Fast Lanes (3 page)

Talk about walls, the rules can do it and women can do it too, put you on your back unexpectedly. Rules do it over the long haul so you don’t even notice but girls can do it with one punch, like Giselle, the girl I lived with here between the two times I was in England. Giselle was a beautiful little girl, man I will always love her but she was crazy and her life had been shit. She was from the Projects in South Boston and she talked with that nasal flat twang and was all fashion, living at home with her fucking drunk father and her drunk brothers and spending all her money from her boring job on shiny shoes and satin jackets. She was twenty-one and I was eighteen and I took her out of there like Prince Valiant, had a good bar job and a place in Allston. Giselle was blond, real petite, maybe 5’2″—I like small girls anyway, so nice and light to lift and hold in bed—but Giselle had such a way of
standing
, like a kid with her hands empty. You wouldn’t think much of her, I mean she had nothing to say really, she wasn’t so much for brains if you judge by talk, but she had so much heart and would just look at you with everything laid open, like there was nothing she wouldn’t give you. Jesus, Giselle—she got to me, I lived with her the longest, about six months, but she had to possess you, surround you. She was a big help to me and I got a lot of work done then on my music, I lost a waiting job during that time and she took over with the money, but later I got a bar thing together and was meeting a lot of ladies. I couldn’t lie to her so we broke up and she moved back home. I would still go to see her there though I hated that apartment building, all dark and stale with the TVs going. I called her at work one day to see how she was, I knew she was hassled about me, and they told me she’d been sent home drunk from lunch. Really wasn’t like her to fuck up a job. So I went by to see
her and I find her in her bedroom really juiced and weepy, the room a mess, she could barely talk. I stayed there with her about two hours but then I had to leave to meet Janet, this other girl I was going out with—and Giselle just grabs on to me, begs me not to go, stay, stay with me. I told her I had to split but she could come, I figured I’d take her back to my place and let her sleep it off. But she said no, I had to stay
there
in her bedroom and not move until she was all right. So I’m walking toward the door and she’s following, yelling how she’s going to kill herself. We’re on this falling-down stoop in the Projects and she’s screaming and I told her not to be stupid, don’t be crazy, and she slammed the door in my face. I went off to meet Janet but I was worried, I remembered Giselle’s girlfriend telling me how Giselle had tried to kill herself once before over a guy. Tried to phone her but no one home. So that night about three
A.M.
Janet and I are asleep in my apartment and this tornado blows through the door—Boom Boom Boom—I hear three giant steps as Giselle makes the distance from the door to the bed and then banshee screaming YOU FUCKER I KNEW YOU HAD SOMEONE HERE and fists and I rolled over Janet first to protect her and grabbed Giselle’s wrists. I couldn’t hold her, she was totally out of her head, kicking and punching me, she kicked me in the balls about three times and bloodied my face. This went on for about twenty full-blown minutes, and then she seemed to calm down and said she was going into the kitchen to wash up. So I’m wiping the blood off my mouth,
tired
man, exhausted, from fighting this tiny girl, and in shock from falling into it out of a total sleep. I mean, I didn’t even know she still had a key—she’d given it back a month before when she’d moved out but made a copy on the sly. I found out later she’d been coming over to the place when I wasn’t there and just sitting in the rooms, for hours. Anyway, I’m standing there and Giselle walks back in with a butcher knife. She has it in both hands above her head and she’s bringing it down into her own
stomach and I lunged across the room and grabbed her—she cut my chest and kept trying to stab me. I couldn’t get the knife out of her hands. I yelled to Janet to call the police but I had unplugged the phone earlier and Janet couldn’t find the socket to plug it back in, so I’m dragging Giselle around by the arms to show Janet where the phone plug is, blood dripping down my legs from the cuts—really getting scared because this thing doesn’t ever seem to be ending, Janet with her clothes on by now and panic-stricken and Giselle like a frozen monster and all three of us crying—I couldn’t see anything for crying. It was a nightmare, like getting caught in fast water and you can’t tell what’s happening, you’re just getting beaten from every direction and going under. Janet got the police but there was more blood from somewhere and it really flashed through my mind that Giselle might kill me—it took the fucking cops fifteen minutes to get there and by the time they did I was lying on top of Giselle on the floor, naked and bleeding on both of us, holding her down with my weight and the knife still in her fist. As soon as I got off her she was up and throwing a tape recorder she’d given me through the window, then she picked up a chair—not a great big chair but this was a tiny girl. The cops put her in a straitjacket and when she came to herself she was behind bars, clutching this little suitcase she’d brought over to my place with her. I called a friend of mine to go down and get her out of jail and tell the cops it was domestic and no charges and all that crap, and she went to her girl friend’s and soon after left for Mexico—this trip we’d planned for her when she was still living with me. We’d gotten the air tickets and everything and talked about how getting away would make the transition easier for her. Jesus. This was all about a year and a half ago now and Giselle seems OK, living with some guy who goes home to her every night and lets her cook his dinner. I still care about her, I can’t forget the good things about her, but I don’t go to sleep now without a chain lock across the door. That was
the scariest thing that ever happened to me, and the worst of it was seeing her in that straitjacket. Have you ever seen someone you know in one? She looked amputated, lopped off and exploding, her arms
gone
when I’d felt them
holding
me all that time before.

