Stephanie Archive

Site Update: Going Public

Welcome to Stephanie Archive.  This blog contains images and transcripts of some of Stephanie's manuscripts; previously I had made this site available only to a few people who had known Stephanie personally.  Enjoy.

Nicole stood sweating in front of the church door ...

See No Evil

[This entry contains the full text of the unfinished story "See No Evil" plus several manuscript fragments that appear to be related. No attempt at redaction has been made.]

On Friday Nicole's conscience left her and she was invisible. She was quite surprised by this, although she had never taken very good care of her conscience. She called after it to explain but all it said when it turned to her, thin and shining, was, "You are free now."

"What?"

Nicole noticed that the hair which usually hung down into her eyes was not there. Raising a hand to find it she discovered that she had no hand, no arm, no shoulder, no body. "What did you do with my body? What's left? You can't do this to me."

The conscience, which usually was more than willing to argue, just turned and exited. Nicole felt like a toothpick or an eyelash.

"I thought I had an identity crisis before." She ran fingers she couldn't see over herself to make sure everything was in place. It was very upsetting to be inside of a body with eyes that told her she didn't exist. Every few seconds she had to look around her to be sure she could see everything else in the world. That gave her a strange feeling of being the only thing, the only thing invisible; a unique creature, a one-being species. How wonderful, how awful to be the only thing in the universe that was invisivle. And then it occurred to her that maybe she wasn't the only invisible thing - perhaps there were others. She wouldn't know if she couldn't see them and they didn't make any noise. Nicole breathed heavily to be sure she herself could make a noise. Then she wondered if others could hear her. Then she wondered whether she, being invisible herself, could see other things that were invisible to others. Why should she, she thought, since she could not see herself. But still she wished she had taken inventory of the world an hour before so that now she would be able to notice if anything had appeared suddenly.

Nicole found a chair and sat, noticing that the chair creaked and bent to her shape. How could she make herself visible again? She was fairly sure she wanted to be visible, although she could see many advantages to not being seen. Fun was fun, Nicole thought, but this was life, and she didn't really want to spend the rest of her life invisible. It would be so confusing. How would she explain it to people?

So where would one look for a conscience? Immediately Nicole thought of the church, but there was no reason for her conscience to go there. What would it do? She saw in her mind the conscience wandering up and down the pews, and it didn't seem to fit. The church was the place for tangible, solid things that wished for intangibility, not a place for freed consciences. If I were a conscience, Nicole thought, where ...? She remembered the old joke of catching a rabbit by hiding and making noises like a carrot. If I hid and made noises like Heaven, maybe I'd attract it, she thought. But how could I convince it to come back inside of me? And can I be certain that would make me visible?

She decided the first step was to find it and then figure out what to do. It would most certainly be outside someplace, not still hanging around the house, so Nicole went to the garage for her bike. No, she thought, that would attract attention. She couldn't hitchhike either. She started out on foot, looking around her all the time for a shadow or wisp of smoke disappearing behind a tree.

The city was in a friendly mood because it was spring. Bulbs were having noisy parties under the emerging trees. All the cars glistened with dew as if they had bloomed just that morning. Even the buildings looked clear and sharp, every brick and board stood out and the textures were shadowed like charcoal drawings. On this day, Nicole thought, someone without prejudice might consider this city a work of art; everything fits into place perfectly, everything is balanced, and surely there is some symbolism in everything if one has the time to figure it out.

She passed a bake shop window and, on an impulse, walked in. An Italian woman with black hair in a bun stoo, counting cookies into a white bag. Maria's Fresh-Baked Cakes it said. Maria reached forty, folded the bag down and turned to staple it. Nicole grabbed a handful of the raspberry filled cookies and darted out the door. The cookies, when she put her hands around them, became invisible. She ate as she walked down the sidewalk, still looking up and down for her conscience. As she finished the last one the prospect of getting her conscience back appealed to her less than it had, and she stopped to look in a Sage-Allen window at suede jackets. She wasn't sure she would like one if it were invisible when she put it on, so she kept walking, her eyes now watching store windows. It was dawning on her that she could now have virtually anything she wanted, being able to take items from stores without being seen. Her conscience said nothing - it wasn't there.

At a traffic light Nicole saw a truck with an inviting platform in back, and she leapt onto it, holding the metal door handles. The doors were locked, as she had expected, but the truck started up when the light changed, and she watched the city street roll effortlessly off into oblivion. She glanced around her every once in a while, out of a feeling of duty, but the conscience didn't appear. At another traffic light she hopped off and, mindful of the fact that cars couldn't see her, made it to the sidewalk safely. It would be awful, she told herself, to be injured now. How could a doctor help me?
...

Nicole stood sweating in front of the church door, her black dress clinging to her shoulders. She held the silvery handles of the doors with both hands, breathing in soft gasps.

"Wouldn't let me," she whispered, "why can't I come?"

She shivered as she pulled back the doors, which both opened at once. As she slipped inside, faces in the last rows turned to look. The church was dark, like the inside of a cupboard; hot, even in the May morning. And at the center of Nicole's vision, the minister tood in black robes, speaking slowly. He stood to the right of the closed casket. Nicole smelled flowers and flowers, not as flowers in open places smell, but as smoething dark and clawed might make itself smell if it attended church. The long black casket held her grandmother. Nicole saw bony hands and wrinkled mouth, saw it through the wood. Something crept up Nicole's legs and crushed her chest, put an arm down her throat, grabbed her ribs and pulled back. Screaming, Nicole staggered against the closed doors, turned, yanked one open and ran down a set of wite steps, into sunlight. Oh I'm going to die, I'm going to die.

