this.”
“If we are going to start all this delinquent nonsense, the least you can do is wait two seconds until I’ve emptied my bladder. I felt like I was going to burst.” The beer can fell when she started talking and she grabbed it before it could spill.
I stood there feeling ridiculous, trying not to listen to the sound of her pee hitting the ground which was kind of making me have to go too.
“How do they get the grass so soft out here?” She had reached out a hand to stroke the lawn next to her. “Ours is always so spiky.”
“Gaby, hurry up.” She drank some of her beer, still in a deep squat and still peeing. “Why are you drinking right now, just finish.”
“It takes a while. We’ve had a lot of drinks tonight.” Finally, she stood up and pulled up her pants. “Okay, now I’m ready.” Then she opened the mailbox near us and put her empty can inside and raised the little red flag on it with a chuckle. “Go on.”
For a second, I almost lost my nerve. I almost told her to get back in the car, that I couldn’t do it, and have her drive us to the next shitty bar that would accept our fake IDs and we could laugh about the insane thing we almost did. Another story about Rosemary and her dumb ideas. But I couldn’t let her down.
It was important that we do this. That we do this for her. We had grown a little apart since I had been spending more time downtown, hanging out in punk bars and shows. And before too long, we would be hearing back from colleges and maybe moving away from each other, and I was so worried that somehow she might not know how much I still needed her. That she was the only person I really had in this world. My feelings for her radiated in my chest until I thought it would burst and I had to find some way to show her. Something like this, a battle cry of love and allegiance sent forth into this dark neighborhood of assholes that didn’t cherish her the way I did and always would. She needed to know that I would always be there for her and stand up for her, that all my feelings could barely even be contained in that loose and flimsy word: friend. I would show her, and it needed to be dramatic, explosive, incendiary.
Reinspired, I began spraying lighter fluid all over some big ugly bush right on the edge of the lawn. There was a big stretch of grass between it and the house and I figured it would stop any fire from spreading too far, but I didn’t want to think too much about the technicalities of all this. It was the gesture that was so important.
“Oh man, that stinks.” Gaby waved her hand in front of her face. “Reminds me of my uncle Antoine.”
It did stink. The awful smell of gasoline was rising as I sprayed, squeezing the plastic bottle until its sides caved and it made a little gasp to refill itself with air. Then I sprayed the remaining liquid. “Okay,” I said.
“This is some dumb shit, Rosemary. You know that, right?” she said. Then she smiled and struck a match. I reached out to hold her hand as she dropped it and warmth burst over us in a fiery wave and it was everything I hoped it would be, a searing circle of flame, and then just when I had started to enjoy it, just as quickly, it sputtered out. We both looked at each other surprised; the silence only lasted for a second before we began to laugh again. “Oh wait, I think plants have to be dead to catch on fire,” I said.
“Of course they do. You’re such a fucking idiot,” she said affectionately, squeezing my hand and then giving me a little shove that sent me bumping into her car door where I slid down and rested, hanging off her cracked side mirror.