It takes a couple days, but finally I get the idea: hit her. I’ve wanted to do it since that day with the donuts anyway. I wouldn’t have to break any bones or hurt her even, just piss her off enough that she’d decide it wasn’t worth it and she’d go away. The idea comes together all at once; I guess that’s what they call a stroke of genius. Inspiration. Even when I pick it apart it all works: Tracy likes Critter, sure, but she needs him less than Eeyore did, and Eeyore left when I made her. And it’s not like leaving would be some big loss for Tracy. I’m sure she did fine on her own for a long time before us. So I figure it won’t take that much to make her go.
I’ll pull her back behind the 7-Eleven just like Eeyore; no one ever comes back there. She and I can have our little talk, I’ll teach her a lesson, she’ll get pissed and take off; the fog will quit clogging Critter’s brain and he’ll be back. It’s perfect, really, the way things sometimes fit like puzzles when you see them in your head. I just have to wait till Critter leaves her side.
It doesn’t take nearly as long as I think: the next night Critter has to go meet his connection at Donut Emporium, which is fifteen long blocks down. I know it takes him forty-five minutes to walk each way, plus the waiting and the deal. Plenty of time to do what I need to do and solve the problem.
Rusty and Squid are up on Hollywood, spanging or whatever; I’ve been the third wheel with Critter and Tracy all afternoon, waiting. I keep my eyes on the purple sky while the sun goes down and I don’t even say shit when Tracy calls me Critter’s bitch and laughs. It’s amazing what you can sit through when you know something else is coming.
Finally the sun sinks below the low buildings and the clock inside 7-Eleven stretches its arms all the way across, 9:15, and snaps into place. Critter grabs Tracy’s ass and bends down to kiss her so her back bows backward and she opens up her mouth. I stand there watching while they of course don’t notice; I think to myself that I hope he likes kissing her ’cause it’s the last one. I feel bad for about two seconds that he’ll miss her, but then I remember it’s for his own good she’ll be gone.
It’s different pulling Tracy back behind the Dumpsters than with Eeyore. Eeyore was little, and soft, and I knew she’d come with me no matter how much she kicked around on the way. Tracy’s little too, but in this weird way she feels bigger than me, or maybe harder. That dirty too-strong feeling I’d had with Eeyore, like I was made out of rusty metal that could cut her? Well Tracy’s about twenty-seven times rustier than me, and sharpened up too. I know I have to catch her quick and get her back there quicker, before she turns that rusty blade around on me.
I get her by the arm, not hard enough to make her think I’m hurting her, and say “Come on” calm enough so she’ll maybe feel like it’s normal, and she does. She looks up at me squinting for a second like,
What’s this about
, but I just look at her like there’s a reason, like drugs or whatever, and she comes with me.
When we get back there it’s not like I planned, though: I just stand there. I can’t hit her. Not out of the blue. It’s not that I’m scared or anything, it’s just too weird. Like, there we are standing in the alley, facing each other, and I can’t just punch her out of nowhere, go from zero to eighty in two seconds. My muscles won’t do it. I don’t know how to start. Plus weirdly my throat is feeling dry and I’m all jumpy like I took some speed or something, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
But she’s looking at me like I’m wasting her time, and I know I’ve got about ten seconds before she gives up on me and goes back to the sidewalk to keep trapping Critter in that cushy fake world, one motel room at a time, and then I’ll be fucked. I have to do something.
I don’t know how I got her up against the wall exactly. I just know one second my hands were heavy at my sides like they were dead and I couldn’t pick them up, and after that there’s this flash that sort of shoots through me and I’m on the other side of the alley, Tracy between me and the brick of the building, and I’m pressing hard enough to flatten her out, her razor ribs sticking into my stomach, her sour junkie breath in my mouth.
Her tongue is like a fish, hardly even flopping around, just laying there all meaty and thick. It makes me want to make her move it. I know she could if she wanted to.
I try with my tongue but she just keeps hers dead, so then I use my teeth and her blood comes into my mouth all metal-tasting. That wakes her up and she slaps me, hard, one time, in the face. Her eyes look like a cat with rabies and they stop me for a second, just long enough for her to swipe at me. Her fingernails get near my eye and I pull back scared, but then I feel the pain from it spread like hot needles across my cheek and it makes me shove her by the ribs back into the wall and grab her wrist with my other hand. My muscles have that too-strong feeling surging through them harder than I’ve ever felt before, and I know I could let Tracy go right then, send her home like Eeyore and she probably wouldn’t come back.
