Amor and Psycho: Stories (5 page)

When he saw the determined yellow incisors tearing into the flesh and the spastic movements of the sinuous body, he swore at the rat and shouted meaningless words to the snake. His cigarette dropped from his lips into the tank and fumed around the scene like dry ice. Peter wrapped his arms around the tank and lifted, as if it would help, in spite of the impediments of the reptile heater and its electrical cord, to move the primal stage elsewhere.

Psycho wrote in the morning—a rant about giving some bald guy head in the bathroom of the gas station at dawn, something she hadn’t actually done lately—then she walked into the park and paced the playground for an hour, riffing. Hyperarticulate self-revelation was Psycho’s talent. She illuminated experiences other people would avoid, repress or hide. Poetry was a blood sport in our foggy little town, attracting dropouts and misfits, theater freaks hungry for a solo, and a few of the angry college-bound. Twice a year, poets faced off in the meeting hall of the Caballeros de Colombo, and the top scorer got a chance—a chance no one had ever taken—to unravel her shitty life at the Grand Slam Finals in San Francisco at the Warfield.

Freestyling was how Psycho elevated her consciousness.
Our whole team aspired to this condition, but Psycho had the most confidence in our dumbfuck lives as material. She came out to her mother, for example, at a slam. Psycho wasn’t actually gay; she was bi; she was whatever. She came out at every slam; she came out, really of her own mouth, kissing Heather in front of Boz Blacks’s Store, where ten-year-olds bought cigarettes—but everything she said was true, or became retroactively inevitable. Psycho was the first girl I ever heard use the word “incested” as a verb. This turned out to be the least original thing about her. “When I speak my shit,” she said, “I want you to see the beautiful ugliness of the world, like a cathedral made of tin foil gum wrappers, dead cigarettes, condoms and bright-colored suckers.”

WE WATCHED
in awe during Harald Bugman’s memorial service at the Odd Fellows Hall as Psycho killed it:

On that terrible occasion we trusted Psycho to shine a light on the darkness; hers was the voice we most needed. We’d already heard a loose cannon, Jane Jones, go off about some cousin of hers who had committed suicide while taking
meds for anxiety and acne. As if this had anything to do with Harald, as if the point of the story was the overmedication of the mentally ill in America. Jane droned on about how parapsychotic schizophrenia was a disease registered in the DSM, an amazing book; the library should get a copy of the fourth edition so the whole town could benefit from this diagnostic tool, used constantly by all mental-health professionals. Harald’s mother, Babe Bugman, looked, at this point, literally breakable, practically shattered already. While nobody expected the memorial to turn into a celebration of Harald’s life, exactly—his death at nineteen was tragic, stupid—it shouldn’t turn, either, into a recitation of everybody’s story about their mentally ill relatives and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.

Then Psycho stood up, creating a frisson of expectation: Now any drama could be narrated. She spoke intimately to everyone at the same time and burned with a secret energy. Her voice seemed to come from a deep place, like a funnel or a sinkhole.

Harald Bugman
had
made a permanent mark, like blood or hazardous waste, a wild scribble that lived. The very name—Harald—in Psycho’s mouth made everyone proud, made everyone weirdly hungry. In the magic way of memorials, three trestle tables in the hall filled up with free-range meatballs, logs of fresh goat cheese and homemade bread, and salads of baby lettuce with bright orange nasturtium petals and blue borage flowers out of which earwigs and
small spiders crawled. Pat Estevez made pupusas to order on her little hot plate; somebody roasted a pig out back, and the locavores formed an important knot around the fire to discuss its provenance. The beer, wine, weed and apple pies were locally sourced; our town began to love itself again. The only flaw: Harald was dead and his mother, Babe Bugman, looked startled and destroyed, her visage ravaged. Her visage ravaged, her ravaged visage! No matter the level of suffering, Psycho turned everything into language. She couldn’t help herself; she was a bard. Besides eating and drinking and Psycho, there was so little (Babe Bugman’s ravaged visage and the bizarre RC wall hangings belonging to the Odd Fellows with their occult symbolism and vividly bleeding hearts) to make Harald’s death real. Because Harald had died violently, there was no body to focus on, no coffin, and, for the immediate family at least, no God.

ALL PSYCHO ASKED FOR
was the chance to stare freely, and free-associate. Olivia’s striped hat, Amit’s nose ring, the wings of Heroine’s blue eye shadow, Roy’s admirable eyebrow and the star tattooed behind her left ear. She wanted to remember the last pure time she wore sneakers, lace-up ones. White Keds, with a blue line around the rubber.

It happened freshman year—that she became Psycho. Before, she was just Psyche—a given, hippie name. In the eighth grade, the magic powers of witchy girls came on like ecstasy, filled us up like fresh air, except it wasn’t fresh. It
was old. All the girls hated on Psyche because she was fairly sexually advanced, so everybody called her a ho and said she was a hellaslut. Psyche went into the den of girls; down by the taqueria they pulled each other’s hair.

She came out the other side re-created as Psycho. No one could get to her then, except Harald. No one but him was more whacked and brilliant than her.

WHEN SHE FREESTYLED
, Psycho just stood there spouting out of some necessary instinct, changing the words around so they sounded right but didn’t quite make sense, or said something she hadn’t known before:
Glowering noun
or
souring gown
or
flowering town
.

And then, famously, Harald cut his wrists, enhancing her reputation. But Psycho remained humble.

After Harald, then after Heather, Psycho’s next lover was a man named Mr. Avery, very adult, very skilled, she said. He was a total secret—forty-two, forty-five—and lived two towns away with his wife. We laughed too loudly when Psycho said “skilled.” Sex still made us nervous. Not that we minded sexual talk, sexual jokes, sexual innuendo, sexual confidences—and like anybody else we released sexual tension by laughing.

