Fast Lanes (2 page)

•  •  •

Doncha like to walk down the street with me, hmmm, doncha? Whoops, somethin tells me you’re not amused, not amused HEY well excuse me (dodging passersby with elaborate swoops and fast two-step skips) I’m part preppie, can’t help sliding through crowds, stay close now, we want everyone to know we’re TOGETHER and we’re RIGHT and we’re COOL, Yoo Hoo, Everyone, This is MY FRIEND, This Girl (pointing, taking off in a sleuth’s mince), Here, give HER the prize. Come, Darling. This way darling. And don’t drag your feet, I can’t AFFORD another pair of Candie’s this week … keeping you in french ticklers keeps food from my mouth as it is.… Sweetheart, your kicks are killing me, why can’t you be satisfied with that Malaysian dwarf I bought you? Ouch, OK, don’t kick the shins, need the shins, STAGEWORK you know, you gotta Stand Up to project, I got the message, I’ll shut up, we’ll just walk. HEY EVERYONE, we’re WALKING here, we’re just WALKING. Wow, I love the street. See this lady in front of us with her kid crawling under its own stroller? Hey, she loves the day she loves the kid she loves HER LIFE you can tell. Jesus, look at that face—they ought to lock her up before she walks in front of a truck—

OK here we are, take a good look, this is CHEAPO’S—Only place to buy records in this town. Darling? Sweetheart? Come back DARLING, Mickey’s gonna buy you some MUSIC, he’s gonna pay for his SUPPER, cut you off from that commercial dark ages Stones shit (dancing in doorway, bowing from the waist), Come IN now, don’t be shy, never too late for the good stuff, just don’t get LOST now that we’re on the BRINK (running down aisles in smooth reggae skip) OUH! (making faces, doing an imitation club-foot) I hurt myself, I’m SUING. Now you see that cute punky girl at the counter? She’s going to spin some tunes for us, hey, see? (lays out a dollar a record tip) here are the imports, the real stuff, there’s no real shit over here, it’s all happening in England
like I told you. Now listen I’m gonna get her to play The Members, oh oh or hmmmm (sucking his finger, rolling his eyes) ahhh, The Spectator—this cut with the fabulous Moog that drifts off like balloons. You’re gonna LIKE IT, it’s gonna Change Your Life, you’ll be a rock ’n’ roll baby—You can’t take it in at first, it sounds bitter maybe but when you HEAR it you know what it is all at once … and that doesn’t mean you go out and buy yourself a string tie and put on some
fashion
pose, just means you KNOW what the real music is and you’ll go where you need to go to get it, like, look at these asshole album covers, you can SEE what shit they’re playing by the sparkly lights on their jeans and how they hold their fuckin streamline chromeline guitars like giant cocks—it’s sickening man and people buy this shit. You see these imports. One little rack of singles with penciled-in titles, but this shit is REAL this is REAL music and they don’t have to pretend it’s sex. Yeah, balls, the family jewels.

I don’t know I just never got along with my family, I mean they’re not my family really since I’m adopted but they are my family—and it was always weird man, I mean they told me I was adopted from the start but still, all those years it was like, uh, how come
I
got such dark skin and how come I just don’t really FEEL it for you. When I was fourteen they gave me the address of the adoption agency and I found out I’m half Comanche and half Spanish. I wrote four letters, four different letters man, and the agency sent me this long sheet of paper inscribed with the facts, but no names. I was born in Tucson, and my younger sister too, but she’s no blood relation. Only the oldest one, my older sister, is their own kid, and Jesus it was always obvious. I mean, who graduated from Barnard, who works for ecology and married a lawyer? Not Mickey, man. Mickey got boarded off at the age of twelve because he was a mean little kid and always in fights. NO, I ain’t gonna do it cause YOU say so
man I mean who the fuck are YOU? And my younger sister, she’s a case, she’s fat, she sits all day in the easy chair and watches TV like a TV machine. Makes me sick—I tell her, I’ve told her, get off your butt, it’s plain you hate yourself. Not me man. I love Mickey. Who cares if THEY love Mickey—that’s why I said I’ve had it with this shit and I went to England when I was sixteen and lived with Nate. Nate, the kid I played basketball with at Wakefield High, after I came back from Correction School where I got CORRECTED Ha Ha. But Nate man, he was wonderful. England was really real, I
grew up
over there, I learned about rock ’n’ roll. We went out to the pubs and the bars and we had a band and I got into singing. There I was, sixteen and really alive while everybody back here from my old street was asking daddy for the car, oh please daddy can I? ah come on Dad, I wanna get my hand in someone’s pants in the backseat and have her home by 12:30 with her dress buttoned up right so
her
daddy don’t ask questions. What? Yeah, I was singing, SINGING, S-I-N-G-I-N-G and living with a nice twenty-nine-year-old lady who had a little half-black kid that called ME daddy. Yeah, you see? Quite the difference.