I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, the right thing or whatever, and when I think of Eeyore’s big-eyed face there’s this soft little buckle that happens in my chest, squishy and so sweet it’s almost rotten. But then I look at Tracy’s zitty cheeks, her hickeyed neck, her skin washed out like an old paper towel, and I know the difference between her and Eeyore is that Tracy doesn’t have a home to go to, and the even bigger difference is that she wants into mine. My friends, my world, my patch of street. If I let her in she’ll chip away at me and Critter till there’s nothing left between us but a big square of sidewalk that she’ll come in and stand on. Then she’ll grab him by the balls and cart him off to some pretend-safe motel and tuck him in. Away from our roofless world and everything that matters and is real.
By this time I’m hard and Tracy’s limp between me and the wall. For a second I feel her stop moving; I wonder if she passed out and I open my eyes to check. She just stares back at me glassy, like some doll or coma victim. It freaks me out for a second, how different her face is now than any time I’ve seen it before, all the sharp and the hard gone, just soft like sleeping. My heart clogs my throat and a little bile stings up bitter because I can’t feel her breath against my neck. But then she turns her head to the side, looks down at the asphalt and breathes in, and everything’s okay again.
That rabid-cat thing comes back into her eyes like she’s remembering something. She rears back like she’s gonna smack me another time, and I say “Yeah” to it in my head, like I’m egging on a fight. I want her to slap me again so I can hit her back. I want her to give me a reason to smash her head into the brick. I want her to do it. When I imagine it, it feels good in all my muscles, like it’s what they were made for, and my teeth press together and I want to bite something till it breaks. She doesn’t hit me though, the bitch. Of course. Instead she looks at me and fucking starts to cry.
Her eyes crumple up and go bloodshot: she looks like a skinny ugly baby, the kind that’s wrinkled, and it’s gross the way her face is just so red and raw. She keeps looking at me and it’s like everything’s stripped off of her, like roadkill with the skin peeled back, too goddamn fucking naked. Throw-up comes up in my mouth again, but this time more. I swallow.
“Don’t,” she says. “Please don’t.” The snot is streaking down into her mouth, and her shoulders are shaking. I reach my hand up toward her, to smash her face or shut her mouth or something, but she flinches back into the wall and sucks her breath in loud like an asthma attack, sudden enough to stop me. I almost take a step back but I don’t. “Please please please just stop, I’ll do what you want just please don’t touch me,” she says, and she keeps looking at me, and it’s like I’m paralyzed by how naked she is; I can’t move.
Then I realize that she’s begging, and I remember who she is, and I see that this is exactly what I wanted this whole time. Ever since she showed up on my sidewalk, Tracy’s been trying to make me beg for everything that was already mine. Now it’s balanced out exactly how it should be. I look up at the smoggy sky and then at her, and laugh.
She stops sniveling a second and watches my eyes, trying to figure out what I’ll do next. I can see the thoughts flash across her sticky dirty face, calculating how she’ll run and what she’ll do and how she can make me beg again. I let her imagine it for a minute, hold on to it like something good in her hands, so she’ll know exactly how I felt when she snatched my shit away from me. Then I rush her.
I slam her up against the wall. I don’t care now that she didn’t hit me again. She’s done enough. The crying starts back up but I know it’s an act: she’s just trying to get me to let her go so she can go right back and steal my home away again. I’m smarter than that, though. I unzip her jeans, pull them and her underwear off her skinny hips and use my foot to get it all down to her knees while my hands pin her wrists back to the brick. Underneath my hands her skin scrapes hard against the mortar; I can feel it. It feels like her skin is mine except the bricks don’t hurt me, only her. Then I’m inside and her wrists and her skin and her hurt all dissolve. They don’t exist anymore; there’s nothing of her that’s real except for the feeling of her around me.
I don’t think about Critter except I know that after this Tracy will have to leave for sure and everything can be like it was before again. Every move I make rocks things back and forth so they finally balance back to normal. The combination of that and how warm Tracy is makes me feel like I’m wrapped up in blankets, somewhere in some big soft warm bed, almost safe enough to fall asleep.
i
fell in love with Tracy at the Santa Monica Pier.
