These Streets Are Hard on a Girl

THESE STREETS Are Hard on a girl

That’s the thing about this city: these streets are hard on a girl. You've known this for a while, but when you hold her head in your lap n watch her broken eyes stare up at you for the eleven minutes before the ambulance takes her away, you begin to know it in a different way. Two pink lines -- pale blood -- leak from her nose to where her lips peaked. They are still damp to the touch, but they are already cold.

  You'd met Mike at the old Drop-in the summer before, n when you’d bumped into him at the bus stop and found he had molly and acid & plenty of weed, you’d gone back to his place where you met Magen. Mike had a one bedroom studio where they all lived: Mike, Magen, the mom, n Mike’s girlfriend. Magen was getting over a cold, so she was in bed all weekend -- n you couldn’t make your eyes stop looking at her. You don't stare at girls. You just don’t. It's rude; & they can't look at you while you’re looking at them, n you want them to look at you. But Magen was just about the prettiest thing you've ever seen n she couldn't look at you while she was sleeping anyway, so you just stared away. Like you were trying to memorize her. That's what you will tell yourself later. After everything happens. I’ll tell you about it -- all of it -- after you get to know me a little better.

  As pretty as she was, what killed you about Magen was her writing. God could that kid write. Straight street. The poetry of asphalt & concrete & graffiti. One of your ambitions as a writer is to bring the language of the street into mainstream literature, cuz that shit’s poetry, & here’s this girl, this dazzling thing, scribbling bar after bar after bar. After bar. Every line takes a little more of your breath away, & after reading about half a page & falling right-the-fuck-head-over-the-fuck-heels, you ask her what does she read & she says she doesn't & you say whaduya mean you don't read you’ve never read a book & she says yeah that's right I've never read a book & you jump up & fling the notebook & bellow I give up n you walk outside & blow your brains out. Not really, but from where you are now, maybe you should have. Instead you shake your head n light a cigarette & by the time you finish reading that journal you are very much very utterly in love with her, & very soon after this she is very much, very utterly, very dead. But it's what happens right before that that just won't quit fucking with you. But even without that part. My God. Twenty-one-&-supermodel-beautiful. MMore-mis-educated-tha-Ms.-Lauren-Hill, but just as street, & a prettier version of Cindy Crawford. 

  'Magen-Ben-Finessin'. Always finessin’. Here's to you, Magen. Knowing you for a weekend is one of my great regrets. I'm sure you were an angel. Or something better. I'll never forget your face, or how one neon night, not long ago, I tried to memorize it.

  Then you met Khat, or -- as Khat had been of your acquaintance for some time before she ‘decided to meet you' -- then Khat met you. You never looked at Khat without thinking she should have been made of porcelain. She just looked like a China Doll. A prettiness you're lucky to see three or four times in your life. Have you ever looked at something so exquisite that the slightest injury would not simply mar it, but ruin it entirely? That was Khat. Her yellow-green eyes as fragile as anything you’ve ever seen, winking out the kind of beauty that belongs chiseled in a museum. 

  You only got to have one night with Khat, & though it wasn't a perfect night, you know it will become the night you look back on the whole-long-rest-a-your-life as the most Romantic night you ever had. As you think about it now though, you remember that it was in fact a whole day, early early morning 'til late late night.

  You'd been staying down at The Drop, at the emergency winter shelter, n she'd just left her latest boyfriend. You'd noticed her weeks ago. Watched her work her way through boyfriend after boyfriend & were beginning to doubt there'd be a day she'd be single. 

  At precisely five-thirty, the lights pop on & the voices start shouting, & you pull your jeans up & stuff your blankets in your bag. Winter is brutal. Brutal. The days are barely endurable, the nights, grotesque. Ruskin Spear images but colder, & don't step in a puddle. Do not step in a puddle. If you do, kill yourself immediately. Immediately. N then the Holidays come & bring zero cheer; just bitterness n bad memories. Even Santa’s evil. Satan Claws. & don't get me started on the reindeer. Or those fuckin' elves. 

  Those who don’t have bus fare or gas money scurry into a 5'×10' hallway & huddle till the RAs get sick of fuckin with you & call the cops which they usually end up doing about 7:30, then you walk on your frozen toes into the frozen day & down the frozen streets as slowly as you can to the library which doesn't open till nine, & you get there at eight-thirty, & waiting there on your frozen feet in the frozen day that last half hour before the library opens is the longest part of your day. Every day you do this. Every. Day. No-one will ever convince you that these hours & distances were not intricately planned: carefully calibrated & synchronized to maximize your misery. 

