Lit Riffs (36 page)

I don’t want to be like my mother, but I sit at a window of sorts in a house that tilts forward with all of my urgency; academia provides the view. And the boy, now dead, he was so real. The class filed out. Someone threw on the lights. The projector fan buzzed. He followed me to my office, sheepish. Once inside, he said, “You got my note.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“It’s true.”

“I figured it was.” I’m sitting in my office chair. It’s old wooden slat-back on wheels. The floors are institutional tile. I tell him to sit down. There’s a small blue couch. He edges into it slowly, presses his shoulder blades back, cocky, but looks at the floor.

He looks like all of them. Do I have to go over it? Half pimp, half Little League. I want to tell him that I know him, drunk, naked, stung. I know him beat-up, passed out. I know how he drives, distracted, screaming lyrics. I know how he plays air guitar in the shower, how he lathers his head with his knuckles and how he shakes it when he comes up for air in a lake. I know how he throws up. I know how he’d put his hands behind his head when I’m going down—my mouth, my teeth, they remember too much—and I know how he’d like me to ride him so he can take in a view. I know him in his parents’ basement, on public golf courses, swimming pools. I know him on the beach, on a basketball court, up against a tennis wall. I know him in the school gym, along a row of clanging lockers. I know what his car smells like and that his dick curves because some overzealous doctor circumcised him too tight, an underestimation.

I lean over and put my hands, one on each of his knees, and let them slide down his thighs. There’s a small window in my office door. It isn’t locked. I tell him that he can call me at home. I write the number on a slip of paper. He looks at it, folds it, and puts it in his pocket.

Once upon a time, the high school administration developed an arsenal of filmstrips. What had once been the uplifting story of an armless woman (she could trim her sons’ bangs, bake a cake, stir batter, swat a fly, all with her toes) was replaced with stories like
Cathy, Cathy!
about a promiscuous girl who needed love and a virgin football player talked into having sex with her in a van. Projectors were wheeled into stuffy, chalk-dusted classrooms. Lights off, the room took on a backseat feeling, the expectation of groping. The filmstrips did no good. Jealousy, I preferred it to sympathy. Afterward the beleaguered eyes of the ethics teacher dogged me all the way to the door. “I want to talk to you.”

But she had nothing to say. She kept things vague. “Is there something wrong? Do you need help?”

I stared at her. An underbite and stitched eyebrows, concern knotting at her nose. “No,” I said. “I’m as fine as you are. We’re all fucked-up.”

“Don’t speak that way to me! I’m reaching out.”

“Was there a teacher memo on that?”

“I should give you detention.”

“Okay, but in your professional opinion, do you really think that would help?”

I’m proud of this now. Can you tell? I didn’t have a vocabulary for any of it then. I thought I was alone. There was a movement going on, but not in Asbury Park.

Michael Hanrahan called once it was dark. His voice was hushed, like he was calling from his parents’ kitchen phone. Or his roommate was around. “Should I come over?”

There have been grown-up men. A techie who appreciated that I could dance to Ozzie. An engineer who confused work and love. A Harvard grad, fallen on hard times, selling his hand-me-down golf clubs. I’d been good for a long time. But this kid was one of my people. I’d be able to recognize him anywhere. Smart, but beaten, that dogged accent, rough hands. “I think you should.”

My mother called, too, at dusk the night she died. It had only been six weeks. That’s relevant. She said, “Why don’t you get married? I thought you would get married young. But no, you and your boys, boys, boys. I saw you once. Your father and I were driving to your aunt Rita and uncle Marty’s. They were going to play calypso music. And, out on the highway, you were there, doing a backbend out a car window with your shirt pulled up. I didn’t tell your father.”

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“It doesn’t last. That’s why. Do you do that now?”

The kid was knocking at the front door in fifteen minutes. He picked up a gourd off the coffee table. “Nice gourd.”

I was going to tell him about a tribe, but didn’t. It was a lecture. I didn’t want to be rehearsed.