In the afternoons, Psycho sat on the big wooden bench on the cliff overlooking the beach like the nymph Psyche on her rock or crag, waiting for her mythical lover, Amor. Psycho sat there waiting for Mr. Avery. Only she wasn’t waiting. She was
writing
. We could see her lips move.

Every year, a cliff crumbled, carrying someone down; young lovers were particularly vulnerable. One day, Mr. Avery didn’t come, and Psycho turned his tragic drama into the stuff she turned everything into.

In preparation for the Grand Slam Finals, Psycho went downtown to the bathroom at the gas station—the headquarters of her early bold gestures—and cut off all her hair. Then at the throwdown on Saturday night, she rapped about her hair—pretty, pretty hair—she wanted it gone, and now it was. Beauty was ugly, et cetera. She did a freestyle called “My Mom Looks Like Hell—in a Good Way.” It was just Psycho up onstage, basically bald, rocking it, and her mom in the blackened theater, taking it:

Psycho’s mom left the throwdown that afternoon—or maybe it was another afternoon; Psycho adjusted facts for realistic effect—and drove into a baby, a three-year-old, at a crosswalk. It could have been the lithium, and—face it—a helpless baby shouldn’t be out on the street on its own at dusk. Still. Psycho told the truth before it happened. Her mom flattened like a cartoon character, as if she’d run over herself.

Psycho’s enemies complained to the school board: “Girls who talk dirty and dress skanky shouldn’t be allowed to work with kids.” But Psycho loved her community service, teaching fourth graders to speak up and shout out. She taught them spoken word, hip-hop. Corrupting youth was the best and purest thing in her life, she said. She loved their innocence, their depravity, their potential. She pushed her students to dig deeper than they thought they wanted to; she made them sound stranger and more interesting than they were.

AS A JOKE
, Psycho went out for baseball. Those girls like Greek heroes, ropy legs and broad shoulders, their attitudes of power as they held their iPods and baseball bats—Psycho became one of them. This happened in the spring, before Harald died, the season of the new rope swing going up at the swimming hole, the season of strapless prom dresses, high heels, asparagus and apricots. Softball took her—to Wineland Valley, Strawberryville—even Hawk Park and River City. After Maria Cabeza went down with her pregnancy,
Psycho became the pitcher. She pitched like she freestyled, taking a stance, throwing herself out there. She took the title at the County-Wide Throwdown with a freestyle on the dual nature of balls so mesmerizing, no one remembered two words of it the minute it was over.

Psycho’s dad couldn’t watch her play, or help with driving. Her mom drove to every game, a hundred miles down the 28, or the 116, or the 1.

PSYCHO MADE THE CUT
—we knew she would—for the Grand Slam Finals at the Warfield. Our team went in the van to watch. Psycho’s mom drove; she had a new paper license. Even Psycho’s dad came. First we waited in a line halfway down Market Street, where a bunch of thugs tried halfheartedly to threaten us. Then we were in, up in the second balcony. The lights went down, and the grand master pumped the crowd. A chica read a poem in Spanish, her voice riding like a Lexus over the awkward tangle of vowels and consonants, and it sounded so fluent—how could she speak so quickly?—and so wise. Then she translated the poem and it was the same old bullshit they feed all the Catholic girls: Love is everything, love fills the soul, love is our highest purpose, life pales and I am nothing without love.

Next came a poet with a big red flower in her ear, and a case number—#389214B—written across her T-shirt in Sharpie. She riffed about how she was going to be released from the welfare system the day she turned eighteen. She
had sixty-five days left of high school, plans for college. But without her group home, she’d be homeless. Her caseworker said that if she dropped out of school or got pregnant, she’d qualify for help. “You think I should get pregnant?” “I’m just giving you the information.” Then came a dude whose family came from the hills of China, via Laos, Vietnam and Thailand to Oakland.
What are you?
people asked.
What are you? What are you?

“Marry me,” someone screamed from the floor.

Somebody said, “Where’s Psycho?” And then there she was, onstage for the first round, and our team went crazy. We went crazy screaming her name until the whole Warfield went quiet, waiting.

IN THE STORY
of Amor and Psyche, the young maid is cursed, through no fault of her own. Her parents, obedient to fate, set their daughter out in the elements upon a rock crag to be ravished and used. Psyche waits. A black hole surrounds her, the sky darkens, a wind kicks up, and she is blown upward and wafted into the valley below. Amor, whose job it is to transport the vulnerable and valuable virgin into the hoariest arms possible, instead takes Psyche for himself, not revealing his true identity. Psyche, who has been led to expect a miserable and oppressed existence, feels slightly relieved, sexually; her lover is sweet-smelling, soft-skinned and reasonably tender; her situation could be worse. In this
way, she begins to understand the possibility of desire. And yet she can’t see her lover; the condition of her marginal happiness is total ignorance. And, really, how long can that last?

After Psycho, more poets came on. They spat rhymes about police brutality and street violence, about nickel nines and Wendy’s parking lot, about Oscar Grant III being shot in the back on a BART train by the Oakland police while lying facedown, unarmed. The gesture—arms floating up and down like birds’ wings, the back crumpling inward—kept returning in poems about the streets, as if it were the universal gesture of innocence. Kids troped toward and veered from suicide. Palestine and the effects of white phosphorous shimmered in the foreground, and a Sikh kid forced the audience to point at him and shout out “Sick! Sick!” to duplicate the judgment that rained down every day on the turban he couldn’t wear to school. We listened, our mouths hanging open. The Warfield filled with the popping
sound of silence breaking. Psycho’s two estranged parents sat vibrating together in the second balcony, but Psycho didn’t come back for the second round. She didn’t even place.