Veronica (4 page)

The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and then sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures—flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying—that was just another place to go.

When I still lived at home, I had to share a room with my sisters, Daphne and Sara. Two of us would share a huge bed with a

giant headboard, and the third had one-half a bunk bed to herself on the other side of the room. We rotated to be fair. The good thing about the single bed was that it felt more mature, and that the wall above it had special cardboard cutouts our mom had made of huge-eyed dancing teens in short skirts and boots. Plus, you could masturbate privately, without having to carefully lift the blankets off your working arm and stiffen up to keep the mattress from shaking—and still wonder if your sister knew what you were doing. But if you shared the big bed, there was the fun of shutting out the third, giggling and whispering secrets under the blankets while the loner hissed, “Shut up!” Sometimes it felt better not to have to touch legs and butts together. Other times it was good to have your back right against your sister’s back, especially if she was asleep and you could feel her presence without her feeling yours.

We also had to take turns sharing the record player. Daphne and Sara didn’t like the music I liked—they still liked I the old kind recorded on 45s. They’d pretend to be go-go dancers, dancing on the tiny green chairs we’d sat in as little kids to eat peanut butter from teacups. Sometimes when they danced, I’d roll my eyes and hunch up over a book or storm out. But sometimes I’d jump up on a green chair and yell, “I’m Roxanne!” after the most beautiful dancer on Hullabaho. Daphne would yell, “I’m Linda!” and Sara would yell, “I’m Sherry!” even though whenever Sherry came on the TV, my father said, “There’s that big fat girl again.” Then we’d go wild dancing for as long as the record lasted.

My music was more private, and I didn’t play it loudly. I crouched down by it, sucking it into my ears, tunneling into it at the same time. Daphne sprawled on her bed, reading, and Sara maybe played one of her strange games with miniature animals, talking to herself sofdy in different animal voices. Downstairs, my father watched TV or listened to his music while my mother did housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachments are not made of sad flesh.

I didn’t know it, but my father was doing the same thing, sitting in his padded rocking chair, listening to opera or to music from World War II. Except he did not want tumbling or endlessness. He wanted more of the attachment I despised—he just didn’t want it with us. My father had been too young to enlist when World War II started; his brother joined the army right away. When my dad was finally old enough to enlist in the navy, he sent his brother a picture of himself in his uniform with a Hawaiian girl on his lap; he wrote, “Interrogating the natives!” on the back. A week before the war ended, it was returned to my father with a letter saying his brother was dead. Thirty years later, he was a husband, father, and administrator in a national tax-office chain. But sometimes when I walked past him sitting in his chair, he would look at me as if I were the cat or a piece of furniture, while inside he searched for his brother. And through his brother, his mother and father. And through them, a world of people and feelings that had ended too abrupdy and that had nothing to do with where he was now. He wasn’t searching for memories; he already had them. He wanted the physical feel of sitting next to his brother or looking into his eyes, and he was searching for it in the voices of strangers that had sung to them both a long time ago. I was so attached to my father that I felt this. But I felt it without knowing what it was, and I didn’t care enough to think about it. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Who wants to know about a world of people who are dead? I was busy following the music, tumbling through my head and out the door.

My parents were right: When summer ended, I did not go back home. At seventeen, I lived with twelve other kids (sometimes more slept on the floor) in a three-story purple house that listed to one side. I worked for a florist, selling flowers in the bars and outside go-go clubs in North Beach. The bars were little humpbacked caves with bright liquor botdes and sometimes a glowing red jukebox inside. I went in with my basket, and drunk people would dig around for money. Spirits swam in the cloudy mirror behind the bar, rising up and sinking away. The go-go clubs didn’t let me in, but I could hang out in front, talking with the bouncer and warming myself in the heat from the door. Men would say, “Here’s the Little Match Girl!” and drop bills in my basket without taking anything. There were huge neon signs above us, a big red one of an apple and a snake and a naked woman with big tits.

When we were done, my friend Lilet and I would meet in a coffee shop to count our money and have pie or fries. Then we’d take a late bus to Golden Gate Park and get high. At night, the park was thick with the smell of flowers and pot, wrapped in darkness and smells, hidden, so you could find it only if you knew the right way in. People sat in clumps or flitted in and out of the trees with night joy in their faces, sporting hot-colored hair dye and wearing zebra prints and pointy-toed boots. Sometimes I’d meet a boy and we’d walk so far up in the hills, we could see the ocean. We’d look up and see the fog race across in the sky, then look down and see trees, houses, knots of electric lights. I’d feel like an animal on a pinnacle, ready to leap. We’d kiss and put our hands down each other’s pants.

Or Lilet and I would join a group and go to a crash pad, usually a cheap apartment, but sometimes a house with a lot of people in it. Everybody would be high and there’d be music filling the rooms with heavy, rolling dreams. Some people found a private spot in a dream, curled into it, and slept on the floor. Some people made it a dream of kissing and touching; peering into a dark corner, you could see a white butt humping up and

down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.

I wanted something to happen, but I didn’t know what.

