Suicide Blonde (7 page)

I lay on the bed, watching the light fall. I could see a sign across the street that said GirlsGirlsGirls. Above it a window with green drapes. The moon was rising over the brick skyline, outlining the highway ramps by the water.

I remembered Madison's note, heaved up out of bed and got it from the pocket of the mini-dress. I could still read in the half-light.

I was pregnant, on X, couldn't really focus on anything. Boys kissing in the corner. I couldn't get into the bathroom to take a piss and stood waiting in line, watching a tall thin boy spin around so that his skirt flew up showing his net panties. When the door finally did open two girls and a boy in a red sequined sweater walked out laughing. There was a strobe that made me happy, until I saw in its pulse my boyfriend with a girl on his lap. I turned my head—that is his way—I said eight times fast and then faster until it went with the music and did not seem so bad.

I put the paper into my little wooden chest, latched it, set the alarm for midnight and turned out the light.

T
HE BARTENDER TOLD ME TO GO UPSTAIRS. IT WAS A RELIEF TO
get away from the leering men at the bar. The stairs were steep, covered in bruise-blue linoleum. At the top was a white door with a black sign that said
PRIVATE
. I put my hand on the doorknob and there was a sudden buzz. I pushed it open. The hallway was dark and because I didn't know the geography of the place I stood still for a moment letting my eyes adjust. The air was warm and damp and I could hear the sound of bubbling water. I walked ahead. There were giant fish tanks set into the wall on either side, dreamy angel fish, transparent guppies and pencil-thin silver ones. The tanks alternated with doors and windows. Moving toward the spiral staircase, I thought the woman in the first window was a mannequin, but then she looked up. A well-practiced look, a touch of naïveté, a question, and the perfect amount of distance, the kind of distance that elicits desire. She wore a white corset, the same shade as the shag carpet. There were other women, one wore a blond floor-length wig. She spread her legs, showed me her rouged cunt.

The blue lights made it seem like the whole place was underwater. I climbed the metal stairs. Madison's room was huge with the same thick white carpet, round white couches and a bed with a fuzzy white bedspread. Madison was near a white table, sitting in a white leather bucket seat. She wore a baby doll nightgown and patent leather go-go boots and said without turning, “Could you help me?” She was carefully heating the bottom of a silver spoon with a lighter. She slapped her forearm, made a fist, told me she hadn't medicated herself yet this morning, asked if I would hold her bicep until she found a vein.

“Couldn't you use something else?” I asked.

“I want you to do it,” she said fiercely, “NOW.” She slapped her other hand against the table and I quickly clamped my fingers thumb to thumb around her upper arm.

“Tighter,” she said, “these veins aren't for shit anymore.” Her arm marbled, then turned pink, the veins puffed up and she finally found one she liked, in the delicate underside of her forearm. She loaded the syringe. I hated how the needle slipped in, as if her flesh were butter. There was a bloody backwash that tinted the heroin rose.

“Let go,” she said, pulling the syringe out. She pressed a tissue over the vein, folded her arm up, then slid back into the chair. When Madison saw how startled I looked she laughed.

“You're not one of those people who consider seeing your parents argue intense?”

“I think seeing a seagull with a broken wing on the side of the road can be just as horrible as—”

“As what?” Madison asked. “Getting raped?”

“No,” I said, “of course not. I just don't think there is a real hierarchy of pain.”

Madison nodded. “Fair enough. So what's your opinion of blow jobs?” Her smile was not a smile at all.

“Do you have some kind of philosophy about them?”

Madison rolled her head dreamily toward me. I could tell the drug was taking effect. “Well, many powerful things seem based on them: rockets, skyscrapers, guns. But, in a way, they're all pitiful. When I have one in my mouth I think of it like a dumb worm. It doesn't know the difference between a cunt, a hand or a mouth. And while the men think I'm either servile or kind, depending on their feelings for me, I know that it's a service. When I give head, I'm like a mechanic. The cock is a car. The car's owner, just like the owner of the cock, knows nothing about me or how I really feel about him.”

“It's all so esoteric.”

“Esoteric?” she repeated angrily. “Tell me how you lost your virginity.”

“No,” I said. “Let's talk about my job.”

“Tell me what happened, it's part of the interview,” she said. “And sit down over here by me.” She patted the chair near her.

I didn't want to tell the story and tried to change the subject by asking how tips were at the bar. She ignored me and said, “Please continue.”

“O.K.,” I said, “I'll tell you, but it won't prove anything.”

Madison looked up slowly, her eyes were glassy now and she smiled.