I can’t ever tell her that. I tried to once and she kicked my ass. Just looked at me through those slitty eyes of hers and said if I ever said that shit to her again she’d break her beer bottle on my face. I kept my mouth shut after that.
That one night was different though, I think because she didn’t really know me and when things happen with strangers it’s different than with people you know. Or people who know
you
, really, is what it is: Tracy thinks she can keep anyone from getting to know her, and she gets pretty pissed when you prove her wrong. But that first night I was just a kid she’d seen around on the sidewalks. I knew friends of her friends in that thing that happens on the street when all the little circles of people link up and make a chain, but no one I knew’d had sex with her and I didn’t know her name. We both hung out in Hollywood, so it was weird that we wound up out at the pier, weird enough that it made us actually smile when we saw each other, start to talk. I’d been sleeping just south of there in Venice for a week, since the rainstorm of Eeyore and Scabius: things got too crazy up on Sunset so I took off for the beach with its rainbow fuckin’ flowers and old dried-out hippies who lugged their shit around in guitar cases. Vacation. After a while I couldn’t deal with the drum circles, though, so I followed the bright lights north to the pier.
It’s at the arcade that we see each other. Some hyper kids are playing that old-school game where you have a bunch of plastic guys all attached to a rod and you have to slam them around so they kick the ball onto the other side. Dumb. For some reason the fact that they’re yelling and jumping and getting all worked up about this stupid ancient plastic-guy game is pissing me off and I’m watching them, trying to narrow down my eyes to points so they’ll turn around, be scared of me and scatter. I’m full-on focused on my goal when Tracy comes up next to me. She doesn’t say anything, but I know she must’ve been there for a minute, because when I finally feel someone standing there she’s already comfortable, leaning back on her heels with her arms crossed, copying my stance. It’s weird, the switch from the feeling of total one-pointed focus on smaller-than-me people who I could’ve made flinch, to looking down and realizing that the whole time she’s been watching
me
. My center of gravity is gone. I uncross my arms and she smirks. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I smile back.
“Having fun?” she asks. I right away realize what an asshole I look like, standing there staring at a bunch of twelve-year-olds playing whatever the fuck that game is called, and a second after that I realize that not one single girl in seventeen years of my life has ever made me feel like an asshole, ever. I want to be pissed at her but she’s looking up at me with her sly little eyes through her blond stringy bangs, knowing I probably have zero retort, and she’s just so fucking cute I can’t hate her. “Not really,” I say, and it’s almost the truth.
I don’t let her know till later that even right away it’s fun with her around. Which is especially corny coming from my mouth because “fun” has sort of lost its edge for me; I’m not the type of person who runs around the amusement park and goes “Wow!” and is amused. Usually it takes some kind of substance, and even that’s just another kind of normal. But like I said, not one single girl in seventeen years has ever made me feel like an asshole before. It’s kind of fun.
“Well what the fuck are you doing in here then?” she says. “Get out,” and nods toward the open door, framing lights and boardwalk and past them the black of the ocean. I look at her and then the dark and say “Okay.” She leads the way.
There’s not much to do out there: photo booths and whack-a-mole and rides cost money and I don’t have much left today. Sometimes you can just walk around with someone and not do anything, but I don’t know Tracy well enough for that. When we walk by the Ferris wheel I think of hijacking the control booth so we can swing our legs way up at the top and make everyone freak out, but the guy in there is pretty burly, and getting kicked out isn’t worth it. I wish I had enough change to win her a fuckin’ ugly orange teddy bear. Which is weird. The whole thing is weird, how I want it to be a Date, how I suddenly have to Show Her a Good Time like some fifties jocko guy with his ponytailed blond chick out for an evening. Usually with girls it’s this: hang out, fuck, talk afterward or not. It’s not like I take them to the movies or something. And she’s not even hot or whatever; to tell you the truth she kind of looks like a rodent the way she squints her eyes and is so superskinny. But I don’t know: every time she smiles at me, even if it’s just a closed-mouth halfway smirk, I feel like I earned something.