  The library is your sanctuary. It is where you go to spend the hours, most of which you waste watching porn on your phone & going to the bathroom every couple hours to jack off. But on one of these days, en route to this sanctuary, Khat comes up & clutches your left biceps in her palms & says very brightly:

  'I decided to meet you.'

 & when she does this everything inside you melts n rolls around like you've just swallowed a shot of the best whiskey the world's ever seen, & the two of you spend all day & night adoring one another. But you won’t let yourself fall in love on these streets. You're too fragile. So you won't even let yourself kiss Khat; knowing that if you were to kiss this girl, she would bloom for you like Daisy for Gatsby, & wonderful as that might be, you know nothing can work on these streets & you have no idea where this wisdom comes from, because you are not wise. If there is one thing you know about yourself, it is that you are not wise.

  Since a date with you wouldn't be a date with you without getting lost, you get lost trying to find your way back to the Drop, & Khat has bad feet, so she's not real fond of all this extra walking, & at some point she asks how you got lost & keeps muttering about 'one turn,' & while you’re stuttering something, she stops & turns you n looks at your eyes, n says,

  'Your answer is ridiculous, sir.' N you say,

  'Yeah well they usually are, but I'll use lotsa syllables & every once in a while luck into a charming phrase,’ & you don’t know where this comes from because you are not at all witty. If there’s one thing you know about yourself, it is that you are not witty. & while you’re adoring Khat & thinking about China dolls, the night very suddenly snaps into focus, & it is very suddenly very much like you are in very many places at the same time: you're in that hallway the first time you noticed Khat; & you're holding Magen's hand looking at her palm; & you're back there on the road where Khat grabbed your arm, & you're holding Magen's head in your lap watching her broken eyes; & you're here, now, at the ice-skating rink in Fountain Square, with a pale glass ghost at your side, inside a black satin night under all those diamonds winking like cold halos stuck in the sky or pink-pin-pricks poking out of the sky, like God had sewn the stuff of night for just you two. The only word for it is magic, even holy is not enough.

  & you'll never forget the day she came floating over to you like the ghost she has become and perhaps always was. She was just so sad, handing you a pile of crumbled papers -- her psyche ward discharge. Her voice shaking, trying so hard to get the words out, cuz she just had to have you hear:

  'I knew you'd be waiting for me.'

  Like it was the most important thing in the world to make you understand that she knew there was still someone in the world who gave a shit about her, and how much that meant to her. And it was the strangest thing. You've got a college degree. You know better than to believe in this shit. You just know better. But you always sat in the same chair in the same spot at the library, but today you know she will be walking into the library. So you sit on the marble bench where you can see both entrances: Walnut on one side & Vine on the other; & less than five minutes after you take this seat, Khat comes floating right over to you. . . .

  My God. Poor Khat.

  She was already so broken when she got to you. Poor broken porcelain Khat. You were so lovely, & you gave me my favorite compliment:

  'Don't you see how people are drawn to you,' you'd said. & I've been watching them ever since. All those meditations on Poe's desire of the moth for the star, who'd've ever thought I’d be the star? And I'll never forget that last look you gave me, just before they took you away this last time. We were sitting on that granite bench outside the library and I'd found a couple people to listen to me ramble on about race relations & we were playing DMC's 'Raising Hell,' & you were trying to conjure some kind of mock-disapproval into that doll's face of yours, but you just couldn't hide the pride there. You always had precisely the impression of me that I hoped to give. You were very generous that way.

  & then there was Karen.

  Karen Kesey. 