Mist hovered just above the apple trees, and the apple blossoms smelled clean from rain. Nicole ran down park paths toward the ocean; pigeons hurried fluttering from her.

...

{Nicole turned a corner and smiled at the sea. Behind railroad tracks and telephone poles the waves lapped calmly, stretching out to the horizon. What would it be like to swim, invisible, in clear water, Nicole wondered and crossed the tracks, running down a small slope. The beach was farther away than she had thought; by the time she reached it she was out of breath.

Sitting by the edge of the water with his light tan back to her was a boy with sandy hair. He was still, watching the sea curl its tongue up and then uncurl it, tasting shore sand.

"Hey," she said, forgetting she was invisible. He turned around and squinted at her voice.

"I'm sorry, I'm invisible," she said, lamely.

"Ahh," he said, still squinting. Then, "You come to look at the water?"

"Yes. I wondered how it would be to swim in it. Actually I'm looking for ..." Her words trailed off as she tried to remember what she was looking for.

"It's cold," he said. "The water's cold."

Nicole nodded and waited. She could see the sea with its breath held.}

...

Walter sat in light sand, his hands behind him. "OK, come back in

He looked back and nodded to it, and it came in.Nicole shifted her feet.

"You do that?" she asked, surprised.

He nodded and drew squiggles in the sand by his leg.

"How?"

"Always have." He shrugged. "What's your name?"

"Nicole."

"Ah."

They silently watched the sea a while.

"It does this all the time?" Nicole asked.

"All the time," Walter told her. "What were you looking for?"

Nicole frowned and then remembered that the other could not see her thinking. "I don't know. I guess I was looking for the sea."

"What about your conscience?" Walter asked.

"Oh, I don't have one, that's why I'm invisible," Nicole said, and then they were silent a minute.

"Can you make it go out and stay?"

Walter nodded.

"Do it," she suggested, but he shook his head.

Nicole picked up the brittle crab shell and blew lightly to clear sand from the curled edges.

...

Walter pointed at the sea with a brown finger. The sea sighed and drew back, rolled upon itself and retreated, leaving swept sand glistening. Farther up where the sand was dry and hot, walter sat, waiting. He stretched his hand again and the sea came in, like a tongue. Tiny slivers of silver exploded apart and fanned their fins in shallows, fought the retreating tide. Motioning, the boy ordered the water out; fish glimmered and were gone.

Stretching his legs out, walter brushed tan sand from creases in his bleached jeans, examined the frayed knees. His bare toes scratched each other. The sea held its breath in the distance. Walter nodded and it rushed in. Gills flapped from water-swept rocks. And walter shook tan hair from light brown eyes, putting his head back. His fingers which supported him were dug deep into the sand and were so close to its color that he might have been made of sand, might have been sand-filled glass, sitting stil, head back, sun-worshipping with shoulder-length hair across his bare back and almost touching the ground. His hair was a waterfall of sifting sand.

And the distant miles of waves calle in giant whispers. Walter lifted his head, motioning to the white fingernails of water. They ran forward across sand, held at arm's length, and with Walter's not, ran back again.

A crab with a dry shell ran across one of the boy's fingers, looking for the sea. Time, time, time, time, time. The crab's shell bleached and its flesh dried and its smaller bones fell into reddish sand.

Walter heard a giggle at the water's edge and saw a small girl wading ankle deep, splashing in blue water. He got to his feet and walked down to her, bending closer to her height. Still giggling she looked up and smiled into his eyes.

"Wet," she said. He grinned back, with white teeth like shell insides. Reaching in a jeans pocket he drew out a piece of bottle glass which had been worn into a rounded diamond shape, dotted with bubbles inside.

"Look," he said, and put the piece in her palm. The girl ran a finger over it and said nothing, but looked up again shyly. "Glass," he said, "old bottle glass. For your pocket." They smiled at each other. The little girl danced a few steps down the beach while Walter straighened and pointed to the water. When he looked back she had leapt from stone to stone and out a few yards. Seaweed swayed around the rock her feet were on. She leapt for the next one and landed wquarely, balancing with her small arms.

"Come back, " he called to her and she giggled, jumping again. When he waved the ocean in it lightly covered the rock she was on and she laughed, putting one foot out as if to walk on water.

"No, that's deep. It's deep out there, come back in," he yelled.

"Make the water go out," she said.

"No. You come in."

She squinted back at him from the mossy rock. "Make the water go out. I never seen that before."

The water hesitated, lapping her feet. She shifted her feet and one slipped, and suddenly her light arms waved desperately. Then she was in the water, holding onto the rock and yelling. Walter stood watching. The water did not recede. Clinging to the rock the girl spluttered through mouthfuls of water.

"Help me!"

...

Walter sat in the summer sun, twining the salty shoelace around his wrist. He pulled with long fingernails at the fraying end, unwound it halfway, wound it back knotted it once, untied it. Particles of sand sprinkled onto his faded white jeans. He looked out at the sea with eyes squinted, trying to catch the splash of a gull's dropped shell.

