A Field Guide to Getting Lost (10 page)

When she was a teenager she did spectacular things with eye shadows, with azures and pinks and golds and other startling colors that made her eyes Byzantine mosaics; later she wore less and less eye makeup, and that last night she wasn’t wearing any at all—it made her look old, she said. She was twenty-four. She had dyed her brown hair black, and with her pale, pale olive skin and fine bones she seemed almost to be dissolving into a photograph of herself, a perfect fleeting image. A gesture from that night: lifting her chin and, with closed eyes, pushing the strands of her hair from her forehead back with weary self-consciousness. We were both wearing black jeans and black T-shirts and boots and leather jackets. When we stopped at my house to listen to her demo tape and heft the manuscript of my first book, we preened in front of my mirror, and we danced together there and in the clubs. The man she was with, an older musician in her current band, watched indulgently. The night ended in a biker bar, where she lured the bar’s big cat over to her lap while we drank our last round.

She looked radiant, and I believed her when she told me she was off drugs. We were out on a Saturday, and she was meeting a woman on Thursday; she wanted me and her male companion to come too. She was more insistent about this date than usual, and she called me up that Tuesday, partly to see if she’d left her shirt and sweater in my car and partly to confirm that she’d call me Thursday morning at ten to set up our rendezvous. Such clarity and commitment were unusual, and so when she didn’t call, I called her band’s house, the house she’d been living at the last few weeks. Marine had died Tuesday night, the older musician said, and he was broken up over it. “Little Marine,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

 

 

A hundred adventures with Marine: the afternoon of my twenty-first birthday wandering with her and the filmmaker around the ruins of the vast Sutro Baths at the northwestern tip of San Francisco, where the waves smash hard enough to send the spray dozens of feet up; while walking on a local hillside in the greenness of early spring, stopping to throw rocks in the swimming pool of a world-famous old rock star who was giving young girls hard drugs for the usual reasons; wading in an icy forest stream until our feet were blue during a heat wave, after an expedition to fly her kite failed to turn up any winds; Marine about nineteen, blasé and impatient in a hospital gown after a speed binge resulted in dehydration and collapse; at home, cocking her head to one side to regard her baby pictures, declaring she looked exactly like Mussolini in them; us tossing the filmmaker’s father’s thorny backyard roses at her onstage, roses that the band’s singer took as a tribute to herself; Marine and I climbing the wall of the Catholic cemetery down the street from her family’s apartment as all the dogs at the adjacent school for the blind barked; coming home six months before her death to a message on my answering machine that said in tones of lighthearted wonder, “I love you. It’s Marine!”

When I called back her band’s house the next day to ask about funeral arrangements, I said, “But she seemed so happy, she seemed to have got everything together at last,” and the musician said, “Marine was never happy for herself. She was happy for you.” He told me that after our outing she’d gone home to take care of her grandmother while her mother went away and from there went to a party that Tuesday night. At the party she took something that killed her. It wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine’s corpse was and urged me to go see her at the funeral chapel. This, with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we’d been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two. That Saturday I suddenly walked out of a symposium and went to the chapel.

I’d never been to such a place before. A Georgian portico, a long hallway with doors on both sides, a family with children gathering for a funeral there looking at me doubtfully. The hallway confused me until I noticed lecterns with guest books outside each doorway. The book at the last lectern had Marine’s name written on it, and the curtained glass door was ajar, so I stepped through. The room was a dim mock-chapel. There was a strange hush, there were huge candles and a stained-glass window through which dull, faint light filtered above a vast, ornate, ivory casket like a pastry, set on a bier like an altar, inside which there was a little boy vampire. From the doorway, in profile, she looked tranquil, a sleeper. Up close in that light, she looked only half-familiar, and I realized how much her constant flickering motion had been a part of the impression she made. The coffin was lined with white satin, soft as a bed, and I found myself whispering, “Marine, Marine, Marine, wake up.”

Her mother called me up every once in a while for a few years afterward, and during one call told me that the night Marine died was her wedding night. The man she married was young and well-off, halfway between their ages, and Marine had talked about how much she hated him, though she never mentioned the marriage. Her mother came home the morning after the wedding to the celebratory bottle of champagne that Marine had bought her and to her own mother saying, “You must be strong, you’re going to have to be very strong.” With this revelation, the facts reordered themselves again: it seemed that, in the bitter upset of a marriage that might put home out of bounds, Marine was reckless not to escape but because her return was blocked. I folded up the violet shirt and sweater she’d left in my car and put them in the chest at the foot of my bed. They are still there. In the shirt pocket I found the crumpled wrapper of a Tootsie Pop.

