Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

I moved, dripping through the dark apartment, to the window. The hotel sign blazing through the evening fog. Its aura occasionally flared out like a sunspot and I could feel the power spark into me through the thousand roots of my scalp, each one now flaunting a golden hair.

THE BRASS DOOR OF THE APARTMENT BUILDING SUCKED SHUT behind me. The night was balmy. I heard the bells of Grace Cathedral, thought of going there, sitting in a back pew, the bloodied light over me, heady as a red-wine buzz. Jesus would be everywhere in radiant stained glass, his face over and over like a man you loved or one you had killed. Bush Street was so steep I had to lean back slightly, which made the comforting city minutiae — the lanternish lights of Pacific Heights, the quiltlike Victorians and the sculptured bushes — seem distant. I held my arms forward to stop this sensation, then quickly let them fall, the gesture seemed crazy.

Maybe I shouldn't search for Bell, but to stay in the apartment was impossible. What did it mean that I wasn't the kind of girl who could wait, dispassionately passing time drinking wine or reading a novel? My instincts told me to leave him, it's what I always did when I sensed the first soft spot of discontent. I was the kind of girl who left men. It wasn't like me to look for Bell. And I knew searching was no different than putting on the teddy or dyeing my hair. I thought of my mother, how when my father threatened to leave her, she started to take longer to get ready and always wore a bright shade of red lipstick. . suddenly she was working so hard to be loved.

At first the nights were cozy, I’d make soup and we'd lounge on the bed reading the paper, the radiator crackling. The night was distinctly outside and we were safe in its center. Now, the night is like poisonous gas and infiltrates every room. And Bell, like a whore or a junkie, has changed day into night. My love has splintered, so I saw him everywhere. Inside storefronts and bars, in the shiny elongated cars, even in the eyes of a big-assed woman in pink pants, and a tall thin man with a shaggy mustache like a Texas cowboy. The bourbon exacerbated Polk Street's seedy carnival ambience.

The Motherlode was much like other gay bars on the block, filled with men in casual clothes. The disco music was so loud it shivered the glass. Most watched the large video screen showing a man on all fours on top of a bar, a leather monster, with a little chauffeur's cap and a black leather vest. His pants were around his knees. An identical man was jerking his fist into the first man's anus. The crowd watched, but no one seemed particularly interested. Instead of arousing the men, it seemed to make them shy, and together with the bar's decoration — crepe paper and silver stars — the place had the atmosphere of prom night.

On the corner, a covey of young men waited between windows filled with vinyl shower curtains, sensuous as tongues. All were thin as eels and there was one peroxide blond with a complexion so puckered it resembled the surface of the moon.

His hips were pressed forward and he wore a leather belt with straps circling his thighs. I couldn't help staring, there was something puffed up and trembling about him. He caught me looking and said, “I wouldn't sleep with that,” and flipped his chin toward me. There was a riff of laughter from the others. I tried to avoid them, but the blond stepped forward and nudged me, startled me enough so I lost my balance and stumbled toward the glittery cement. When I tried to stand he thrust his hips into my face. My lips brushed the grainy texture of his jeans. He laughed, his head haloed by the moon.

I stood, ran. My face burned and I yelled, “Assholes!” and the blond camped back, “For sale!”

My teeth clenched and there was that shifting and shaky feeling again. I was terrified that Bell was going back to the boys.

* * *

THE BLACK ROSE HAD A POSTAPOCALYPTIC FEEL, AS IF BURNT out and only marginally re-established. The interior was black with low ceilings and any light was random and murky. I noticed particularly the metal cone fireplace and how the bartender stoked and tended the fire diligently, as if his were the last embers on earth. It wasn't a gay bar like most of the places off Polk Street, but there was a smattering of queens among the punks with nose rings and ruddy-cheeked old-timers at the bar. All of them, as well as the people in the deep booths and at the carved tables in back, came for the cheap beer. A screamy song blasted from the jukebox. And though I came to wait for Bell, because he had a drink at the Black Rose every night, I was relieved he wasn't here. What would I say? I felt strange for pursuing such an awkward situation. I thought of crazy things: I would walk up to him and tell him my mother died, I would say an old boyfriend called, tell him a magazine wanted my photographs or maybe go all the way and pretend to be pregnant.

But I hated myself for thinking like that. Why should I need anything interesting or provocative to say? It reminded me of the sudden and forced interest my mother took in my father's middle-aged hobbies after he threatened to leave, of how once in the car searching for the church softball game she almost started to cry because we couldn't find the playing field.

I ordered a bourbon and sat in the back. Scribbling on my napkin I wrote, Just give me back this one , then Love is not based on worth and No one is dying from this. I wrote and rewrote that, and because it was true I felt overly dramatic, even stupid. I realized I was writing phrases with a vague thought that Bell would see them. The idea that everything I did was generated by him made me feel dismal.

Why was Bell so dissolute? When I confronted him on his wanderings, he would say I was selfish to think I was responsible. It had to do with his father, he'd say, how motionless his face had been the moment he died, how the slack skin around his chin reminded Bell of his own loosening flesh. “Do you know how terrible it is to wear the skin of a dead man?” he would say.

Bell came in then, followed by a young man. I knew I wouldn't speak to him. He was intimidating, even stellar. At first I thought the young man was Kevin, but he was one of Bell's old lovers. Kevin was older now, and besides he lived in Los Angeles and was getting married soon. On closer look, the man was tiny, not young. He had red hair and a quick satyric way of moving.

Bell looked exhausted, hallowed and light, almost weightless. They sat at a far table, the little man toward me and Bell in profile. I couldn't hear what they said, but it was easy enough to see their faces, though they couldn't see mine. I read their expressions as if I were reading the ingredients of a bottle of poison I swallowed by mistake. Bell's concentration and ease made me shiver. It reminded me of our first dreamy months, when he teased me playfully without malice, when our moral structure seemed identical. But these same gestures were ominous now. And there was a growing leisure to his movements that made him seem disinterested in whatever the little man was saying. He was acting, as he always did, resistant, withholding. In bed Bell would lean his bare shoulders up against the wall, always waiting for me to come to him. The little man talked with his mouth wide open and gesticulated with his chin. After every statement he stopped and looked intensely into Bell's face.

Bell gazed off, blew long indifferent tendrils of smoke. This discourse was beginning to look like an interrogation. Bell rebuked, and I knew that then he spoke about his latest idea, that no one ever had an original idea, any notion was a confluence of news, former ideas, history, music, and you were just one of many who pulled it down out of the air. The little man was chastised, cast his eyes down, then grabbed Bell's wrist. He twisted it back and said something urgent.