"Alright, now come in." The waves folled up to th ebeach. The gull lifted, circled, and flew away. "Go out." The waves went out, hitting each other in their hurry, dragging a light layer of sand back, back.

"Come in," Walter told it, and it came in. Long, flat, green seaweed, wavy at the edges like palm leaves, turned rhythmically, rubbed its tail on the sand. "Go out." The seaweed was swept back into its green birthplace. Walter got up sighing lightly and brushed sand from folds in his jeans. He looked up, remembering. "OK, come back in!" Sand clung to his bare feet, up to the ankles, up to where he had waded in the water that morning, the sun rising on the right and lighting misty rays through the lifted wave tips, so he could see the tiny grains of fish. Walter bent and rubbed absently at the sand, admiring the pattern of yellow and brown and black pieces, the black being [ground] mussels, and white. He turned to the water again, which held itself taughtly stretched up the sand. "Carry on like that," he said, and it sucked back in its breath, retreating. The boy turned and waded up the beach, holding his arms straight. He was tall but walked bent from leaning into the sea and walking in the sand. Blonde hair bleached nearly white, nearly transparent, fell straight to his shoulders. Behind, the sea faltered, and he turned spoke to it. It continued.

Walter saw the man before the man saw him, because the man was out of place, new, and dark like the earth. He stood with feet spread out, surveying the expanse of yellow sand running east. When he turned and saw walter, he smiled solidly and ran a thumb around the waistline of his brown slacks. He thumb made a soft dent in the flesh, like a finger in a wave.

"Hi there."

Walter raised his fingers a little in greeting, and walked slowly towards him.

"You live around here?" The man squinted at Walter's sand-color face, looking for the eyes. It was hard to see ...

"Yeah. I live over there." He pointed a bony arm across to the west and the man saw a shack in the distance.

"Oh," he said, confused. "Uh, well, is this, this isn't your land is it?"

Walter grinned and brushed hair out of his eyes. "Why, is it yours?"

The man laughed easily and put his large hands into his pockets. "Actually, yes, I bought it a few months ago. Yes." He lifted his chin to gaze over Walter's bent shoulder, his eyelids closed slightly over dark blue eyes.

"Man in thought," Walter said to himself, softly.

The man looked sharply at Walter, who started with surprise and then closed his mouth. Smiling still, but frowning a little the man looked down at the sand by his feet. "Well, I was thinking about the cottage I'm going to have built. Right, about, there," he pointed, considering, over Walter's shoulder.

"A cottage."

"Yes."

"I'd have to move?"

THe man tilted his head to one side. "Uh, not for a while," he said slowly. "It will take a while. Find a builder." He scratched his cheek. I'll have to get a good design, you know. I want a large window facing, facing the land, and one facing the sea, yes," he said, thinking.

" A window facing the sea?" Walter's greyish eyebrows lifted. "Ah. That's right."

The man looked at him for a minute, then nodded. "And I want a sun porch, I think."

Walter shifted his feet, toes sinking into the sand slowly. "Are you taking over, then?"

"Taking over what?"

"Well, the sea. That. Are you going to take care of it now?"

Completely confused, the man squinted at Walter, trying to see him. "I'm sorry, what do you mean?"

"The sea," Walter said patiently.

Walter looked back and was quiet for a long time. He turned around and looked at the sea. As he looked it poised in between coming in and going out; not freezing but settling still, not coming in or going out. It rocked slightly, waiting. Walter turned back to the man, frowning. He shook hair out of his face. "Go back," he told the man kindly, and the man turned, walked clumsily thruogh the yellow sand, into the distance. Turning, Walter smiled at the sea. "All right, go out now." And the sea rocked slightly forward, then rolled back as if cut loose, small waves slapping each other and blending, green, fading, blue, under the blue sky.

...

"Dead," she said wonderingly. "What must it be like?"

"Not like anything," the boy said softly. "Like nothing. Like not being. Like this, you keep going, the blood and skin become other things, but you stop being. Like this," and he waved at the water.

"Awful," she said.

"Simple, easy, the easiest thing there is."

Nicole ran a finger over the bumpy shell and then dropped it back into the sand. She heard a sound behind her. Turning, she saw herself standing, holding the shell. She looked back at Walter, then at herself. Reaching her hands out she found the conscience and covered herself with it, like a blanket. INside she stretched her fingers out to the tips of the glove-like skin and turned to walter. "There," she said proudly, but he was gone.

The sea came in.

Nicole put the shell in her pocket and walked back up the slope, with water sounds behind her.

Iridescence

Iridescence is in the feathers of a starling, is on an old penny, on the frosting of a lightbulb, soap bubbles, puddles of rain on black tar, fingerprints on a crystal vase, powder on moth wings. Rare occurrence in a dramatic world, the subtlety of shifting blues and greens, a swirl that changes with your breath across a dome of water stretched through air. The eyes of a fly, fractured into geometric specks, like atoms of a molecule, are iridescent, and never close. Ringed snake scales become green and red above the black, iridescent. The back of a flea, the humped brown shell around a universe of hairy mouths and legs, the oily smooth body designed for flight through air, head down, across furless space ...

***

A day and a night outside of Why, Arizona, on a somewhat hilltop, the top of the world as truly everywhere is. In the glittering noon the yellow earth curves its cracked body over the edge. All around the yellow curves; the sky curves into the moving curve of the earth.