I went to England to stay with Nate and he was living with Clytie, she was going to marry him so he could stay in the country, but I don’t know, I just fell for her and Nate moved out with hard feelings but things settled and were cool in a few weeks—Clytie was so smart and hardheaded but crazy enough to put up with me, and had no real set on how anything should be—that’s what
smart
is, you know? She shared this two-family flat with her dad and he drove a lorry and picked up scrap to sell. I mean it was two separate flats but her dad was around a lot and she did his meals and he gave her dough. She had grown up with her mother and found her father right after she’d had her baby, this beautiful brown kid she called Feather though his name was really Frederick. Her dad was just a working-class stiff but Clytie
could do that, show up after twenty-five years with a half-black baby and make her father love her, and he was cool about her boyfriends. Boyfriends moved in and out and it’s not true that kind of number always fucks kids up. Feather was happy, sunny cocoa face, about two and starting to talk. Nate and me took him to the club we worked, he watched while the group played. What a time that was. I’m sixteen and Escaped: school, family, house, and got what I want after
all that time
of bad-boy guilt trips. Nothin but YOU GOT NO FEELINGS FOR PEOPLE MICKEY, YR DAD AND I HAVE GIVEN YOU ALL WE CAN BUT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT DO YOU MICKEY and the day I got them to release me on my own recognizance from the state ward crap was the luckiest day of my life. I go to England and there’s Clytie, pale complexion and black hair cut real short, so she looks like a boy almost, except she’s nursing and has these round, heavy breasts. Nothing was dirty to Clytie, nothing was stained or fucked up. She showed me about the feeling of feeding a kid, that it pulled at her inside like a real faint coming and made her wet. Evenings she would be feeding Feather and I would lay down with them and fall asleep from the suckling sounds. I was out at night and she was out in the days sometimes, art-modeling, and I took care of the baby. He did, he called me daddy. Now, can you dig how that was for me? I mean, I knew a lot, I’d been OUT THERE a long time, but I didn’t know this good stuff, always before I only had glimpses, BAM, quick flash and close the shutter—ah, there, THAT’S REAL—but only for a minute, an hour maybe. I really pushed man, I pushed to get in where the juice was.

The women I’ve cared about are mostly good women, but I got no illusions about girls in general. You think women don’t use men for fucking? Bullshit, plenty of women have used me for sex, just want some big cock to bang their brains out, want you to walk around with them all dressed up
because you got a nice hard ass in your pants, they got no feelings for you. Katrin, this other girl I know—the one I met in the bar before I met you, I told you about her—she’s not like that, she’s a nice little girl, punky and kind and shy under her red lipstick. She lives with her folks, that was her dad’s car I borrowed yesterday. Her family has plenty and Katrin wants to pay for an apartment for me, I mean she would still live at home but she would have a place to go at times, you know? What d’ya mean? She knows me, I’ve been honest with her, she knows how I feel about the jealous maniac number, no, Katrin is cool. Besides, I’ve got about eighty bucks left and none of the clubs around here are going to let me bartend right off. You got to work up through the ranks just like in a fucking bank—barback and bus and whatever else they want to rankle you with. If I have to spend my dough on just living, rent and that shit, I’ll never get enough money to split and do what I have to do. You think I’m wrong? How the fuck can you be me, how can you
do
that? You, with your life all peachy. Just let me be here, OK? let ME figure it out, I’m experienced.

My first real time was with a neighborhood girl the fall that I was twelve, I got into a lot of trouble over it. She had this big backyard with all these apple trees like a forest and we were back there in the trees, just innocent pushing against each other, feeling pretty loopy, like the first time you’re tipsy on booze. She was leaning against a tree and had pulled me against her and her dress was up between us. She had unzipped my pants and then suddenly everything
fit
, you know, sounds like a joke, I mean I wasn’t trying to fuck her, I didn’t know I could fuck anybody, but she was one of these girls who all of a sudden catches fire and then doesn’t know where she is. I mean there ARE such girls. Right then her mother has seen us from the house through the trees and starts SCREAMING the girl’s name across the yard, yelling with this hysterical warble in her voice, and I was sort of
pulling the girl around the tree so the mother couldn’t see us when I slipped inside, really inside her, almost by accident. I will never forget it, I was amazed, she came, just in seconds, and I was watching her face the whole time. I didn’t know what coming was and for a long time after that I thought there was something wrong with me because I hadn’t felt the shaking SHE’D felt, with her eyes wide open but she wasn’t there. Real scary, like the sky cracking open. By the time her mother got from the second floor of the house and across the yard to us it was all over—it was the mother who had worked up a passion and she kept on with it for several days. You might say the whole mess contributed to my parents’ decision to get Mickey OUT, like once a dog has tasted blood he keeps on killing chickens. So they packed me off to where there were no chickens they’d know about—they gave up on me and made me a ward of the State. I was TWELVE man, with the whole puberty thing crashing around my head. I mean, CONFUSED? I was crazy, here was this totally heavy punishment when SHE was the one who had done that weird shaking. Had
I
done that to her, I mean I only just touched her in this softness and she exploded. And really the PACK HIM OFF gig was already in motion before that, I’d been in fights with some older boys and I’d done some petty stealing, but the actual change of residence came right on the heels of magic in the forest. Magic Mickey, what a laugh, it wasn’t any magic I knew about till it grabbed me. Later I did the grabbing I admit but back then I was just this hyper wild LITTLE BOY really, big for my age maybe but not
that
big. It was just this weird MYSTERY, all of them, all their reasons—Let’s do what’s BEST FOR MICKEY everybody and it felt like jail, like waking up in solitary. I mean it wasn’t like I loved my parents but I thought I was supposed to and they shoved me off man, they sent me off in the old lifeboat.