Holding is a trip, right. The last time my mother was in the hospital, I stayed up with her all one night and couldn’t get my head clear for days afterward. She was on chemotherapy then, some drug that was mostly speed because she couldn’t sleep at all, and she had these speed raps with everyone in the family. All of us, one at a time, late at night. I’m alone with her in that room, she’s the only one of them I love. She told me how hard it was to raise me—I said, shit, you didn’t
raise
me, from the age of twelve I was a ward of the State, you call that
raising
me, I mean I was bounced around like a fucking ball and you so-called parents didn’t pay for nothing, my clothes, my lodging, my schooling,
nothing
—and no one says you
had
to but then to get on my ass about owing you fifteen bucks, FIFTEEN BUCKS man. Blame me for that if you want to, she says, I’m only trying to teach you to care about someone’s rules but your own, and we had to let you go Mickey, you were tearing us up, you were tearing all of us apart, it was you or all the rest of them, I had to decide. Why did you hate us, she says, Why Did You Hate All Of Us coming at me pounding in my head like a drum, Christ, in that dark hospital, the halls dark and the nurses squeaking shoes outside. My legs were shaking, I wanted to get up and run but I couldn’t stand up, just her FACE in that bed man—I took her face between my two hands and I YELLED right at her EYES, I didn’t hate YOU I hated THEM, I LOVED YOU. Fucking Christ. Now she’s home. She’s home now and I’m gone, I can’t go over there. If I weren’t staying with you I’d be staying somewhere else.

All you can do is turn the bad stuff into something else and not flake out on what it costs you—like, I know I’m good, I
got metal and breath in my voice and I can hold any space. Use a voice like playing a horn, peeling and slow whines and a good bass—like,
I’M FLYin on an AIRPLANE / I’M WALKin on a LAKE / MOVE my LIFE AROUND / BUT IT’S ALL A MISTAKE
—hard undercut in the bass, that flat BWAA BOOM in the lyrics lays down a gut tremor they can’t help but give you, give BACK to you.
An DON’T YOU WISH / somebody knew you / an DON’T YOU DREAM / somebody calls your name
—Yeah, I know I’ve got it, I sing in the streets and I can hear people pick it up behind me. I’m back in Europe just as soon as I get the bread, there’s no rock clubs here, nowhere to do a good band, just posers man, just wearing the fancy leather and the chains and stepping out to masquerade, barns full of sweaty dress-ups, all MONEY, they all got money and no pressure, no push—they don’t know shit about music but it doesn’t even MATTER man, the ones doing real music can do it without them and just play them, play them like mongoloid pinball—Nothin fucks music, what it
has
, melts in your mouth and turns to acid halfway down, you don’t forget it. AM slosh is no real language. Look, you feel my mouth, you see, we’re talking.