A cloud of sagebrush, a pair of jackrabbit ears, the eye-corner lizards darting for cooler inches of afternoon.

I wet a bandanna and it dries as I put it around my neck.

A clump of prickly pear cactus lifts a single spiny violet bloom, a flower as large as my palm. Slowly the sticky purple fingers close and night drifts into a curve of sky. The stars lean down near the horizon. One bent shack in the distance, incredible and unexplained, is lit inside by yellow light; I watch black forms pass the kitchen window, a door opens. Out leaps a dog, bounding away through clumps of sage. Before him is the random, sideways shadow of a rabbit; I can feel the tremors their feet make in the cooling sand.

***

In the dream I walk through the ruins of a city in my brown skin. I find tin cans, bottle caps, pieces of colored plastic, orange peels, nails, broken dishes, metal wire. I find a tool with a sharp point and make holes in the pieces, string them together with wire, wrap the wire around the nails; these baubles shine in the sun. I hang them on my body, through my hair, and walk across the sand of the desert, going toward the oasis. Everything is very still.

Perhaps I can fashion a camel out of dead animals, the head of a dog, the legs of a horse, sew fur together across several cat bodies to make the back, open the dead mouth and breathe into the rotting cavern, the black spotty tongue, decaying withered gums, dried blood, breathe life into my camel and watch him rise on shaky legs. I will ride him across the Mojave, the desert shimmering, my bangles rattling heavy on my neck, shining in the sun. I will make a spear from a rusty tin can, with a rock I will pound the metal sharp. Sway of the camel, slight give of the sand, turn of the earth. Out to the oasis where my camel, under atree, in the shade, dips his head to the water and drinks long, long.

***

At the kitchen table my mother says, "I would hate to regret the things I didn't do. I'd hate to be old, sitting and thinking of everything I wish I'd done. I'd much rather regret the things I did do than the things I didn't."

Three years later I visit her at the hospital's mental ward; I cannot wake her. She is lying in her clothes on the bed, mouth drawn apart and crooked, eyes open in sleep. The nurse leads me to a white and grey room with cafeteria tables of shiny formica. The other patients sit playing Gin, smoking, staring with fearful eyes. One woman is bent double, her head almost to her knees, twisting her eyebrows with both hands.

I wait and at last the nurse brings my mother in. Fuzzy-tongued, querulous, she asks what day it is.

"Is this the day my daughter is leaving?"

I nod and her face, the room, warps with salt water in my eyes.

She shuffles back to her room. I hear her throwing books, an alarm clock, pill bottles clothing. A cup of cold coffee sits on the linoleum floor; the surface is iridescent.

***

"Saskia," I say, I'm strung out and my voice echoes in my head, not like empty room echoing or auditorium echoing across rows of plush cushioned seats, red carpeteing, chandeliers, black doors, footprints on the floor where the usher would be -- "I hope you know what you're doing."

Echoing like a breath exhaled in a cavern in an ocean rock, a cave with only one entrance which is though an underwater passage. You swim out and dive into the darkness of the cold sea, feeling with fingertips along the barnicled stone, holding your breath, not knowing how much longer, how much longer it will be before you can or must breathe again. Finding the indentation, following it blindly with your fingers to the opening and pulling yourself in, the tunnel widening around you, jagged rock under your hands, following the rock walls up and up, breath contracting in your lungs, bones, muscles weak, chest aching, taste of salt -- and then the water is thin as rippling glass above you and your head breaks through. You exhale and gasp in, hair sticking to your face, seaweed between your teeth.

Saskia is bent over the candle. She heats the spoon until it makes tiny bubbling sounds. I tie the bandanna over my elbow, pulling it tight with my teeth.

Saskia is drawing clear liquid into the syringe. She holds it to the candle and peers; thorugh it her face is distorted. She flicks a tube with a quick finger and bubbles rise.

"Make a fist."

I grip my fingers and she slide sthe metal into my skin, I only feel it on the surface, then she is done, turning to wipe the spoon. The ocean washes over my ears, I dissove and become the sea, I stretch like a slow starfish across the rounded earth, feel gravity sucking me into the center, feel the moon draw me upward in waves. I roll and crash, wash against ice cliffs of Antarctica, spread over the shores of Africa, the yellow sand of yellow Australia.

Saskia is trying to get me to sit up but I keep turning into the ocean, I curl cold against abalone shells. She opens my mouth and her head disappears inside. She reaches for a screwdriver or a hammer or a pair of pliers, attaches it to my mouth, grips my jaw. Bracing herself with a hand on my forehead she pulls, twists, strains backward, all I see is the dirty soles of bare feet. Then she reappears, triumphant, grinning and holding up the tooth.

***

Once I stepped on a frog by mistake, all its coiled insides lay wet and glistening on the wet grass and the sound the frog made was almost like a kiss. How to put it back together, make it whole? The silver spots on the green skin shine iridescent, the gold eyes are painless with amazement. I sit up in the night, holding my ribs together. Living is iridescence. This is all I am, this piece of alive, only this and nowhere else beyond the curved edge of skin. A clock ticks in the stillness of a caught breath. This is all I know.

