Robin Wasserman: Girls on Fire

I made do with what I had, and what I had was the smell of the ocean when the wind was right, and the beach itself, when I could thumb a ride. I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.

Mine was a nineteen-year-old dropout with greaser hair and a James Dean jacket, squatting in the empty apartment beneath ours, because his mother was the super and had given him the key. He read Kerouac, of course. Or maybe he didn’t actually read it; maybe he just strategically spread it across his lap while he napped in one of the crappy metal chairs he’d set up in the vacant lot, his own personal tanning zone. He definitely didn’t read Rilke or Nietzsche or Goethe or any of the other moldy paperbacks we passed back and forth while I coughed down his cherry vodka and he taught me how to smoke. He was too lazy to make it past the first chapters of most of them, but I can believe he made it through the Kerouac, because Jack spoke his language, his druggy, pretentious, wastrel nympho native tongue.

His name was Henry Schafer, but he had me call him Shay, and don’t get me wrong, Dex, even then, fifteen and swoony, I didn’t think it was love. Love was the stack of books piling up in my room, maybe, and the bootlegs he brought me; it was sailing down the Schuylkill in his beat-up Chevy, Philly on the horizon; it was South Street and head shops and smoky nights in a shitty back room listening to slam poetry; it was the heat of flesh the first time I dropped acid, salty skin when I licked my own palm. Love was not what Shay had me do to him in my mother’s bedroom while she was off trying to fuck Metallica; it wasn’t a sticky glob of him in my mouth or the pain of a finger up my ass; it certainly wasn’t finding him with his tongue in his girlfriend’s ear and then pretending, the next night, that I’d assumed a girlfriend all along, that of course I’d understood what this was and wasn’t, that there was no harm and no foul and no reason he couldn’t keep using me to kill time while she was busy, and yes, I should be grateful that he’d always used a condom, what other proof did I need that he was thinking of me.

This isn’t what you want to hear. You don’t want to hear that I studied those books, at least at first, to impress him. That I listened to Jane’s Addiction and the Stone Roses because he told me that’s what people like us should do, and when he asked me whether the baby’s breath of hair on his upper lip looked cool, I told him it did, even though I thought his girlfriend was right, that it made his mouth look like a peripubescent pussy. He spent that night with me and not her, and that’s what mattered, and still, Dex, that doesn’t mean I thought it was love.

I liked him best when he was sleeping. When the lights were out and he was curled into me, kissing my neck in his dreams. Bodies can be anyone, in the dark.

That was before I turned sixteen, before my mother’s season of rebirth, born again into the loving arms of AA and then again into the Bastard and his Lord. That was the year I discovered no one gave a shit about how many classes I skipped as long as I still scraped through tests with a C-plus and, when I did bother to show, did so in tank tops that erred on the side of boobalicious, a tactic that also proved effective when my mother would put on a Bon Jovi album, spin the dial up to ear-shattering, sing and twirl and drink along until our landlord showed up to whine about volume and rent. That was also the year he started slapping my ass instead of hers, and she stopped noticing me, except for the nights she would sneak home late, sticky with someone else’s sweat, crawl into my bed and whisper that I was all she had and she was all I needed, and I would pretend to be asleep.

Life with Shay was better, if only marginally. I thought maybe we would run away together. Fuck his girlfriend. We would be Kerouac and Cassady, dance wild across the heartland, sip the Pacific, drive for the sake of driving. I believed we both understood that there, any there, would always be better than here, just like I believed that he’d dropped out of high school because true intelligence can’t be contained, that he let his parents support him because he was writing a novel and true art demanded sacrifice. I showed him some crap poetry, and I believed him when he said it was good.

Shay doesn’t matter. Shay was a gateway drug, a cheap glue-sniffing high on the pathway to transcendence. Shay was like something ordered out of a catalog: Of course he quoted Allen Ginsberg, of course he got stoned to the Smiths, of course he smoked cloves and wore black eyeliner and had a glass-blowing girlfriend named Willow who’d made him a Valentine’s Day bong. Shay only matters because of the day we camped out in his friend’s attic studio a block from the Schuylkill, and after we got good and stoned, someone turned off the Phillies game and turned on 91.7 and there he was.

Kurt.

Kurt screaming, Kurt raging, Kurt in agony, Kurt in bliss. “Fucking pseudo-punk poseurs,” Shay said, and reached over to turn it off, and when I said, “Don’t, please,” he only laughed. It took me another week to find the song again and then steal a copy of Bleach and another few weeks after that to fumigate Shay out of my life, but that was the moment he went from mattering a little to not at all.

After that, it was like they say about love: Falling. A gravitational inevitability. Even Shitbag Village had one decent record store, with a giant bin of discounts and bootlegs, and it only took thirty bucks and some tongue wrestling with the walking zit behind the counter to get what I needed. Then I closed myself into my room and, except for periodic forays back to the record store and one very inconvenient move to the middle of nowhere, spent that year and the next one catching up: the Melvins, because that was Kurt’s favorite band, and Sonic Youth, because they’re the ones who got Kurt his big deal; the Pixies, because once you knew anything about grunge, you knew that was where it all came from; Daniel Johnston, because Kurt said so and because the guy was in a mental hospital so I figured he could use the royalties; and of course bootleg Bikini Kill, for some righteous riot grrrl rage, and Hole, because you got the feeling that if you didn’t, Courtney would come to your house and fuck you up.

Then, like Kurt knew exactly what I’d need when I needed it, there was Nevermind . I barricaded myself in until I knew every note, beat, and silence — cut school for the purposes of a higher education.

I loved it. Loved it like Shakespearean sonnets and Hallmark cards and all that shit, like I wanted to buy it flowers and light it candles and fuck it gently with a chainsaw.

I’m not saying I go around doodling Mrs. Kurt Cobain on my notebooks or that I, like, ohmygod, imagine myself showing up on his doorstep in black lace panties and a trench coat. For one thing, Courtney would gouge my eyes out with barbed wire. For another, I know what’s real and what’s not, and real is not me fucking Kurt Cobain.

But: Kurt. Kurt with his watery blue eyes and his angel hair, the halo of stubble and the way the rub of it would burn. Kurt, who sleeps in striped pajamas with a teddy bear to keep him company, who frenched Krist on national TV to fuck with the rednecks back home and wore a dress on Headbangers Ball just because he could, who has enough money to buy and smash a hundred top-line guitars but likes a Fender Mustang because it’s a cheap piece of crap you have to abuse as much as you love if you want it to play nice. Rock god, sex god, angel, saint: Kurt, who always looks at you from the side, from beneath that golden curtain of hair, looks at you like he knows all the bad things scuttling around inside. Kurt’s voice, and how it hurts. I could live and die inside that voice, Dex. I wanted to crawl inside it, soft and razor raw at the same time, his voice cutting me bloody, warm and slippery and alive. I don’t need Kurt — the real living, breathing Courtney-screwing Kurt — to throw me down on the bed and brush his hair out of his eyes and lay his naked body on mine, miles of translucent skin glowing white. I don’t need that Kurt, because I have his voice. I have the part of him that matters. That Kurt, I own. Like he owns me.