“I rode the bus down to Georgia. It smelled horrible, because an old lady in the back had shit in her pants and I remember thinking how the trees and shrubs on the back roads seemed lushly malignant. He picked me up. We drove to a subdivision where he and other boys from the college had a duplex. We went up to his room, it was sparse, anemic with calculus textbooks in a metal bookshelf and a mattress on the floor. He undressed me and placed my hand on his little cock. Afterward, he went to the bathroom and I found a gold earring stuck between the wall and the bed.”

“Let me tell you mine,” Madison said, she sat up in her chair and reached for the light, turned it away so we sat more in the shadows. I thought of dark confessionals and how when I take a new lover I always dim the light. “Sometimes, just kissing I got so wet my underwear would be soaked. There was this guy. He told me he wanted us to have a baby. Sure I fell for it, I chose him over the other groping potheads. But after a while he kept bugging me to fuck, he would scream every time I said I wasn't ready. He started to talk in baby talk to me and he'd say I was the same as little girls we saw on the street. I got angry. And while he was away two friends of his came over and asked me if I'd have sex with them. I said I would and they took me to an apartment. I think it was one of their uncles’. It was empty with just a single lawn chair and a card table. I leaned against the wall and they fucked me one after another.”

“And you never told your boyfriend?”

“No, we did it right after and I pretended to be a virgin.”

“I feel sorry for you.”

“Why? That's how I felt.”

I was aware of being clichéd, sentimental and wanted to show her I could be as tough and raw as herself.

“What's the worst thing you ever saw?”

“My father with a boner.” She laughed hard, then her face pulled up suddenly, as if she had thought of something horrible. “I'm not unwilling to die,” she said, looking at me with sleepy eyes. “After a while the men who come around here seem as inconsequential as flies.”

C h a p t e r

S i x

I
T WAS A HARD NIGHT, MY ONE-WEEK ANNIVERSARY AT CAR
men's. I got home around five in the morning. There was a sliver of light creeping over the horizon. I closed the curtain against it and lay waiting nervously for sleep. It wasn't sleep that came, just levels of flattened consciousness, one moved into the next as easily as lovers move toward one another in dreams.

I had expected the night to go as all the others: the slow setup and stocking, the first customers, then the frantic rush that lasted until closing, but tonight a couple of weird things happened. First, Susan ran downstairs naked, her bare chest splitting the crowd, swaying under the computerized lights. The upstairs door banged open and Madison pounded down after her. She pulled Susan by the wrist, twisting her arm so the girl's head was nuzzled in the crook of Madison's neck. She got her to the foot of the stairs before Susan stiffened her legs, grabbed onto the railing and wouldn't let go. Madison touched her chin, whispered something in her ear and stroked her hair. Susan's eyes went soft and she let Madison lead her up the steep staircase. She looked at me just before the two of them disappeared behind the metal wall. It scared me because I couldn't tell if it was a warning or if she loathed me, felt I was Madison's accomplice. Then at closing, while I was wiping down the tables in back, this jerk came over, one who ordered slippery nipples all night. Each time he said the name he grinned like a sophomore in high school. He came back, offered me a five pinched between his thumb and forefinger. I didn't like how he folded the bill long ways, or how he held it slightly away, but I reached out anyway. Of course, he pulled the bill back and laughed. I noticed the deep red capillaries spidering through his cheek and how his beard was wet around his mouth. I shifted my eyes down to my rag and continued wiping wet ovals over the glass tabletop. There was something anemic about him, with his khaki overcoat. “Sorry, I didn't mean nothin’.” He grinned sheepishly, revealing a sliver of chewing tobacco caught between his teeth. He held the bill out closer this time. Turn the other cheek, I thought and reached out for the money. But he pulled it back again. I scrubbed a sticky spot off the glass, picked up a swizzle stick and a napkin from the floor. The man just stood there holding out his money, his mouth clenched in a broad and scary smile.

The clock moved interminably toward morning. I opened the curtains a bit, the raw light reminded me of infected skin. Daylight was trying to trick me into thinking life was good. Instead, I lay in the dim light, listening to the early morning news on the transistor radio, trying to see what the people across the way were doing. I hoped Madison would come by today. I thought of telling her I loved her, not so much because I did, but because I was desperate for some elemental connection with her. Sometimes I imagined us in this bed, spooned together, her breasts pressed into my back, the soft hair of her pussy curling toward my rear. I knew I was lonely and that she made me feel inadequate, but I have always been attracted to people who make me feel inadequate. But I wanted to center my life on myself, not this continuous pattern of revolving around another. The first construction sounds of the day started down the block: the hum of the crane, a jackhammer. The workmen came to me, their tool belts flapping gently against their rears. I remembered how the stranger had held me from behind with an arm around my waist tight as a seat belt. I imagined Bell fucking Kevin, two young men connected in the missionary position. I tried to clear my head by staring at the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a daisy. I didn't like thinking of Bell connected to anyone but me. I thought about my former lovers. I remembered how a man was inside me and I was nowhere, and in an effort to arouse myself I would think
FUCK ME
, and just the visualization of those words, I wouldn't even have to say them, would send me over. That was the first time my sex life became two things—the mechanical sexual reality and the ongoing fantasy. The first fantasies were naive—a stranger licking my pussy, taking me from behind; each act I developed to the last detail, flat strokes of his tongue, his calloused fingertips on the goose-pimpled skin of my rear.