Don't You Leave Me Here

“Heh heh,” he says to the naked woman. She smiles up at him from satin sheets, a wind through the open window ruffling white lace on black skin, and Scott turns the page. He’s sitting in the tattered green chair with a glass of Jack Daniels, the ice cubes rattling softly, the Penthouse on his lap, saying “Heh heh” over his red beard. His thick arms rest on the arms of the chair and white stuffing seeps through the upholstery. He says to me, “Hey little girl, you seen Joey? He back from work yet?”

Joe and Scott on Saturday afternoons watching Kung Fu movies on TV, talking about Friday night, Joe says, “That new club Stage West, they got these moving stairs going up to the second floor.”

“Oh they got moving stairs, do they Joey?”

“Yeah, there’s one set going up and one going down.”

A stream of grunts comes from the television set, hands and feet flying, flesh hits flesh. Scott leans back looking at Joe, his eyebrows raised in mock admiration, his knuckles tufted with red hair.

“Well ho-de-do, they got moving stairs, going up and going down!”

Joe nods with dignity but Scott slaps his knee, eyes sparkling. “How about that, eh little girl, moving stairs, that’s a real first-class joint, I’ll have to go and check it out.”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose and rolls his eyes at me. Scott says, after consideration, “Moving stairs, ho-de-do!”

Joe gets up slowly and shuffles over to the coffee table. He brings out the white HI-FLYER frisbee upturned with a quarter ounce of shake in it, sits back on the couch and runs the front flap of a Zig-Zag pack through brown leaves, holding the frisbee slanted. Round shiny seeds roll to the curved bottom. “‘Only one paper can be pulled at a time,’” he reads off the pack, “‘Qualitie Superieur,’ hmmm.” On the front flap a man who looks like a pirate is smoking a rolled cigarette. His eyes disappear in black ink.

My mattress is in the attic, by a small window at the base of the roof. Through the window I watch the street, the yellow school bus stops outside, I watch the wind in the tops of the trees. The roof slopes upward in a pyramid; its sides come down to crouching-height and its point is higher than my fingertips can reach. The brown wood beams smell dry and dusty in the heat. I sleep surrounded by boxes that say Welch’s Apple Juice, Sanyo Receiver, Markel Quartz Heater, Ellington Farms Produce. There are boxes of clothing (some mine) and a box with DC painted on it in day-glo orange which is for my dirty clothes. I watch black leaping spiders drop lines of silk from the rafter to the window sill, and one afternoon I saw an egg sack bloom into baby spiders, almost too tiny to see, colorless and many-legged, spilling out into the endless air.

In the evening Joe quietly gets drunk (sometimes when Joe is drunk he lowers his head and nudges my shoulder saying “baaaaa, baaaaa” tenderly) and we watch television. Scott isn’t home yet, the midnight movie comes on, and then Scott’s old Plymouth chugs into the driveway, I can hear the rust rattling in the fenders. Scott comes in with his girlfriend, a tall black-haired woman who chain-smokes Camel straights, blowing the smoke upward, her lower jaw extended, teeth bared, the smoke spreading angrily from her. She sits down on the couch, Scott sits next to her and she tries to pull her skirt free from under him.

“Hey Joey guess what, Marla here can’t find her car.”

“She can’t find her car?” He looks at her. “You can’t find your car. Where’d you leave it?”

Marla yanks the skirt out. “If I knew that I wouldn’t a lost it right?” she says petulantly.

“She parked it somewhere around here, we was at the Bridge Street Pub and we walked around looking for it, couldn’t find it, it’s really hid good. Marla here, we had a pitcher of that iced tea at Carry Nations, that Long Island Iced Tea they got there, and Marla’s really wasted, heh heh,” he elbows her side, “aren’t you, Marla. You can’t hold your liquor, you know that girl? Hey, are you feeling a little sick, you gonna throw up? You want me to show you where the bathroom is? Heh heh heh.”

“Scott, you’re a bastard.”

“Mmmm, I know that, Marla.”

“I could drink you under the table.”

“One pitcher of Ice Tea, ...” Scott says and Marla taps an emphatic finger on his knee, “under, the, table!”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well Martha, ah Marla, you must be pretty drunk if you lost your car.” He nods to himself in agreement.

Scott chuckles. “You know what else?” Marla is staring at him. “She left her keys in it too.”

We all laugh, we can’t help it, except Marla who stands up, bumping the lamp. It wobbles back and forth.

“I don’t have to take this tinda, kinda shit from you.”

“Ah, settle down Marla.”

“And I don’t have to listen to that from you Scott, don’t you order me around, you asshole, I’m not hanging around here. I’m leaving.”

She grabs for her pocketbook strap and misses, grabs again and gets to the door.

“At least I’m not a fucking junkie like you Scott,” she yells. “At least I’m not a fucking alcoholic like you, Joe.”

She slams it behind her and the doorbell which never works when you push the button, now rings in sympathy with the door.

Joe rolls his watery brown eyes and Scott shrugs. “What d’they got on the movies tonight little girl?”

