Susan Steinberg: Spectacle: Stories

I once hung out with this shit group of kids and they were just such shit.

This to say I made some mistakes.

Like breaking into this one guy’s car.

Like stealing the stereo out of that car.

I was young and I didn’t steal the stereo because I wanted the stereo.

I stole it, rather, because I wanted the guy.

This to say I just wanted some thing the guy owned.

This more to say that nothing else mattered in that moment except this thing the guy owned, this thing that, I now know, was not the guy.

Anyway there was nothing else in the car.

Had there been a jacket I would have stolen it.

Had anything else jarred loose — a mirror, an ashtray— I would have stolen that too.

But the stereo was the only thing I could snap out of its hole.

And so there I was, drunk and standing on the sidewalk at two a.m., the bar closing, the drunks stumbling out, holding a car stereo with both hands, a kind of person I didn’t even know I could be, and my friends said, Run.

This to say I made a mistake.

Not because I got caught, because I did not get caught.

Because no one ever once got caught.

Because this was Baltimore.

And if you know the place, you know what I mean.

If you know the place, you’re likely from there.

I mean you’re likely still there.

Which I no longer am.

Which doesn’t mean I figured it out.

It only means a window appeared and I went through the window before it disappeared.

Metaphorically I mean.

But it’s not time for anything deep.

We’re just talking about this mistake I made.

How I can’t make myself feel better.

Because I’m awake and thinking the thoughts I think at four a.m.

Me, some guy, and it’s always the same.

Me, some guy, and we’re lying around a bed like kids.

Then one thing, another, his hands on my face, his face near my face, and just before it all starts up, I’m yanking a stereo out from its hole.

I’m backing out ass first from the car.

My friends are screaming, Run.

To say I shouldn’t have stolen.

But I’d fallen hard for the guy whose stereo it was.

And when I fall hard, I fall like the proverbial ton of whatever, and by fall I mean I splinter everything around me.

Another might call it apocalyptic.

By another, I might mean the guy himself, the victim I mean, the guy headed away from me fast.

He might use the word apocalyptic when cracks form in the asphalt, when windows shatter, when women cover their daughters’ eyes.

When he floats upward to heaven.

I’m not being melodramatic.

You’ve never been there to see it.

And this time, like every time, the entire world had splintered.

And because he’d been all night in the bar talking to some girl, I was splintering within this splintered world.

It was very complex.

The strategy I mean.

Like if he stood there, I stood here.

If he looked at me, I looked away.

And on and on and on.

God.

It was summer and it was a hundred degrees.

This is not an excuse but I’m just saying.

It was a hundred degrees and my friends said, Run, and we all ran up the street to my car, all of us too drunk to drive.

And six of us kids squeezed into the car, two up front, four in back, and somehow I ended up in the back, even though it was my car.

Somehow I ended up sitting on some guy’s lap, the stereo on top of mine.

And somehow one of the guys ended up in the driver’s seat, and he started the car and drove closer to the car I stole the stereo from, and we sat there.

And the radio, meaning the piece of shit radio in my car, was playing something from that summer, and the kids up front were singing, and there I was in the back of my car, some guy I didn’t like gripping my hips.

I didn’t know then what we were waiting for, sitting there outside the bar.

We were waiting for the guy whose stereo I stole to walk out.

We were waiting for the guy whose stereo I stole to get into his car and see that his stereo was gone.

But then what.

I mean what were we going to do about it.

That was the thing.

I had the stereo, but now what.

We’d hooked up, me and the guy whose stereo I stole, in the front of his car, the week before I stole the stereo and the week before that.

And the liquor, those nights, was doing its thing.

The stereo was doing its.

And the guy did this thing those nights where he tilted his head too far to one side when he moved in toward me.

There was something about this.

Nothing new.

That brilliant spinning in one’s gut that no one knows how to describe.

That everything inside inching up and up, and this is why I wanted him.

And by wanted I mean I wanted to own him completely.

I wasn’t dumb.

I knew that stealing a stereo was not the way to own a guy.

I knew that the way to own a guy was to push something down, push something else out.

I know that the way to own a guy, still, years later, is this.

Like recently, there was this incident.

There was this guy whose car I scraped by mistake with my car.

It was raining that day, a downpour, and the guy whose car I scraped by mistake was big and standing on the sidewalk, holding his sagging bags of groceries.

He was waiting for me to move my car so that he could get into his.

I mean I’d parked so close, he couldn’t get into his car, and he was waiting in the downpour, burdened with his sagging bags, annoyed.

And when I backed up my car, one hand up, giving the obligat ory wave, the obligatory thanks for waiting, I scraped his car with my side mirror, because of my shit parking job, and I heard it scrape, even through the sound of the radio, even through the rain and the windshield wipers’ squeak.

And before I shut off the car, and before the rain refilled the windshield, I saw the guy drop his bags of groceries to the wet ground and smack his forehead with both hands.

I knew I had a choice to make.

And I knew the right choice was to get out of the car.

And I knew I had another choice to make.

And I knew the right choice was to be a guy.

As the rain refilled the windshield, I knew I had to open the door.

And as I opened the door, I heard first the downpour, then heard the guy calling me certain names reserved for women, certain names I’d been called before and would be called again, certain names I’d, eventually, later, not too much later, call others.

And as I stepped out of the car I was suddenly some very small thing, by which I mean I was suddenly a woman to this guy, absorbing these names reserved for women, standing there in the downpour, reduced to something snail small and just as tightly coiled.

I wanted to be a guy.

I wanted to be a certain type of guy.

But instead I said, Stop yelling at me.

And he said, Stop being a fucking whore.

And what does one say to that.

I wanted to say a lot of things.

I wanted to say, Is that the best you can do.

Because it was raining and we were standing in it and it didn’t look like it would stop.

And his groceries might have slid, at any point, from the bottoms of their sagging bags.

The world could have come, is what I mean, at any point, to the standstill we’d been waiting for.

It would have been apocalyptic.

And this would have been his finale.

Whore.

But the point is not this.

The point is I wanted to be a guy.

By which I mean I wanted to get up in his face.

I’m not talking about anything deep.