This era came rushing back to me a few years ago when I walked into a New York gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1986. I had been looking at thoroughly contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded this momentous entrance, art that was sleek, shiny, clever, art about design issues, fashion, disaffection, art that was in some ways about the smooth surface of the new city that had replaced the cityscape that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture was different. In Hujar’s saturated black-and-white prints of animals, outcasts, eccentrics, and ruinous places, the world was rough in every sense. Its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and what seemed an ability to absorb: to absorb light, meaning, emotion. The city had mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Not far from the gallery was Chelsea Piers, now “a family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricy, regulated, safe, and predictable, full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing that really only happen elsewhere. It is in a profound way synthetic, a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again.

The Chelsea Piers Web site steers clear of all the history beween 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “But the Chelsea Piers just sat there rusting in the harbor air until destiny called them back,” is all it said, but they didn’t just sit there. During those years every kind of sexual outlaw and pariah made themselves at home in this temporary autonomous zone, sadomasochists in leather and transvestites in fishnet and homeless people and junkies. Chelsea Piers was the place Peter Hujar photographed and his protégé David Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDs in 1992) cruised and wrote about: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater. . . . In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes . . .” Something about the emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz seems inseparable from this kind of place, for if he—queer, punk, desperado, activist—was the quintessential artist of his time it was because the time was about this kind of place, one that was ruinous, bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility, of freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic, idealistic in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.

“A nuclear error but I have no fear,” sang the Clash, “ ’cause London is drowning and I—I live by the river.” It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, and the postnuclear ruins were in every imagination. “The living will envy the dead,” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra, and books, articles, a made-for-TV movie anticipated what kind of ruin the Northern Hemisphere could become. I had always anticipated living in this postnuclear world, and when I thought of my future I wondered whether survival skills or a graduate degree was more germane. Though the ruins were imagined as prophetic architecture of the future, they were the essence of their time. The great industrial cities were becoming something else: San Francisco and New York were almost done losing their ports to more suburban sites, and the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists and the smooth affluence that sometimes follows and imitates artists.

We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. In the time of which I write, the new silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed in a way far more insidious than nuclear war, that they would bring a new wealth that would erase the ruins. In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. Then I thought of Marine’s death as the end of my youth because it signaled the end of my connection to that underworld, but it might instead have been because death became real.

Everything had changed for me in the couple of years that ended with Marine’s death: my father died in a distant country; things that had been too perilous to see before surfaced, and so I wrestled with some highly educational demons; I quit my job and embarked on the life I’m still living, that of an independent writer; and the filmmaker moved to Los Angeles to begin a successful career in the entertainment industry, a transition that made it clear that we were heading in different directions, and so we parted. I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more open and more free. Though I think of the 1980s as my most urban phase, Marine and I, who had both grown up in that suburban county of beautiful hills, kept one foot in the rural or the wild, for that direction was also an escape.

I think now that the suburbs were a kind of tranquilizer for the generation before us, if topography can be a drug. The blandness of ranch houses, the soothing lines of streets curving into cul-de-sacs, the homogeneity, the repetition, the pretty, vacant names were designed to erase the desperation of poverty and strife, to erase tenements and barracks and migrant camps and sharecropper shacks. What they wanted to erase, we unearthed and made into our underground culture, our refuge, our identity. We were shaking that trance off us and going out in pursuit of the world of our grandparents, us kids not so remote from a lost Europe, from the Second World War, from desperation and privation. That was what the city offered, a sharp antidote, the possibility of being fully awake, surrounded by all possibilities, some of which we’d learn the hard way were terrible. I am still a city dweller, but in those days when everything changed I first began going deep in the other direction. Another world was opening up to me in which night was for sleep and, far from city lights, for stars. I got to know the Milky Way and the sharpness of the shadows the full moon casts in the desert.

I wonder now about Marine’s abandon. In a way it seems brave to me, this charging into adventure without fear of consequences. Or was it a desperation in which there were more terrible things than death, a desire so urgent for the anesthesia, distraction, and sense of destiny drugs seem to offer, even a desire for death? Was I cowardly not to want to explore the farther reaches of consciousness, afraid of getting lost, of being unable to return? I had been on my own since I turned seventeen, and that early independence made me old: I was never sure anyone would pick up the pieces if I fell apart, and I thought of consequences. The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily. But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. I missed a lot of adventures that way early on, but I know that there were many paths I could have taken, and madness and misery lay down some of them, just as death was down one of Marine’s, closing off the others her talents and passions might have taken her down.

On a few occasions a few years later, I would enjoy the metallic taste of poppies in various states of refinement and their effect of turning me into something almost reptilian. Opiates seem to kill not merely physical but existential pain, turning you into a cool spectator of your own sensations and desires and of passing time, as languorous as all those images of divans and draperies and long pipes had promised. Though in yet another version of Marine’s death, I heard that it was not the heroin that killed her but a shot of speed her companions gave her to “wake her up”: the two together are a deadly combination, and in this version she died of cowards unwilling to risk any legal consequences from calling the paramedics who could’ve revived her with a single injection. I cannot say now whether it was a murder, a suicide, an accident, or all those things at once. Marine plunged into the unknown again and again, but she kept returning home, while I trudged on in a straight line away from where I’d started.