In sweet autumn Indian Summer, Scott and I sit on the porch in broken down chairs, the paint peels and I scrape at it with my toe. The neighbor’s calico cat wanders up the steps and rubs her arched back on the railing. It’s China White all afternoon, slow and sleepy, I look through a gap under my eyelids and the maple trees are leaping out of their own souls in red and orange, the birches swing and lift loose yellow leaves. The old man next door rakes leaves into piles and his wife watches from her front steps. She smiles and I smile back. Inside the house Joe is banging pans, running water, boiling spaghetti noodles. I hear his heavy feet cross into the front room, hear him slip a record on the turntable and scratchy Hot Tuna drifts out through the screen door; don’t you leave me here, pretty baby if you go give me a dime for beer... Scott chuckles. “Heh heh.” He sings softly, barely moving his lips. “Well I never had one woman at a time, now if you see me, tell I’ll always have six-seven, eight or nine... don’t you leave me here, don’t you leave me here... pretty baby if you go, leave me a dime for beer... don’t you leave me here.”

We live on Flower Street. Two blocks down and across Main is Jack’s Grocery, a tiny shop with bald-headed Jack behind the counter. Farther up Main is the park, then the white church and Friendly’s Ice Cream on the other side, then Harvest Beads and Silver where you can buy carved pipes, Afghanistan socks, tiger-eye necklaces and concert tickets. Up at the corner is the Antique Store and from there you can look all the way down Main Street. There’s the Coin Exchange and the Prayer Tower with its yellow cross saying Jesus horizontally and Saves vertically, and the Adult Bookstore (movies 25 cents) its windows covered in grey paper and three black Xs painted just above the window sill.

On Sundays we go to the Prayer Tower for the free cheese they give away. It comes in one-pound blocks, bright yellow, wrapped in thick plastic and put in long cardboard boxes, coffin-like, saying Pasteurized Process Cheese Food in humorless black letters.

“What is this Cheese Food stuff?” Joe says contemptuously.

Down past the bookstore is Mary Lewis Youth Shop which sells Indian print skirts and pre-faded jeans, and then the Goodwill and the pawn shop and the Woolworth’s and the plasma center on the corner where the highway goes past, into East Hartford.

There are five traffic lights on Main Street between the Antique Store and the highway. During the day the street is blue and dusty between cars; at night the store windows are dark, reflecting the white streetlight and the white of your face. The yellow cross glows all night. Crazy George wanders by, headed for the park. Sometimes we see the Christian, which is what we call him, not knowing his name. He stands quietly under a light, rapt and raising his hands, palms outward in wonder. Sometimes we hear him blessing the glistening cars as they pass.

Warm afternoons I count filthy jean-pocket change and go to Friendly’s for an ice cream cone. Crazy George is there in a green army coat and knit cap pulled to his earlobes, mumbling to no-one but himself and then, white eyed he suddenly slaps the counter, looking up. “Hey, can I have a refill?”

Sometimes I see the Christian sitting at the counter on one of the revolving stools, a five-scoop sundae in front of him, a maraschino cherry sliding slowly down the whipped cream, leaving a trail of red syrup. He folds his hands in front of him and humbly lowers his head, saying grace.

Joe brings home boxes of free tomatoes; we have tomato sauce, tomato salad and tomato sandwiches. Scott slices the tomatoes and places them mushy, full of seeds, between brown bread; no butter, no mayonnaise, just bread and tomato. “Heh heh,” he says to me, raising his red, thick eyebrows. I buy bags of frozen peas at Jack’s Grocery, we live on frozen peas, tomatoes and brown sugar.

Once I found a cornfield and filled my shirt with ears of corn but back at the house, Joe shakes his head, looking out over the frames of his glasses with amused sorrow. “Cow corn.”

“I can’t eat it?”

“Naw, it’s cow corn.”

I shuck it anyway, peeling down the threads of translucent silk and dumping the ears in the double-handled aluminum pot.

But it’s mealy and tasteless, I take one bite and give up, and the precious butter melts down into the puckered kernels.

* * *

Joe wrote to me last week; he’s stopped drinking and found Jesus. He says how’s California. He says he thinks of me and what am I doing? The other night I dreamed I put my foot through a pane of glass and drew it back, glass slivers stuck in my shoe. But I saw Scott, who is dead now and free, walk through the web of cracked glass as if through air, chuckling in his beard. I would like to say that I sang to him, maybe about leaving a dime for beer, but I never could carry a tune, even in my dreams.

Don't You Leave Me Here (early draft)

Don't You Leave Me Here (early draft)

"Heh heh" he says to the naked woman in the magazine. Thirty years worth of Hustler and Penthouse and crazy bondage glossy pictures under his bed, women and dogs, women dismembered, women with black skin in white lace on shiny satin sheets, open window blowing light ruffling the crocheted pillowcases. Scott in his sagging chair with the yellow-brown whiskey and a magazine on his lap, saying "Heh heh" over his red beard, those big bones with their heavy red-haired flesh resting against the chair arms. He says "Hey little girl, you seen Joey? He back from work yet?" Joe and Scott on Sunday afternoons watching Kung Fu movies, talking about Friday night, Joe says "that new place, Cellblock West, they got these moving stairs going up to the second floor." "Oh they got moving stairs, do they Joey?"

"Yeah, there's one set going up and one going down."

{In the background A stream of grunts ... is coming from the television set two figures with arms and legs flying towards each other like Oriental scarecrow parodies of doomsday machines. Scott says after consideration, "moving stairs, ho-de-do!" Joe nods with dignity but Scott slaps his knee, eyes sparkling "how about that, eh, Joey, moving stairs, a real first-class joint, I'll have to go there and check it out, that's really somethin'."}

Scott leans back, his eyebrows raised in mock admiration, the beer rocking against his stomach. "Well, ho-de-do, they got moving stairs, going up and going down!"