I didn’t have the ambition to be an important person or a star. I My ambition was to live like music. I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next—songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

I saw Lilet surrounded by music. She was seventeen and, like me, she’d left her family. She was blond, with wide cheekbones and pink skin that shone with the radiant grease of hormonal abundance. She fed the engine inside her with zest, gobbling stuff—big sandwiches and ice cream in paper dishes and French fries and bags of hot cashews from vendors—with both hands while we stood on the corner chatting, our baskets on our hips. She wore tight clothes that showed her stomach sticking out under the cheap cloth. She wore thick high heels and she walked proudly, thrusting out not only her breasts, which most girls did, but her stomach and her jaw, too, like they were also good. She walked like a dog—aggressive, interested, and curious, strutting alongside people with her basket, saying, “Buy a flower for the lady?” We’d meet for breaks in front of | club called the Brown Derby, which had a big derby sign outlined in sputtering gold bulbs, and she’d eat with both hands and talk about men. She was always with older men, not rich guys, but truck drivers and bartenders, drifters. They were

almost never handsome, but she seemed to think they were. She was always excited about stuff they gave her, or did with her sexually. I remember a guy who came by for her one night; he was walking a Doberman on a long leash. His face was heavy and caved in, like somebody’d crushed it, but his eyes were shiny and fierce as his dog’s. They stood together and laughed, Lilet petting the dog’s glossy black head and letting it lick her hand with its dripping pink tongue. When he left, she told me she’d let him butt-fuck her. “Did you get on your elbows and knees?” I asked. “No!” she said. “That’s not the only way to do it—you lie on your back and he pushes your legs up.” Right away, I pictured it—her head raised a little so she could watch him, and her stomach sticking up in a mound. In my picture, her stomach was radiant in the same way as her greasy pink skin, with gold rays coming off it. I understood pornography then, how men could look at actual pictures like this and feel things. Sexual, but also the way you feel when you hear songs on the radio—the joy in knowing everybody’s listening to them and understanding them.

I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality—clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.

In my mind, models and stars didn’t have any of this. Though I remember once seeing a picture of one who almost did. She was shot so close-up, you could barely see what she was wearing (crumpled lace); her lipstick was smeared and a boy mussed her hair as he pressed a joint to her open dry lips. Her eyes rolled unevenly in her head, so that one stared blankly at the camera and the other shimmered near the top of her eyelid.

I looked at her for a long moment; then I tore her picture out of the magazine and tacked it up on the wall of my room. I didn’t understand why I liked it. Even if the girl really was stoned, it was just a pose. Mosdy, these poses were like closed doors I couldn’t open, and this one was, too. Except that you could hear muffled sounds coming from behind it, voices, footsteps— music.

You see a lot more pictures like this in magazines now. Fashion has linked itself to music and so it, too, seems to expand forever into room after room. Maybe it does. But it’s nothing compared to those people dancing, or even to Lilet wolfing her food on the street corner.

Because we sold flowers outside bars and go-go clubs, prostitutes were some of our best customers; the nice ones bossed their johns into buying from us. Most of them weren’t beautiful girls, but they had a special luster, like something you could barely see shining at the bottom of a deep well. They treated us like little sisters, and we were tempted to join them when men came around looking for “models”—which everybody knew meant stripper or whore. Mostly, we would indig-nandy say no, but sometimes somebody would say yes. I said yes a couple of times. Why I picked those times to say yes, I don’t know. One was an old fat man with a spotted face and pale, aggrieved eyes. He ran some kind of business, maybe postcards or comic books. He leaned on a counter in the back room of his store and blinked his pale eyes while I took off my clothes. When I was naked, he looked awhile and then asked if he could look at me from behind. I said okay; he walked around me in a circle and then went back behind the counter again. “You have beautiful hips and legs,” he said. “Beautiful shoulders, too. But your breasts are small and they’re not that good.” He talked to me about the kind of work I might do while I put my clothes back on.

“You mean porn?”

“Sure, we do some porn. There’s more money for the girls

that way. But we do seminude art, as well.” His eyes became more aggrieved. “Do you care what the other girls do?”

I shrugged. Outside the window, electric music corkscrewed through the air. If he hadn’t insulted my boobs, I might’ve tried it out. But I just said bye and left.

Like a cat in the dark, your whisker touched something the wrong way and you backed out. Except sometimes it was a trap baited with something so enticing, you pushed your face in anyway. Once when I was out with my basket, a short man with a square torso said, “Hey, hot shit—you should come work for me.” He bounced a rubber ball on the pavement, caught it, and bounced it again. “I’m a pimp.” His face was like lava turned into cold rock. But inside him, it was still running hot; you could smell it: pride, rage, and shame boiling and ready to spill out his cock and scald you. I stared in fear. He just laughed and bounced his ball; he knew that for somebody what he had was the perfect enticement. The street was full of these enticements, always somebody grabbing you or trying to get something, and us, the girls, proud of our refusals, and sometimes proud that we went ahead with it.

Some of the kids I knew didn’t have parents, or didn’t know them, but most of us did, so barely in the past that it was like they were in the next room. I still felt their breath and the warmth of their bodies, but I so took it for granted, I didn’t know what I was feeling. I had walked out through the gauze veil of the song, not into killing and dying, but into colored lights, hunt and escape. But my parents were still there, like the wishing well and carousel, hidden in shimmering spots. “She’s going to make her way in the world,” said my mother. She stood at the counter, stirring a bright bowl with her brisk arm. She opened a book on her lap, and read a story about a wicked girl who fell down among evil creatures. My father wandered off into his music, but he came back in the cloudy barroom mirror to watch over me. I’ll be looking at the moon, but Fll be seeing—