I pretended the morning traffic was the elemental purr of the ocean, thought of waves pulling away sand to expose coquinas. Their milky purple shells revealed for an instant to the sun, but then a mucusy muscle reached out and dug back under the sand. Finally, I was sinking into sleep. My mind's eye enamored with light moving over a huge crystal clamshell and over the face of the man that held it. Though the features were bland I knew it was the stranger. He told me in a whisper that the bowl held a thousand tears. He dipped his fingers, sprinkling me everywhere as if the water were holy. He told me that I was not alone. The clamshell rose then and floated transparently above his head.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT WORKING UNDER THE STROBES WAS DISORI
enting. I watched men lean against the walls, hips pressed out, eyes fixed on one woman after another. I chanted while mixing potions from the illuminated liquor bottles. In just one week I had become a judge of liars and learned about conquest—how a woman opens her body, lets her eyes go soft, how a man saunters toward her. I found that misery at its worse was quiet, how one moment swallows the next until it's the end of the world, closing time, when the little Mexican man mops up the floor and the whores come downstairs to drink sleepily at the bar. I saw too that the best-dressed men tip the worst, that men in toupees always demand fast service, and how a man who loves bourbon can be as grateful as a child if you pour him shots above the lip. If I made that trembling crucible which reminded me of the moment before you kiss someone, then they looked at me with the eyes of a lover.

I watched the clock, waiting for Madison. To me she was like a woman that stepped out of the sun. I wanted her brilliance, her ease, her power. Desire has two speeds: quick match flames, unpredictable as a wild bird stuck in a house, and slow-building long-term desires—a walnut kitchen table, hand-thrown mugs, the steam off the coffee wisping around the lip and a sleepy-looking man across from me with eyes the color of green grapes and long-fingered hands like a pianist's. But what did my worn-out dreams have to do with Madison? I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want. But Madison didn't want a normal life, she wanted to be perverse and powerful, to transform into a monster.

It wasn't until last call that Madison came downstairs and sat on the stool closest to the stairs. Her make-up was smudged, her fisted hands flattened against the steel bar trying to relax. Would I bring her a beer? she asked politely. I sulked, offended she had spoken to me like any other customer. I wanted to tell her I was desperate and lonely, but I knew at the beginning of relationships you couldn't show much need. If I did I'd be associated with the sad men at the bar. I suspected Madison was no different from anyone else. She had an animal sense that vulnerability is dangerous.

I brought her a beer, placed it neatly on a napkin. She asked me for another and when I brought it she asked to borrow my pen and began writing on the napkin. She held the pen loosely, looking up every phrase or two and letting her eyes sink back with thought. I watched her while pouring beers. It was getting to the point in the night when the drinkers get demanding. One accused me of watering down his drink and another said I overcharged. Madison leaned up on the edge of her chair. Her intensity made me curious. I went over, asked her if she needed anything else. She looked up.

“You saw Susan come down here yesterday?”

I nodded. “It was hard to miss her.”

“She got spooked because a man she was fucking said his dick was a snake.”

I shivered. “That's creepy.”

“Hey,” a man yelled, shaking his empty glass. Madison nodded for me to serve him. He snarled like a dog when he saw me make his iceless drink in a smaller glass. When I glanced up Madison was gone. But her napkin was there, as if she had left it intentionally. Stuffing it into my pocket, I called a lap dancer over, a heavy Mexican girl named Mercedes. She agreed to watch the bar while I went to the john.

The bathroom smelled like anxiety. I closed the lid on one of the two toilets and sat down, staring for a minute at my shoes against the checkerboard floor. I took out Madison's note. She had pressed so hard the ink had gone through several layers of the fine paper, each sheet with less ink so the second looked like Arabic and the last like a child's drawing of snow.

Susan said, “He put a snake up inside me, I can feel its scaly skin.”

“No,” I said, “that man was just tormenting you—he likes to think his dick is a snake, but it's not really a snake.”

She clawed at her crotch so the skin tightened, turned deep pink.