Joe brings out the white Hi-Flyer frisbee upturned with a quarter ounce of leafy brown shake in it, sits and runs the front flap of a Zig Zag pack through the leafy brown frisbee holding the frisbee slanted so the round shiny seeds roll to the curved bottom. "Only one paper can be pulled at a time - no waste" the pack says. "Qualitie Superieur". On the front a man who looks like a pirate is smoking a rolled cigarette. His eyes disappear in black ink.

In August Joe brings home boxes of free tomatoes' we have tomato sauce, tomato sandwiches, and tomato salad. Scott slices the red round fruit and places mushy flesh between brown bread: no butter, no mayo, just bread and tomato sandwiches. "Heh heh" he says to me raising his thick red eyebrows. I live on frozen peas and tomatoes. I can't remember eating anything else or wanting anything else.

Except Though once I bought an ice cream cone and chased Scott around the house with it, finally mashing it into his ear, at which point he turned and went for me. I slipped on the stairs and turned to see the big bull strength of Scott standing over me. I was laughing, there was ice cream dripping from his ear, and yet I was afraid. I stuck fingers into his eyes. He didn't flinch, just bent down with my fingers pressing his eyeballs into his skull, and growled.

Nights and days in the attic, breathless heat, hot wood dry smell of hot wood, Scott and I and down in the dank mouldy enclosure of Scotts room, Scott and I, putting holes in our arms. He says, "Davey and me, we used to hang out by Bushnell park, over by the fence where theres these bushes, every time we see a cop car we'd hop the fence and hide ... Dave got sent to the State in '79." I ask him "State Prison or Crazy House?" "Don't matter, same thing." and his eyes close.

A year later and two thousand miles away, I heard that Scott had trashed the house before and been evicted; he hadn't paid rent for three months. Joe had moved out long before, saying Scott was a drug addict and stealing all his things. Scott on One night, crossing the street, Scott was hit by a drunk in an automobile. and he is now lying between hospital sheets He was in a coma and they kept him alive by machines while his brain died, his muscles warped and drew into themselves, his face turned old.

His eyes are bright blue liquid glass set between red cheeks.

Don't You Leave Me Here

A Story About Drugs

Across the street in the phone booth surrounded by a vibrant smell of piss I punch the numbers, "uno medio," I tell him in pidgin Spanish and he sends out the runner, brown kid no more than nine with eyes like a rabbit, I eyeball the block and cop the half and get back on the bus sweating but it's all clear, it's another day of freedom.

City city. All of downtown rising surreal around me, the city is my box of chocolate, squares of chocolate sprinkled with windows, dribbled with columns, long caramels down by the water, I want to open my mouth over the city and swallow it whole but it's already inside of me - at night all night I feel it like constellations in my bones. The bus lurches down Haight Street through the Filmore, the street signs a song of names as familiar as my fingers, Filmore, Steiner, Pierce, Scott and in a grey mist with whispers of sun, black children chase cats, orange workmen stand by vats of evil smelling tar, paint peels everywhere, Do not park in driveway sign, an incredible tattered woman in an army blanket, three punks skateboarding through traffic like crumpled Christmas wrappers blowing.

Sergio and I nodding out in Buena Vista Park can see over the web of bus cables over the houses the drift of fog rolling and breathing, Eugene a street nut passes down the clover hill giving us a snot symphony all the sounds that can be made with mucus, and the turning earth lies under me like a lover, mysterious and infinite and precious, waiting for me.

And we bop down to the head shop where Alain behind the counter with his crooked teeth and French nose donates a pack of cloves to the cause, friend of Sergio's, Sergio knows everybody. In front of the produce market on the sidewalk are bins of oranges, waxy apples, furry peaches colored like globes of sunrise, bubbles of grapes, rows of fruit like an altar under the awning and I bow down, smell the grapefruit my nost to the cool roughness of skin. Sergio and I are reflected in the gleaming apples, our faces warped backward as through a fish eye lens, over and over and red. I palm a speckled nectarine, he palms a pear, stand at the corner with juice running down our fingers.

"I steal everything I ever own," Sergio tells me, grinning fearless into the future, tall and bony in black jeans, black shirt, cracked leather boots, rabbit's foot hanging from one ear, black hair cropped close except for a long wisp in the back, a clump of horsehair braided into it. "You like thees sunglasses? I steal them." "Yeah they're great." "Oh you can't hav them," he says drawing away, drawing backwards, dropping his lower jaw goofing, "they're MYYY sunglass." And I slap my knee doubled over laughting, "oooh they're YOUR sunglasses!"

We catch a bus to the beach, as I get on I say "don't talk to me, don't talk to me," trying to pass for 16 looking young and innocent to save 50 cents with the youth fare, Sergio disappears, I look to see him sneaking in the back door, wiser than me, says "why deed you say don talk to you" and I say never mind. Watching with half an eye a quintessential business man, suit briefcase mustache, checking the time on his wrist, he pulls the bus cable, bing.