  Six foot, two inches of blonde beauty and badass, with a pair of the bluest eyes you've ever seen. As blue as the sky. & as beautiful: two pieces of weather shining out of a wan, desperate, tragic face: two pale flags of the day. But this woman was a real American bombshell. & a real American hero: Karen was a medic, a mine-sweeper, and a sharpshooter in Afghanistan. I’ll let that speak for itself cuz I can't tell you one thing about it. All I can tell is what it did to her. How one day there is a knock at the door and two men with very red faces come in & say get the fuck out. How you watch her face turn into a child’s face. She might have been staring at a mine about way back in Afghanistan. Or before that. Back perhaps to when she stuttered into the world, screaming all the way from the womb to the terror of these United States; tumbling onto this great stage of fools without so much as a script to guide her. & I could tell about how those men keep telling you to hang back, that they're not getting ridda you, just her. If you can just sit still you’ll be fine. But you just can't understand this. If you’re being kicked out cuzza some anachronistic prohibition against fornicating, you’re at least as guilty as she. Plus, she was a hero. A real one. She'd risked her life for these very men who were so hell bent on putting her on the street, & you’d be damned if you’d let that happen to her alone, so you stay right by her side & defend her as best you can until you find yourselves on the street again, but together.

. . .

  I told you I'd tell you the rest of the story about Magen, so even though it’s been built up too much, I reckon that's nobody's fault but mine, so I better keep my promise. 

  Your dad's mom was gypsy. & had a 180 IQ, which is the only reason you credenced any of this, & she used to tell you all the time you could tell more by a person’s right hand than the most intimate biography that could be written about them. You'd know more about them than they could know about themselves. She used to say stuff like that all the time. But she was also very Catholic, so when she read something in her twin brother’s hand n a week later a tree fell on him n he was very suddenly dead, she thought it was God punishing her so she promised Him she'd never practice again; so you have to try very long n very hard to get her to teach you the very little you were able to get her to teach you.

  So flash back to the weekend at Mike's where all this started. You're all sitting around the room, smoking weed n bullshitting, n you're getting bored, n it's one of the few hours that weekend that Magen's actually awake -- n you wanna keep that shit going as long as you can -- so you ask the room if anyone wants you to read their palm n Mike's girlfriend says sure why not, so you bullshit your way through her rather unremarkable hand n when you're done, Magen wants you to do hers.    

  Now, you've never understood this, but for some reason, whenever you do a reading, people invariably try to give you their left hand, which your grandma always told you is "the hand you're born with." It never changes, while your right hand changes according to the choices you make as you live your life. The only reason to ever look at the left hand is if you need it as a point of comparison to the right. If, say, for some reason the life line on the right hand veers off in an undesirable direction, you may be able -- by comparing it to the left-- to show approximately where they went wrong n to speculate about possible ways to fix it. So even though Magen had just seen you explain all this to Mike’s girlfriend, out she comes with her left hand, so you give the spiel again n get her to come off with the right hand, but of course when she does it’s about as stiff as Julius Caesar's, so as gently as you can -- the poor kid’s sweating -- you ask her to relax it, and, finally -- at long-heavenly-last -- you've got her hand in yours, n you explain to everyone in the room all over again that this is all a bunch of bullshit, but this is how you do it, n you look down at Magen's hand, n when you see her lifeline, the whole-wide-holy-world quite literally flashes bright white like some species of divine concussion -- like God has taken a Polaroid of the world -- & even though you believe in exactly zero much of this shit, you literally throw Magen’s hand back at her, like a reflex, because while you've looked at a thousand hands, you've never seen a lifeline anywhere near this short. It’s about an eighth as long as the next shortest line you've ever seen; it is in fact so short that her hand looks deformed. Like she's grabbed that red hot medallion toward the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc n the whole thing scares the shit outta you. You can not remember the last time you were so scared. This shit's got you shaking; which like I keep saying, makes zero sense cuz you don't believe in any of this; but you can’t talk yourself out of being scared, so you make her promise she'll never do another street drug; talk to shady dudes at bars; get into cars with drunk friends. That she will look both ways before crossing the street, n you make that gorgeous thing promise you over n over n over & over again that she will live very carefully from now on, or at least till that scary-ass right hand straightens itself out, n finally, after you get enough promises out of that gorgeous face, you go to your doctor's appointment, n when you get back to Mike's just a couple hours later that gorgeous girl is dead. Like, dead.

. . .

And now you find yourself back in this place where you’ve been so many times -- too many times -- before. Find yourself here, safely away from the broken world and all its broken girls, and you find yourself weeping at last -- at long-heavenly-sought-after-last -- stuttering your own broken words at the broken sky n trying your very best to honor all these poor broken beautiful girls and weeping cuz you just can't do it right, no matter how hard you try, or how many times, and just hoping against hope to at least make some part of it make some kind of sense at last.