“O.K.,” I said. “I'll get it out.”

“Where will you put it?” she asked me.

I brought over a paper bag. She layout on the bed and spread her legs, I touched her cunt gently, then pressed hard on her lower stomach and made a scream like a TV evangelist, then pretended to throw the snake into the bag, rattled the paper to convince her the snake was inside, then ran into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. When I came out she had her arms around her knees.

“It's over,” I said. “We killed it.”

“You don't understand,” she said in her sad voice. “That old snake just comes and goes whenever it feels like it.”

I know the girl is right because the snake is in me, knotted around my intestines, hanging off my ribs, snuggled like a lover around my black heart. “I love you,” I said, addressing the snake, Madison, Bell, Kevin, Pig, my mother, my past lives and the new lover speeding toward me this very moment. I wondered if it mattered whether you loved one person or another. Weren't lovers interchangeable when you thought back about them? Maybe that was true in the future too. What I really loved was the note. I always loved odd things: the blue curaçao bottle, the wet asphalt, my own insipid fear.

S
HOVING THE BEER GLASSES DOWN ON THE BRISTLE BRUSH, I
practiced my calm voice, the one without the slightest hint of hysteria, the one that wanted nothing and would elicit Madison's desire. I counted out the money, stacking crumpled bills. Madison came down in street clothes, demure for her, bellbottoms and a halter.

“Do you want to go somewhere for a nightcap,” I asked.

She put her silver jacket on and told me she had to meet someone else. Before she finished talking I decided to follow her, afraid of what I'd do if I didn't get to speak with her tonight. As soon as she turned her back, I shoved the cash into the canvas bag and put it into the safe under the bar, asked the lap dancers to lock up.

Outside newspaper blew in hectic spirals and the sex-show signs clanged against their shorings. Her silver jacket ahead was like a fish that toys with the surface. She crossed McAllister, then Market. I thought she might be heading for Hotel Utah, but it was hard to tell, the way she zigzagged. Her route seemed random, but she turned her head up to illuminated windows so often I thought she might be looking for a signal: a lamp, a particular picture on an apartment wall. Who was she meeting? A customer? Her drug dealer?

It was colder on this side of the city. The chilly air caught in abandoned warehouses and boarded up storefronts. I liked the shades of brick under the artificial light and the sound of cars speeding overhead on I-80. The cement columns were covered with graffiti and, at the base of some, homeless people slept in refrigerator boxes. I wasn't paying attention and had gotten dangerously close to Madison, who was waiting senselessly at the light. This didn't seem like her. I back-stepped, paused at the far end of the block for her to cross. Red to green, but she stayed put. Her jacket glittered, her profile too took a verdescent turn. Somehow, her strength made it possible for me to leave Bell. Bell's romantic interest in pleasure seemed docile now compared to Madison's insistence on transcendence through sexual stamina. I liked how she treated her sexuality—like a long-distance runner. Love wasn't important, endurance was all. What could it be like to live with those stretched and skewed standards? It reminded me of my own crazy standards, like the ten or twelve things my mother had taught me were pitiful: like slipcovers, bad perms, those change purses that open like tiny mouths. I wanted out from under these, because intrinsic in them was my mother's fear of poverty.

My eyes came back to Madison, leaning on the light pole like a teenager on a summer night. This stance which seemed somehow disingenuous reminded me of seeing Bell on stage. She stood like a person pretending to be alone, not one who felt truly alone. Maybe she was thinking of herself standing on the corner, maybe the image of herself gave her pleasure, or maybe she liked being observed, knew I or someone else was always looking. She yawned, rubbed her eyes sleepily, looked at her fingers, closed her eyes, moved her mouth quietly—then puckered her lips and blew. I imagined the eyelash propelled into the air, twisting and turning like a twig caught in a current.

She was so absorbed, so appealing. What does she wish for, love, money, a little bit of peace? My mother had taught me that a woman was most valuable before she had sex and that her virginity was mystically connected to her stability. But Madison believed the more sex a woman had, the more precious and powerful she became. I didn't move or call to her, but still I wanted Madison to sense I was there, to call me out. I wanted her to say my name, to promise me something. Watching her reminded me of Cybersex, a place on Leavenworth where closed-circuit ‘IVs show a woman in bed asking the viewer what he wants her to do.

Madison looked up the block, to the right, then crossed the street. She was obviously waiting for someone. I thought of going around the block, pretending to meet her by chance. But it was somehow better if I watched her. It was this voyeuristic intimacy she loved. I walked back toward Market Street, saw the empty electric bus to the Castro coming toward me. I knew there was no way in the world I would sleep tonight.