Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

The shop was called Ozymandias. There was a Jesus costume in the window complete with stigmata paste-ons and a crown of thorns. Waiting to cross the street I picked out Bell moving among the carrels of magic tricks, the familiar motion of him pulling his jacket up over his stooped shoulders. The owner, a tiny unsmiling man in a baseball cap, dead-bolted the door behind them.

Bell turned up Jones and I realized he was walking toward the theater for his audition. I followed. He didn't seem particularly nervous or troubled, though on Sutter and Jones he stopped for a moment, sunk his hands into his pockets, leaned back against a brick wall and looked up into the sky. His leisurely motions reminded me of dreams. . watching your lover speak in hushed tones with someone else. Bell put his flattened hand against his chest. Could he be thinking of the morning his father died? How he had woken from a one-night stand in a strange house, in a neighborhood he didn't recognize, how he walked to the nearest bus stop and shyly asked the driver how to get home? Maybe he was thinking of how Kevin would drift into a café with an atlas under his arm and order a glass of red wine? How his nostalgic yearning for his teenage lover was about to be derailed by a heterosexual reality: Kevin's marriage.

I FOLLOWED HIM, AT A SAFE DISTANCE, INTO THE THEATER AND sat in the back row. It was a small place with abodons and other dark angels smiling down from the cornices. The stage was lit for a moody dream sequence, so dim it took a minute to see the green couch, the kitchen table and the single wooden folding chair.

People were scattered in the front rows where Bell had already taken a place. To one side an older man with a thick waist held a clipboard. Beside him stood a very thin woman in jeans. Their heads were ducked in consultation. The woman shrugged her shoulders, put her hand on her hip and lit a cigarette. Blue smoke rose above her short brown hair. The man called a name and a stocky young man rose and headed for the stage.

“You got it? Your wife is sleeping around,” she said. “And forget your lines. We're looking for something fresh.”

He didn't look old enough to have a wife and I could tell by the way he took the stage that he was uncomfortable. His face compressed with seriousness. He sat stiffly on the couch like it belonged in his old aunt's parlor. After a minute he jumped up and began to pace.

“You dirty cow.” His words echoed. “If I had a gun I'd shoot you. You're like a myna bird, you see something pretty and you just pick it up,” he ranted. Even from where I sat I saw his face was red. “It's not that you're fucking someone else, it's that you've had someone else's cock and didn't give me a chance to decide whether I wanted mine there, too.” He went back to the couch, sat back, crossed his arms over his chest and said, as if to himself and more slowly, “God knows I could never touch you now.”

I was moved by his naive delivery, his seriousness. Maybe he reminded me of my first lover? I could be kind to him, like a lover on a one-night stand, because I knew he didn't have a chance. He went over to the woman and she patted him on the back, speaking to him in an insider's whisper.

I remembered again why I hated theater: the melodramatic idea that a person could wake up over toast or driving to the gynecologist and see they'd ruined their life. And I don't like feeling responsible for humans on stage. It reminded me, with its confrontational emotionality, of the homeless men on the street who told you their sad life stories, then asked for change.

She must have admitted he wasn't right for the part because he grabbed his raincoat from the backseat and walked noisily past me, out the door. The man and woman spoke together softly, until the others waiting began to grumble. From his clipboard the man called Bell.

“Same thing,” he said. Bell nodded, walked toward the stage. He hadn't worked much since I'd known him, so it was odd to watch his attempt at professional composure. In our own conversations there were moments he would perform, his turn of phrase or the graceful way he raised his glass.

To watch him reminded me of my photographs, snapshots of shirtless boys in the Mission and Mexican girls in first communion dresses. I quit because they seemed voyeuristic. I started thinking in terms of the single frame. My brain felt dry, lacking the fluid it takes to link images into confluence. I think of going back to photography sometimes because people become intimate when you have a camera. Everyone has one expression that they believe is attractive or profound. Faces reveal a frightening self-deception.

Bell sat on the chair by the table, which strangely resembled the black table at home, hands folded in his lap, his face set toward the seats. It took me a minute to realize he was pretending. He let his shoulders fall slightly and was quiet so long one man coughed and another let out a long fed-up sigh. Without changing his expression, Bell said, “You should have told me, Jesse.” The stage light became as hazy as a million suns.

“Not that I didn't suspect it, coming home late with your legs clamped and the nape of your neck smelling like whiskey.” He stood and walked over to the couch. Even from where I sat I could see him snarl. “But it doesn't matter if you're fucking Kevin as long as you know now I will too.”

His voice continued, but I didn't hear anything. My head was full; sloshing water, heat spots, beating wings. I felt sick and fumbled out of my seat. The raw street light was brutal, so I stepped into a Moroccan deli, stared at the tubed meats, the squares of cheese in wedding-dress shades. It wasn't that he had used my name or mixed it up with Kevin's, but that I would never know whether Bell was acting or not.

MADISON WORKED AT A BAR CALLED CARMEN'S SNUGGLED BEtween the Fallen Angel and a brightly lit Chinese cafeteria. The block was mostly boarded-up storefronts. But there were a few older pubs designated by the San Francisco symbol for bar, a pink neon martini glass. Across the street was a massage parlor called the China Girl. I wandered into the Lusty Lady, a few doors down, hoping to calm myself a little before I approached Madison.

Inside, I saw a row of numbered doors and disks of refracted light from the glass ball in the foyer. A Japanese woman in high heels replaced my dollars with pentagon-shaped coins, nude girls on either side. The booth reeked of cleaning fluid, and disco music pounded through the wall. I slipped a token into its slot and a panel rose like a suburban garage door. Behind the plastic window, a forty-year-old woman danced in an otherwise empty room. Empty, I thought, so men could unobstructedly ease the woman into memory, take her home and into bed. As the door opened, her feet were revealed first. She seemed huge, big-boned with shaggy hair dyed black, more vulgar than sexy. She had a bored, tattered look that reminded me of a zoo animal. The woman that serviced the other angle was younger and slender with a pixie cut. They never talked or looked at the leering men in the windows as they swung their butts and opened their pelvises. I felt a tightening between my legs. Did I want the woman that rubbed her nipples and grabbed her crotch or was my desire elicited by the massive lust emanating from the other booths? I left quickly wondering if being wanted so intensely could make a woman feel strong.

Down the block, in Carmen's storefront window, a TV on a Doric column showed the horizontal chaos of static. Inside, the walls were sheet metal. Reflected shards of purple light gave the bartender's silver eye make-up and angular hairdo a futuristic glow. The waitresses wore see-through tops and glitter in their hair. Computerized devices sent out bands of fractured light like the flames glowing around a sacred heart. Black lights illuminated the white collars and cuffs of the businessmen gathered at the bar. Carmen's wasn't worn and melancholy like the Black Rose, but brutal and energized like an operating room. A hundred TVs covered the walls, showing continuous car-crash footage — splatters of glass, a panicked eye, puddling blood.