Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

She rubbed the track marks on her arms and tipped her head back, as if wanting the play of colored lights on the underside of her eyelids. I was amazed how she could go for days without sleep. How when she was hurt you could tell only by the movement of her hands. She had no one, so no restrictions either. She couldn't understand worrying about not having a boyfriend or a husband or a baby. Where was her weak spot? Did Pig teach her one person could love another blindly? Or had Pig disappointed her, shown how everyone who loves you needs to control you. Madison thinks that to devastate yourself is somehow life-affirming. I was reminded of a tar-covered cat, a pretty lizard that can shed multiple skins. She looked at me then.

“Susan's not here. Want to make some real money?”

I nodded. Madison stood, opened the door. We entered the noisy bar full of men's faces, numerous and similar as kidney beans. “It will be a relief,” she said. “Kneel down to it.”

FROM INSIDE SUSAN'S ROOM I COULD HEAR THE FISH TANKS bubbling and men's footfalls in the hall. The room had the glowing muted tones of a baroque painting, with its gold glass lamps and orange satin spread. The black garter belt and stockings were in the closet as Madison had said. I secured the garter over my hips and affixed each strap to the top of the stocking. I cracked the seal on the Wild Turkey and swigged directly from its lip, convincing myself I was waiting for my husband, who was coming up the stairs in his black banker shoes, locking up our house. His footsteps creaked on our wood floors, then padded on the carpeted stairs. He would talk to me while he undressed, say, “I think we should get some tulip bulbs for the garden.” I'd hear his hangers cling in the closet as he hung up his pants, then the rich smell of his body coming toward me.

There was a tentative knock, the kind a doctor makes to see if you've used the paper gown to cover up. I said, “Come in.” He was as old as my father, hair combed over his bald spot like a gym teacher, his features ragged and pointed like an eagle's. I started to pull off my clothes and he came over, sat on the other side of the bed and undressed. When I asked him what he wanted he said tersely, “To have sex.”

I heard him rip the condom package and that sticky elastic sound as he rolled it down. He turned toward me quickly and threw one leg over, burying his face in my neck. He forced his cock in and began a series of anxious little thrusts. There was a print of a princess with a pale pinched face above the bed. I noticed how his underarms stank and the ridiculous way he held his mouth pinched up like a rectum. Both his stench and his expression reminded me of the professor I had slept with in college.

The long hairs flapped from his bald head, swayed over my face. He warned me he was going to come and when he did his back arched and he moaned. Relaxing his body weight on top of me, he sucked air for a while, then rolled away, pulled his condom off and lobbed it into the trash can. While he was dressing he watched me with an expression of hate and lust. I leaned back against the headboard, watched him leave, felt the skin of my vagina tingle. I stared at the bulbous lamp on the nightstand, something seemed to be inside of the gold brass waiting to get out. It was an ugly lamp with a faux-suede shade. I thought of how the Nazis had made lamp shades out of people's skin.

The door opened again, slowly, as if the next man hoped to catch me fucking the first. This one was chubby with a little black beard.

“Put your butt up high,” he said, closing the door behind him. I got on all fours, cradled my head in my arms, and raised my ass. He unlatched his belt, then his fly, his pants rustled to the floor. Kneeling on the bed in back of me, “Up higher,” he said and pressed his cock in, dug his fingernails into my ass. After several long breathy strokes he said, “My brother is going to come in here and put his dick in your mouth, he'll pull your hair until his cock is in to the hilt and you'll moan.

“Moan,” he said, and I did. “We'll fuck you every day because you have a nice tight pussy and you liked to be fucked in the ass.” He pulled hard and told me he could kill me if he wanted, that nobody would care. I felt his loose tummy resting on my lower back like a rat. His pace accelerated and he made a sound like clearing his throat as he came. He tried to lean over me, to grab my tits, but I jumped away and went into the bathroom, wet a washcloth and wiped my pussy. I looked at the bright sink, the water gurgling in the toilet, the fringe of a towel hanging on a rack by the door. With my hands I pulled my hair straight back and looked into my eyes. I am still myself. I remembered after the abortion in college going to a blind shrink, how he held my hand, put his fingers around my wrist. “You're thin,” he said. “Is that a problem?” I liked how his one eye was yellowish and glowed like a moon. “You are a girl who has been lonely,” he said. “Why do you choose that dark path?”

Madison came in, went over to the bed and poured bourbon into a glass. I put my bell-bottoms on, buttoned my studded shirt. “So was it horrible?” she asked. It was a question similar to the kind my father used to ask when he first left my mother. “Are you O.K.?” he would ask and the only answer would be yes. “It's hard the first few times,” she said handing the glass to me. “They haunt you like one-night stands, but if you just relax, it happens. It gets to be like passing people on the street.”

“It wasn't really that bad,” I said. And it seemed true. Watching the skinhead beating was more riveting and I cried the time my mother called me a bitch. This feeling was so familiar, what happened to me was never real. Emotional experiences happened to others. I got the picture in my head of my mother, brooding, dangerous. And me leaning toward her, caught up in the aura of her pain.

“So now you know what it's like to do the thing most repulsive to women.” She took two hundred dollars from her pocket and passed it to me. I started to talk. . how good it would be to make a lot of money. How I would get my own apartment and a car so we could drive down Highway 1 to L.A.

Madison's cheeks flushed, she looked into her glass. “It's not about money, it's about death.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “I know that.” I was quiet, thinking it over. The glitter in her hair caught light and for a moment there in the half light she looked demonic.

She asked if I'd seen Pig.

“Not since I started,” I told her.

Madison wound the top of the bottle down. “I met Pig at a titty bar south of Market. If I let her touch my tits she would give me twenty dollars. Eventually she offered to pay me to come over and walk up and down her spine.”

“Then you lived with her?”

“Only after she begged me. I was a lap dancer and lived with a guy who sculpted naked ladies. He got hooked on heroin and started stealing from me. I holed up at Pig's. It wasn't so bad until she started to get that look whenever I went near her. One night she was looking at me.” Madison burlesqued Pig's dreamy eyes. “And I realized if I slept with her, she would think of it forever. So I did her and it was O.K., till she started moaning.”

Madison laughed. I knew I should too, but her attitude toward Pig was cruel and adolescent. It was one thing to say Pig had taken advantage of her, another to make fun of her sexuality. She doubled over laughing. I felt uncomfortable and watched the street light move on the curtains. Madison was acting crazy, but I didn't trust my observations because the chair ribs hurt my back and the rug was rough on my bare feet. My bourbon looked like a flame— I have done the thing I was most afraid of. . what will happen now?