Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

“I can't, I just keep thinking of incidents that make me writhe.” He looked into his gin and began to fold his napkin into smaller and smaller squares. The bartender brushed near us with a wrapped grocery-store log and placed it on the fire. It didn't give off any heat, but the flames were green and purple like a bruise.

“When he died I saw a demon, furred, batlike, crawl out of his mouth.” Bell's eyes closed and tears dripped through his lashes down his cheek.

I put my hand over his, squeezed. He opened his wet eyes and said, “You don't understand how I'm already in hell.” He stood and walked back to the bathroom.

A man at the bar stared at me. He had a full face and wore a leather jacket that tightened at his wrists with zippers. He narrowed his eyes on me. I got nervous thinking he was a customer at Carmen's. I was almost sure not. There was something appealing about him that told me he didn't pay for sex.

The man walked over. “So,” he said, and it was the humid hot house smell and his fat calloused fingers that made me realize it was the stranger from Madison's room.

Bell walked up, took his seat in the booth. “Friend of yours?” he asked.

I couldn't think of anything to say and besides all the air in the place seemed to be gone. “Please go,” I said stiffly.

“Why you working this faggot?” the stranger said.

“What?” Bell's face reddened as he looked from the man to me. The stranger took a swig from my glass. Bell rose up off the bench, but the stranger pushed him back into the booth.

“You see,” he said, “it's my job to tell little fags like you the secrets about their girlfriends.”

“What's the truth about you?” Bell asked. “That you try to get girls off the school bus, that you have herpes, that you fucked your mother?”

“You little fuck.” He grabbed Bell, pulled him from the booth, moved him over to the exposed brick wall and raised his arm. Bell's eyes bulged. The bartender's voice was loud. “No goddamn fights in the Rose.” Then he was on the stranger, pulling him back, telling him to act civilly or he'd kick his butt out onto the street.

Bell was upset, he told me he'd wait outside and walked swiftly to the door.

I watched the stranger as he glared at the bartender walking back to the bar. “Did Madison tell you I was waiting in her room?” I asked.

The stranger nodded, grabbed my wrist. “Have that door open,” he said. “I'll be coming around.”

WHEN BELL SAW ME COME OUT OF THE BLACK ROSE HE TURNED his head. He was waiting in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. Everything was horrible, but it had always been like that, and I felt relieved, the pressure to keep things nice was gone. When I came near, he dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his shoe.

“I won't be able to think of anything else but your delicate hips fucking that thing.”

Nervously, I fingered the lapel of his coat. “It's easier than thinking of us together in some sort of regular life.”

He didn't answer and we stood in dry silence. I remembered a day we'd walked to the pond with the swans in Golden Gate Park, how he'd touched my hair as the birds rose and I looked up into his face.

I PASSED THE TATTOO MUSEUM, SEXPLOSION AND THE LUSTY Lady. On the corner of Eddy and Taylor a man in a wheel-chair was peddling paper roses that lit up in the middle. And a little farther up a man in a jogging suit, holding a baby on his shoulders, tried to sell me a bus transfer. The strong wind blew trash around the street and there was a skinny junkie in corduroy bell-bottoms smoking crack in a doorway. I ducked into an Arabian deli and bought a quart of beer, stood in front of the porno-video shop looking at the blue lava lamps in Carmen's upper windows. I drank recklessly thinking it would excite the men talking out front. It felt right drinking beer, one eye on the lava lamps and the other on the soft-porn movie playing on the screen in the window. I looked for my reflection, but there wasn't any. Chilly, I pulled my shirt-sleeves over my wrists. It didn't really surprise me that Madison had the stranger fuck me. She didn't believe in equality, she manipulated me like a slave. Her philosophy was seductively dangerous.

I'd taken my parents too literally, because it was clear now I wasn't a princess. My emotions were complicated, but no better than the whores’ at Carmen's. Liars attracted me because I was one myself. I was like all women who have great fidelity to their memories and delusions.

The empty quart made a hollow scratchy sound as I set it against the brick wall. I went in the back door of Carmen's, up the dim stairway. The fishtanks seemed louder than usual and the black light made the white shag purple. Between blasts of strobe light Susan danced in her window. I walked straight up the spiral steps into Madison's room. She sat at her dressing table with her head tipped forward. At first I thought she was praying, but then I saw the syringe and rubber tube behind her. She was asleep and I walked closer, saw that the roots of her splayed hair were dirty blond and how the veins of her arm were bruised. She lifted her head and I stepped back.

“I can always tell when someone is watching me,” she said.

“I ran into the guy you sent over to fuck me.”

“And?” Madison sat up, laughed awkwardly.

“Fuck you, Madison! You might as well have raped me yourself.”

“What's the big deal? You're already past your prime, every man you fuck has and is going to fuck someone else.”

It took all my willpower not to hit her. “I can't believe you think being a whore helps.”

“It helps me,” she said, flopping onto the bed.

“You're sick,” I said.

“Meaningful relationships flutter between two things, convention and sentimentality.”

“Some stranger can't mean more than a lover or someone in your family.”

“That's the point. . they do to God and they do to me. . This is silly,” she said. “Come over here. Do you want me to say you mean something to me?”

When I didn't answer she said, “You're so predictable.” She unbuttoned her shirt, showed me her pale cleavage, her hard pierced nipples. “I'll touch you with an incident from my sad sad childhood, how my father raped me, how my mother was murdered. . then maybe you'll kiss me.” She pulled her blouse off one shoulder and her breasts goose-pimpled. “You want your life to be like a movie,” she said. “That's why you won't come to me. . because it's not perfect enough. For you, everything is ruined before it even begins. Do you want me to tell you I love you?” she said.

I still wouldn't come to her and this made her angry, she clicked her jaw.

“You'll see,” she said. “Relationships are like wallpaper patterns, you think you're moving forward but you're always caught in your own obsessions.”

“You are already dead,” I said to her. It hadn't been what I intended to say, but it seemed true enough.

She jumped up from the bed and flew at me, chased me down the stairs. “I know what you're thinking!” she screamed. “Get out of here with all your true-love bullshit!”

PIG SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM ON THE CRIMSON VICTORIAN, tarot cards spread out over the marble coffee table. She looked very put together in her huge gabardine suit and pinkish wig. Her bracelets jingled.

“I absolutely knew in my heart of hearts you'd return.” She patted the sofa near her signaling for me to sit down. Pig's body heat was like a radiator. I leaned into her and she put her arm around me. “You just can't wear your heart on your sleeve dear,” Pig said, “unless you have big teeth. Not everyone is as good as you at falling in love.” She pressed my head into her breast and smoothed down my hair. “I knew a man once, met him in a café reading working-class poetry. He had these dreamy bedroom eyes. He told me right away that his mother had died lately of a heart attack, that he'd once accidentally killed a man with his car and that his girlfriend was a whore. His pupils were dilated and I saw the raised keloid scars on his wrists. He carried his red wine over to my table and told me that a little boy had found a dead baby in the woods. The boy thought it was an angel because clenched in its stiff blue hand was a white feather. What I'm saying,” Pig said, “is that horror is everywhere, it's the rule, not the exception. Life is a disease.” Pig paused, her breath smelled of wintergreen, she swung her fat leg gently but it knocked the coffee table. “After so many broken hearts, the really bloody kind — I've decided it's better to rely on memories. I sift mine, refine them, till they are like jewels in a black velvet bag.”