Luckily I’ve got enough change in my pocket to buy her cotton candy at least. It’s funny seeing her eat it, pink ringing her mouth like dress-up lipstick on a kid. For a minute I see us from the outside in our grimy black and backpacks and piercings with her toting around this Barbiepink ball of fluff, and I laugh out loud in the middle of the boardwalk. She looks up at me with her red-stained face like I’m crazy.
It’s weird how fast you can spill everything to a person if you think they’re listening. That’s never happened to me before, the spilling part or the listening part either, but somehow I recognize them both right away. It’s crazy: Tracy tells me just about nothing about herself or where she came from; I don’t know if she’s got brothers or sisters or what her hometown’s called or anything. Normally nobody talks about that kind of stuff, I guess, but this night isn’t normal and I wind up walking along the lit sidewalk, telling her every single thing that ever happened to me practically. Next to the ringtoss she grabs my hand—well, not really grabs, more like our hands brush each other and she just hooks on—and all that shit they say is supposed to happen happens, like my chest gets all tight and my throat chokes up, and it’s like wanting to fuck someone but different because I keep seeing her face and thinking how right it looks.
Right about when my fingers start sweating she says “Let’s go down to the beach.” You can bet I’m happy about that, but it’s not even what you think—I just want to be with her in the dark where it’s quiet and I can pretend she’s the only other person besides me. So much of the time I wish everyone would just fuckin’ disappear, and the only reason why I don’t
really
wish it is that then I’d be alone. But now all those fuckers could die and I wouldn’t be lonely. Two birds with one stone.
You can’t go down steps or anything to get to the beach so I turn around and start backtracking to the parking lot— you can walk straight onto the sand from there. But she’s like “Where are you going?” and when I tell her she looks at me like I’m stupid and walks right to the edge of the pier. You can’t tell how far it drops in the dark or even if it’s solid below; it could be water or cesspools for all I know and I’m not about to just jump. But she looks over her shoulder at me with a face that says
What are you waiting for?
and then she’s gone. I’m not gonna walk through the parking lot after that.
It’s kind of a fall, to tell you the truth. When I hit the ground my ankles jam up into my knees which ram into my hips which shove my breath hard through my chest and out my mouth. But I land on my feet, so I can swallow the ache and fake it. I amble up behind her like I’m taking my time.
Halfway down toward the water there’s a place where the side of the pier is hollow and you can duck in, tucked away from the waves. It’s like a wet wooden cave in there, all salt water and soft logs. You’d think it’d smell like trash or something rotting but it doesn’t, it smells like sea and tree trunks, and it makes me want to take off my shoes and put my feet in the sand like some hippie from Venice. Which I don’t do. The light from the pier bounces off the water and into our little hideout, waves mixing with the yells from above us, and Tracy’s face is bathed in the gray-yellow glow like some underground angel and all of a sudden she’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anyone be beautiful before. It’s weird.
When she asks me if I have a bag, oh my God I’ve never been so happy to have drugs on me in my life. Which is saying something. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself: it’s perfect. I’ve got a needle, too, only one but she doesn’t care and when she sinks it in the smooth pale skin inside her arm I have this flash like I’m going inside her. It makes me breathe loud enough to hear for a second but by then it’s already hit her, she doesn’t care, I can act like an asshole as much as I want and she won’t notice the rest of the night. She hands it over to me and I could just about tell you it was better watching her get off than doing it myself, but that’s only almost true.
After that I kiss her. It’s like water, the feeling of it, and also like sleep, the kind that comes when you’ve been up three days and your head finally hits a pillow and you can practically hear every single cell sigh relief. Obviously you could also say that it’s like junk, the way it floods in and makes things better, but it’s different. It’s not just the silk-blanket numb, the Bubble-Wrap protection from everything sharp; it’s something realer, more alive. She makes me naked even though I’m still in all my clothes, the cuffs of my jeans getting heavy wet cold from the sand, and her hands feel like they’re erasing every lie I ever told even though they’re just hooked into my belt loops. When she reaches down for the zipper I realize I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean, give me another couple minutes and I’m sure I would’ve, but in the sugar rush of kissing her I forgot there was anywhere else to go. I’m not used to getting distracted like that: I have to admit I usually skip to the good part. But it’s like
all
of her is the good part, her mouth and her teeth and her skinny ribs under my hands and our skins melting, and we’re not divided into good and bad at all.