Here, I want to keep my face close to your face. You share your pillows with me, OK darling? I’ll be YOUR friend.

When it gets to be night like this, I mean late night—night doesn’t start till three
A.M
.—I like how there’s no light and the dark is different from earlier, when they’re all out there checking scenes and looking for some flash. About now everyone starts sinking.… What do you think? we’re not bad roommates—Darling, put those cards away, don’t play games in bed. What? You can tell my fortune with those cards? I believe in that shit, don’t scare me … turn out the light, I got something for you, do it in the dark if you’re going to do it …

I
n our student days we were all in need of fortune tellers. No one was sure what was happening in the outside world and no one thought about it much. We had no televisions and we bought few newspapers. Communal life seemed a continual dance in which everyone changed partners, a patient attempt at domesticity by children taking turns being parents. We were adrift but we were together. A group of us floated among several large ramshackle houses, houses arranged above and below each other on steep streets: a gritty version of terraced dwellings in some exotic Asia. The houses were old and comfortable, furnished with an accumulation of overstuffed chairs and velveteen sofas gleaned from rummage sales. There were no curtains on the large windows, whose rectangular sooty light was interrupted only by tangles of viny plants. The plants were fed haphazardly and thrived, like anything green in that town, enveloping sills and frames still fitted with the original wavy glass of seventy years before. The old glass was pocked with flaws
and minute bubbles, distorting further the vision of a town already oddly displaced and dreamed in jagged pieces. Houses of the student ghetto were the landscape of the dream—a landscape often already condemned.

I lived in a house on Price Street with three male housemates: a Lebanese photographer from Rochester, New York, a Jewish TM instructor from Michigan, and a carpenter musician, a West Virginian, who’d worked in the doomed McCarthy campaign and dropped out of Harvard Law to come home and learn housebuilding.

This story could be about any one of those people, but it is about Rayme and comes to no conclusions.

Perhaps the story is about Rayme because she lived in all the communal houses at one time or another. Intermittently she lived with her father and stepmother and brother. Or she lived with one of her two older sisters, who had stayed in town and were part of our group of friends. Or she lived in her own small rooms, a bedroom, kitchen, and bath in a house chopped into three or four such apartments. She lived alone in several of those single-person places, and in all of them she kept the provided mattress and box springs tilted upright against the wall. She slept on a small rug that she unrolled at night, or she slept on the bare floor with the rug precisely folded as a pillow. She shoved most of the other furniture into a corner or put it outside on the porch. Skirts and coats on hangers, swatches of fabric, adorned the walls. Rayme brought in large branches, a brick, a rock. Usually there were no utilities but running water; her father paid the rent and that is all that was paid. She wore sweaters and leggings and burned candles for light. She used the refrigerator as a closet for shoes and beads, and seemed to eat almost nothing. She kept loose tea and seeds in jars and emptied coffee cans that she filled with nutshells and marbles. A long time ago her mother had committed suicide in Argentina. No one ever talked about the death, but one of Rayme’s sisters
told me the suicide was slow rather than overtly violent. “She stopped eating, she’d been sick, she wouldn’t go to the hospital or see a doctor,” the sister said. “It took her several months to do it.” Rayme seldom mentioned her mother and didn’t seem certain of any particular chain of events concerning the past. The facts she referred to at different times seemed arbitrary, they were scrambled, they may have been false or transformed. It is true that her parents married each other twice and divorced twice; the father was a professor, the mother had musical talent and four children. Rayme told me her father wouldn’t let his wife play the piano; he locked the baby grand because she became too “detached” when she played.