Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

But what had I done to stabilize myself? I had begun a relationship with a bisexual man, and as far as economics I hadn't done much in the last year except take some photos, sew the occasional hat or vest. Instead, I hung out in the cafés on 16th Street, pretending to read Flowers of Evil. The Mission seemed like the last bohemia in America, moved in the sixties from North Beach to Haight-Ashbury, both of which were overrun now with tourists looking for Kerouac and Cassady in City Lights and the Grateful Dead and the Drug Store in the Haight. The Mission was dirty, you could still get a two-dollar burrito, sit in the Albion or the Uptown, watch leftist documentaries at the Roxie. Used-clothing stores were not vintage and there was a host of prophetic street people who drank coffee and wrote manifestos in the cafés. One, a thin man named Spoons, sat in the Piccaro Café, distributing to everyone xeroxes that demanded life-time driver's permits, converting all the storefronts to squats and allowing girls to marry as early as ten. He also insisted that every light bulb had a tiny camera inside and that it was a CIA plot that he never got any mail. The Piccaro with its headless-Barbie-doll art, people in oversized sweaters scribbling into notebooks, reading, playing chess. It seemed authentic, but I couldn't decide whether they were posing or if I was. This scene and every other seemed hopelessly self-conscious to me. I felt as suspicious about bohemians as I did about professionals in upscale restaurants or suburbanites who catatonically roamed the malls of Palo Alto. I had come here to be different with all the others, but it wasn't working. Maybe it had to do with sheer numbers. It was easy to convince myself in Virginia that I was an interesting person, but here I was no different than other women. I couldn't help thinking that thirty years earlier we'd be married, cooking, knitting, arranging furniture — raising a family. Don't misunderstand me, there are obsessed and brilliant women artists in San Francisco. It was just that coming here made me realize I wasn't one of them.

Where would I go now? My mother would buy me a ticket home. When I got there she'd load blankets on my bed and bring me juice. I could masturbate while listening to suburban husbands mowing their lawns. I could go back to Pig. I smiled at the thought of them as my only alternatives. I thought of things I could do in San Francisco; cafés, museums, the park. Then I thought about where I would go if I could drive. I thought about all the towns I had lived in and what I did in each of them. But nothing would satisfy me, there was nothing on this earth that could settle me now.

Madison came down the side steps. There was a silver tear pasted near one black eyelined eye and she wore hiphuggers and a studded belt as wide as a fist. She didn't see me, which I found hard to believe as I was conspicuous as a cow in this robotic place. I yelled her name as the door sucked shut behind her, then jumped up and followed her out onto the wet street. She bent over, unlocking her car door.

“Why didn't you come?” I said to her back. She turned, slacked back against the car sardonically. Her eyes frightened me a little. And I noticed, too, how her biceps were full and rounded. She had the twilling vibrancy of people in good shape.

“Did Pig tell you she wasn't my mother?”

I nodded, realized how stupid I must seem to her and felt embarrassed by my dirty jeans and black high-tops.

“I came to ask you something.” I took a step closer. She was like a cobra and I felt if I could get close enough to stare into those horrible eyes I could charm her.

“Why don't you just leave me alone?” Madison said. I was startled at the thin exhausted quality of her voice.

“I need some advice,” I said.

She squinted at me. “Why do you think I could help you?” She asked like it was an impossible and crazy thing.

“I don't have any place to stay.” It wasn't what I expected to say, but I realized now it was the reason I had come down to Carmen's.

She smiled. At first it reassured me, but then her lips spread in an expression I imagined a man might use on a young girl.

“You just don't get it, do you?” she said. But she seemed pleased. “You want to stay awhile, with me!”

I nodded. She got in and motioned for me to get in on the other side. It was a strange car with large rhinestones pasted all over the dashboard and a voodoo doll hanging from the rearview mirror. She turned the key in the ignition, her jewels caught light like broken glass and the radio played the same white noise as in Carmen's. Madison seemed to like it, she pushed the car lighter in, rifled through her purse, found her cigarettes, knocked two out, offering one to me. I bent toward her hand as she lit mine first, then hers off the fading coils of the car lighter. “You'll see,” she said, absently plugging the light back in, “there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.”

I WENT HOME LATE IN THE MORNING BECAUSE I KNEW BELL WAS at work. I had slept badly at Madison's. A dream of cockroaches crawling into my mouth haunted me and I was worried the stranger would be suddenly beside me, his thick cock nudging my ass. At dawn the couple upstairs started fucking. The woman made a sudden bark of discomfort, but the man coached her into pleasure saying, “Like this. Just like this.”

The apartment wasn't much different than when I'd left yesterday. There were still dirty glasses in the sink and a warm smell of eggs mixed with the clove cigarettes Bell lately favored. The ashtray was filled with butts smoked super low the way poor men do. But the place was already bizarre, the Bible opened to the Easter story and a mazelike drawing tacked up over the bed. The sheets on the futon were tangled. I hoped it meant Bell had slept badly, but to me they implied passion as well. With Bell there was always this OTHER. We never spoke of it, but I knew he was more excited with me after he saw someone dancing at a club or when he saw a man or a woman on the street he admired. And when he encouraged me to wear lingerie or get my hair cut short like a boy's it really wasn't so I would look sexy, but so I would resemble this other, an erotic abstraction in his head.

I broke the seal of the pint I had bought across the street and drank. There was something sustaining about the cold glass lip and the hot taste of bourbon. It was harder to break down the apartment than it had been to leave, there was something torturous about initiating the ritual of MINE and YOURS. I got the packing tape from the odds-and-ends drawer in the kitchen and put together the boxes. Loading quickly, I packed my shoes, several ratty sweaters and a blanket. I got the tiny wooden treasure chest my grandfather had made me and the paperweight with the white rose inside. I took my lithograph of the angel, my old felt hat and the tea strainer from the kitchen. Sorting through the silverware drawer for my favorite spoon I felt my heart beating hysterically. I got in the closet, sat against the far wall looking out into the room. Remembered how Bell had once lured me out of here, from what he called my poodle bed, by putting a cream puff on a plate on the floor. And how my parents had divided their belongings: my father left first, then asked my mother formally in letters to send a certain photo, his suit with the cuffed pants, his old jazz records. Sitting in Bell's aroma, rubbing his materials against my cheek, I decided that all this was my fault because I was the worst kind of person; a pretty girl with high expectations who wanted more, but couldn't define more and prayed it wasn't just a matter of marrying money. I heard the incessant traffic on Bush Street, thought of heroines in novels. They were always optimistic and naive whether they were old women or whores. They were always beautiful, as if only the lovely had courage enough to go out into the world. They were smart in a dumb way, that inarticulate intelligence men seemed to like. They did crazy things because of love and in the end always realized something stupid that was obvious all along.