She pushes ahead faster than I would, but it’s fine: the normal equipment problems junk causes are miraculously not in attendance and mostly I just care that she’s close to me, I don’t think about order or speed. She unbuckles and unbuttons, lets my clothes fall to the soaking ground and keeps her T-shirt on; I run my hands under it like it’s sixth grade except this time I know how to unhook her bra. She’s so tiny underneath: my arms circle around her like our little cave surrounds us, like the ocean wraps around the whole pier and even the city, and the whole time
I’m
inside
her
. She’s the only person that exists besides me. I don’t have to pretend.
The next morning I wake up sandy, dried-up ocean caked in my eyelashes. The beach is full of burned-out coals and green glass bottles; the pier looks empty with the Ferris wheel paused and the lights dimmed down, like a play set or a skeleton. Tracy’s still asleep next to me. It’s the first time I get a good look at her, really, without her watching. She must’ve lost her T-shirt eventually, because she’s curled up in her bra and I can see her tattoos. India ink, mostly, and crappy. She looks different in the light, paler, her back scratched up and full of zits. Her body is all white and scabby red and bones, but I know I must love her because instead of being grossed out I just think she looks like some kick-ass alley cat.
I don’t want to wake her up because I know when I do it’ll be the weird thing of what’s going to happen next. Usually that thing only lasts a few minutes because I say I need some coffee and take off. But I have a feeling Tracy’s more like me than I am: probably she’ll be the one needing coffee, and I kind of want to drag this out forever. If I have to let her sleep the whole time it’s okay as long as we both can still stay here.
What’s crazy is when she wakes up she sticks around. I keep waiting for her to do all the shit that I do: throw her eyes over my shoulder like she’s looking for something, stop talking, start making excuses. Or else play the girl part and get all clingy, although I kind of know that isn’t gonna happen. But she doesn’t do any of it. She just pulls on her hoodie, yanks my stocking cap off and wipes her eyes with it, and says “Come on, let’s get a donut.”
We wind up hitching all the way back to the Winchell’s on Hollywood. I can’t believe the two of us get a ride looking the way we do but we do, and end up winding down Sunset, taking the curves too fast in the back of some rich guy’s Escalade who probably thinks we’ll go home with him but is too sweaty and shy to ask. All through Bel-Air and Beverly Hills I think about holding Tracy’s hand and don’t do it. But she comes back with me, all the way back to Winchell’s, and winds up sticking by my side when we hit my normal sidewalks and I introduce her to my friends and then finally I let myself think, Maybe she’ll stay around for a while.
I don’t make predictions about people, except I can tell when someone’s gonna be an asshole. What I mean is I don’t expect anything from anyone, not ever, really. You can’t. At some point everyone will always fuck your friends or hit you or hit you up, steal your shit when you’re sleeping, suck your energy like a vampire or lie. Including me. But everything’s been different so far with Tracy, so like a dumbass I let myself think maybe she’ll be different that way too. To tell you the truth I guess I’ve got some kind of stupid hope that comes from somewhere in the same vicinity as that fifties jocko win-her-a-teddy-bear shit. I mean, I can’t deny it. But I’d never tell her that.
For a while we do it everywhere. I never knew L.A. was so big. We get to know practically every underpass beneath the 101: Franklin, Gower, Sunset, Western, Santa Monica also known as historic Route 66. We duck just behind the guardrails two feet from the road and if we want to talk we have to yell above the cars. Mostly we don’t want to talk, though.
It’s amazing how a person can make a place feel different. I thought asphalt and concrete all looked the same till Tracy started taking me places and I started noticing things like smells and potholes and how each place we go is specific in a way I couldn’t even describe to you, except to say they’re all exactly themselves at exactly those moments in a way that is secret and ours. The other thing that’s crazy is that the whole thing makes me start using words like
amazing
and
secret
and
ours.
A month ago I would’ve heard that and called myself a corny naive little shit. I mean, it’s not what you’d think, all soft-focus lenses and movie bullshit, where the guy gets the girl or vice versa, and everyone laughs about how adorably awkward they are, and at the end you sniffle in your hanky and clutch the hand of whoever’s next to you. It’s not like that. It’s just that we both have these edges that’ve always scraped up against everyone around us, but somehow with each other they line up so they fit together perfect and no one gets cut.