"So Michael got busted," Sergio says, "trespassing." Michael is Sergio's sometimes-lover, talks nonstop and con-artist to the bone. "That place we all were crashing at, the warehouss, the cops came and took everybody. They were so funny, they walk in like," he shudders screwing up his face and I understand, the place was trashed, all bugs and mouldy bread and burned bed rolls, I'd sleep at the shelter with the winos vomiting all night before I'd stay there, I say "gas masks and those toxic waste cleanup suits," and he laughs, says "I was under some blankets and they don find me, they don want to touch anytheeng."

I say, "Sergio did Michael go for the test?" "The test? Yeah and he's safe." "Ah, I'm so glad," I say, "so that makes three of us. Man I didn't know how scared I was until I found out I didn't need to be. But that nurse there, she gave me shit. I yelled at her." He grins, his teeth white in his brown skin like the meat of a coconut under the shell, "good," he says.

The nurse, tired eyes behind tortoise shell frames took me into a room with a Love Is poster on the wall and a Boston fern hanging in aggressive macrame, told me to have a seat. The sheet of paper on the table crinkled under me. "Just going to take a little blood," she said, I rolled up my sleeve, she ran a finger, pearl-pink nails along the inside of my arm astonished, "are these ... tracks?" "No they're mosquito bites." Standing in her crisp white, from a faraway world where opium is a brand of perfume she said "how old are you honey?" And I told her to lay off, she wouldn't understand, and she started in with how could I do this to myself, my whole life ahead of me and I warned her to quit it, my life is here and I'm living it, and she gave me maybe I could try to get some kind of help and I slammed my fist on the white metal supply table making the jar of bandaids shake, making the glass of thermometers soaking in alcohol rattle like loose pennies in a dryer and she stepped a step backward astonished. "Christ," I said, "look at what I open my eyes to every time I open my eyes, a world so beautiful and there's a hole in the ozone over Antarctica and the fruit is sprayed with poison and I can't drink the water from the faucet and there's fiberglass in the air and acid in the rain. So just say no to drugs and then they can drop the bomb and flatten us all into creeping screaming lizards wiht the skin hanging off our ribs and all the sweet creatures blind without even a sagebrush to stand under and all the green earth barren as a brick and all the blue sky grey full of ash like radioactive snow -" I shook my head hard, shook the crying out, " don't you give me that whole life ahead of me crap, what the fuck do you know."

And here we are. We're on the beach, where the ocean draws back whispering to itself, curling in, shimmering off across the sand as if it could be so bare and pure and lyrical forever, then hisses foreward in clusters of white foam, announcing its soul, sssss, an understatement of egoless love, and I go down to the edge of the water somehow suddenly barefoot and possessed, wobbling at the knees, kneeling to kiss it, saying sssss back, dancing in a loose-boned shuffle in the heavy sloshy sand. Ocean sweeping up a piece of wood and turning it over and over in wet green darkeness until it becomes blunt soft and bleached like the bone of a creature foreign to this earth, starfish, seahorses, arcing dolphins, tentacles of kep rising up on the waves, ocean washing out a piece of glass, rolling, licking cold across the sharpness until it becomes a rounded translucent tongue, lifting up an abalone shell and dropping it down, basing it against the shoreline, rattling it along coral reefs until it splinters into grains of iridescent sand ... "ssss" I tell the ocean. And then meekly collect my shoes, go back to the shore where Sergio sits smoking a clove. We roll the tobacco from the clove end with some dope and smoke it. "Mmmm," Sergio says and I say "ya."

About "A Story About Drugs"

About "A Story About Drugs"

A Story About Drugs

This is a story about drug abuse, please don't show it to Ma + Pa! Its also about loving the world / fearing for the world and the joy/despair that comes from such passion.

Sergio and Michael are real people, great people, wish you could meet them. All this is mainly real except of course my monologue w/ the nurse which is more what I wish I had said in that situation - I know its contrived. The theme of this story is one I have to write over and over again until I find a way to truly express it.

This was a class assignment and the other students liked it except one woman who thought the voice was "adolescent" and the narrator was "unreliable". She's right in a way, but I think people tend to explain away passion for life as adolescent, and see drug abuse as a problem in every situation, instead of an alternative, a viable option, a possible temporary lifestyle. For me this is all part of my education in the earths education system, just as my cross-country trip was, just as all the more conventional things I plan to do in the future will be.

Stephanie at the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard

'Clockwise - Cal, Jay holding Audie's kitten, Mike, Audie, me + Mill

folks hanging out, trainees, staff, friends - on switchboard steps'

Relativity

But there is no Theory of Relative Relativity. Where were you, Albert, when Stella stood at the edge of that black gulf, screaming herself hoarse and in love with the sound, when she blinked, gasped and made the conscious choice to turn back, neighbors knocking at the door, Frank telling them, "its all right, everything is OK" and then "Shit, Stell snap out of it. Shut up." Boarding house with the meal trays brought around to the teachers and by the time the food reached the top floor the ice cream, always vanilla, was melted to soup from the steam rising, to this day, thirty years later, she cannot eat vanilla ice cream.

Somewhere on some wide yellow beach a golden man with sandy hair, walter is telling the waves to come in, to go out, he orders the tides and at night he sleeps for only seconds at a time, it is a great responsibility, watching the waves.

Scott, big boned and red-bearded, the bull in the field with black shining eyes, whiskey drinker,

Orange Notebook