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and there were more and more as time progressed. I would smoke, Marlboro Lights, and Joez
wouldn't. The more I drank the more I smoked the more I talked. The more I drank the more I fell in
love. With everything. The scuzzy pond beneath us, the buildings twinkling beyond the trees, cars
zooming by somewhere. And all of my life would just swell up inside me and soon I'd have to pee.
So we'd leave our little pier, legs cramped and drunker when we stood. Leave the park and be on
Newbury Street in front of the Ritz-Carlton. Push through the revolving door and glide across the
marble floor like we were supposed to be there, hotel people giving us awful looks. If they kicked
us out we'd go back to the park and pee under a tree or in an empty fountain, but normally we
would just walk proudly down the carpeted stairs and pee in the tasteful white bathroom of the Ritz-
Carlton. No paper anything, they had plush facecloths and fluffy towels and a wicker hamper to
toss them in when you were finished primping. Joez would fix her makeup in the long lit mirror. I
would tease my hair, give it a spray, maybe put on some of Joez's lipstick. My eyeliner was always
thicker than hers, like I used a crayon and she had some sort of elegant paintbrush. We would
leave the bathroom a mess and I would always steal something completely useless like a bottle of
softsoap or a towel. Things I would inevitably forget on a sidewalk later, when I was drunker. Being
in that placid white bathroom just made me want to destroy. I took the plant that sat on the sink and
tore the thick green leaves from its vine, threw them all over the floor. Stomped on them till they left
smudges of green plant blood on the floor, me and Joez laughing. She thought it was mean but
she didn't stop me. She stuffed her Tower Records bag with facecloths and we left.
After ruining the bathroom at the Ritz-Carlton me and Joez would stroll up Newbury Street, a street
that starts out old and wealthy with fur shops and Shreves, and grows gradually hipper and
wealthier with haute couture shops and millions of hair salons. We'd have our bottles, Joez and I, if
not wine then juice and 100 proof blue label Smirnoff, though Joez did like to mix hers with Jolt, a
cocktail affectionately called Brown Vodka. So strong it stung the raw windburned skin of my lips.
Joez laughed at my cringe and said mother's milk.
Me and Joez would hold hands and be so obnoxious because glassy rich Newbury Street was not
us, the fawning window shoppers weren't weird like us and it made us yell and sing loud and laugh
at how normal and dumb everything was. And we turned onto Boylston Street where the fat gray
library sat the feeling of entering something would overwhelm me, like the first chords of your
favorite song but we were the song, moving through the street to the place where all the kids were.
Skater boys jerking around on their boards, clean girls with dyed hair huddled together over their
bottles. Sometimes real punks like the crew of mohawked homeless kids from Orange County, a
place we all knew from Suburbia. We all felt fake around them.
And then what would happen. Everyone was drunk, running around. Someone would know about a
party and we'd go, someone would have acid and a real adventure would begin. A cop would tell
us to move and we'd walk down to the river. Or we'd hang out on the library stairs all night, peeing
in the alleys behind the building, helping the ones who got too drunk and puked or started crying. I
did that once, after my grandmother died. It was actually a good six months after her death and I
realized I hadn't done anything meaningful to say goodbye to her, and I started bawling and
burping and carrying on to this boy PJ about how I had to bury an amethyst in the ground beneath
my grandmother's headstone because she had been an Aquarius, like me.
PJ and his boyfriend Jimy were the only out queers we called them the Gay Punks. PJ was tall and
thin and pockmarked with bright red hair and he did a lot of acid. He and Jimy would drink too
much and have fist fights that ended up with PJ crying and Jimy storming off. PJ used my weepy
outburst as a channel to express his own misery and we sat hugging and sobbing until I got up and
barfed.
I remember a girl named Mercy who I didn't really like took care of me, got me into Peter's car
where I sat on someone's lap and puked out the window. They were all going to Rocky Horror and
I had been so excited to go that I drank too much and ultimately passed out, was deposited at
Tracey's house, carried onto the couch and whoever took off my boots must have lost patience
with me because the laces were busted. My favorite necklace was somehow broken. I woke in the
morning so hungover, with no idea where I was. A scratchy little noise
woke me and I found Tracey scrubbing a puddle of bile I'd thrown up in my sleep from the carpet. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]