Was like they could always say to themselves well we didn’t GET him until he was four years old, he’s got things in him
we didn’t put there—my mother told me once I had probably been abused as a young kid which is maybe likely because from the first I knew I was full of hate, just HATE, hate, a little jet-propelled demon. You think I’m abrasive now—wasn’t that the word, Mickey’s new word from the lady with the big vocabulary?—yeah,
abrasive
, you should have seen me
then
. I did it with dedication, like something was boiling over a fire inside me, you know? I don’t have any memory before about age six. No, I DON’T remember any real parents. I mean, my mother is Jewish and my father is Quaker, and they can’t have any more kids so they decide to adopt two Indians. Yeah, the liberal American melting pot and what it melted was my head. But that’s OK, I dig being runny and hot, I just don’t ever want to be dead and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks because I’m not amusing YOU you see I’m amusing MYSELF and whoever digs THAT can stand on my train. I got myself strapped to a big diesel and I got no complaints. I got a lot to do and I’m really HERE, they can all tell and that’s why I’m going to make it. I got talent, I got total energy and focus and I can hold a stage. You’ve never even seen me sing and you can feel it. Just ice, ice and hot white sparks, squeeze it out and control what they feel. It’s not how fucking OLD I am or cocktail manners or social skills, it’s what I know and no one TAKES that, I GIVE it,
I
give it.

I could always take care of myself, all us kids could, because my mother was sick so much of the time. She has lupus, always had it for years, that’s why I’m back here from England now. She’s not well, she’s not at all well. But we kids did our own shit, I mean we washed our own clothes and cleaned up after ourselves and cooked the fucking meals, yeah, casseroles, but still, Mickey is no slouch in the kitchen—that’s why it’s so funny to me to see these guys who can’t wipe their own asses, fucking helpless without a girl to sew their buttons on. I mean that’s not what I need a girl for, you know? And the food thing, I always worked in restaurants,
those jobs are easy to get and bartending pays if you hang around long enough to get the good shifts. I was doing fifty a night when you met me and don’t worry I’ll do it again, but Savio’s man, is the craziest place in the Square, all the nuts are in there, the regulars, every night near closing—like that old lady you saw that tried to throw her glass at me. She’s in there, sitting on the barstool and talking to herself until she works up a fury. Turns to the other customers with this blitz of curses about whoever serves her DID YOU SEE WHAT HE SAID TO ME THAT UGLY MONKEY LOOK AT HIM PUSHING HIS WHITE TEETH OUT JESUS CHRIST I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS SHIT HE’S AN APE AN APE MAN A STUPID BABOON. Finally you ask her if she has the money to pay her bill and she never does, three times the manager had to help her off the stool and into the street and she’s yelling all the way about how I’d slapped her in the face and ripped her dress. Then there’s Veteran Twitch, this wipe-out in army fatigues who’s always there at closing, totally gonzo but very quiet, stares into his glass and does this endless routine of facial expressions, wound up tight and talking nonstop with no sound. Never raises his eyes but definitely directs it all to some companion on the phantom telephone. You don’t know how many nuts there are till you work a bar, I only do it because they don’t lay claims, you do it and get out. And I save all the bucks, I got back from England and was at my parents’ house, couldn’t handle it so I was renting this studio, a sound studio so I could get some musicians together and do some tapes, $350 a month, that’s where all my money went and I’m sneaking in there at night and sleeping as well and it was useless as far as the music went, I just couldn’t find anyone who was serious, they’re on their way to law school and born cool, they got to make the Cotillion in their MGs. The music ain’t going to come from THEM it’s going to come from ME because it’s all I GOT, and then I’m gonna be laughing in their faces which is maybe a pointless desire
because by the time I get there their faces will have long since been turned to the wall, staring at nowhere, nothing every minute.