We sat on the floor. I lit a candle. We drank wine. It made my nose itch. I asked, “Do you believe in original sin?” I asked, “Do you know Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane’?” I recited, “‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness and in the heart’s pride.’”

A true feminist, a single woman, should keep condoms in the house. I should have had them in a candy dish on the coffee table, like at the campus health center. But I didn’t. Once my mother and father were doing it in some parking lot somewhere, two stupid kids, and they didn’t either. It’s why I exist. And Michael Hanrahan didn’t have anything either. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll go out and get some.” He was being grown-up, mustering all of his adult manners for me. He buttoned his shirt, his chest disappearing.

I looked out the window. “It’s started raining. Do you want an umbrella?” My umbrella was a Monet print, bought at a museum gift shop on a day they’d forecasted sun.

He shook his head, and I thought of him pawing out across a certain lake at night. I can’t make it okay, only understandable. That’s the most I can hope for. When I think of him now, I imagine the radio cranked, the scrim of water, an intersection nestled in a forest of telephone poles, Michael, his dick tensed against his jeans. I could have saved him, right? And while he was gone—he never came back; all night as I waited, no one called me; he didn’t, after all, even have my ridiculous umbrella in his car—I thought of what I might tell him. I’d tell him, of course, “Don’t love me.” I’d confess, “My mother died not long ago.” And “I was once someone else.” I would stretch against him and marvel, “My house, my old street, my entire raucous hometown, how could you walk around carrying it with you and not know, and not have the tiniest idea?”

author inspiration

Walker Percy once wrote Springsteen a letter appreciating his Catholic imagery. This literary gushing is nothing new. My letter, if I were bold enough, would center on Bruce’s women. Maybe I’d confess how his line “You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right and that’s all right with me” was a relief at sixteen, when I was a scrawny girl living just south of Jersey. I’d tell him that his women are strong and flawed, ordinary and real—Sandy, Wendy, Mary. He wants to save them, but it’s clear that he needs them if he’s to save himself. Even in the middle of a song about drunken rowdiness like “Spirit in the Night,” he slips in the line “I’m hurt,” and it’s Crazy Janey who offers to heal him, and the song takes on a new weight, a dirty ache. When I was asked to contribute, there was no hesitation. I’d been following Crazy Janey in my mind for years, and she rose up, heroic, nostalgic, still desperate as ever.

LESTER BANGS
has been regarded as the most influential and irreverent critic of rock and roll. Although an untimely death in 1982 cut short a writing career at a premature thirty-four years of age, his hyperintelligent and impudent pieces for such publications as
Creem, Rolling Stone
, the
Village Voice
, and London’s NME (New Musical Express) conveyed his aggressively candid and honest style with prose that echoed Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. His subjects in his many travel essays and general music criticism ranged from Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones to more obscure musicians like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart. The piece featured in this collection, “From ‘Maggie May,’ 1981,” was one of many pieces that became lost in his vast catalog of work and has been resurrected for this collection as a celebration of his sometimes experimental work, which helped to inspire the other pieces in the book.

JONATHAN LETHEM
is the author of six novels, including
The Fortress of Solitude
and
Motherless Brooklyn
, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He’s also the editor of
The Vintage Book of Amnesia
and
The Da Capo Year’s Best Music Writing 2002
. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

AMANDA DAVIS
is the author of the novel
Wonder When You’ll Miss Me
and
Circling the Drain
, a collection of short stories. Davis was raised in Durham, North Carolina, and lived in New York City and Oakland, California, where she taught in the MFA program at Mills College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have been published in
Esquire, Bookforum, Black Book, McSweeney% Poets and Writers, Story, Seventeen
, and
Best New American Voices 2001
. She was killed in a plane crash in March 2003 at the age of thirty-two.

JT LEROY
is the author of the international best-sellers
Sarah
(being made into a film by Steven Shainberg) and
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
(being made into a film by Asia Argento). LeRoy’s third book will be out from Viking in 2004, and his work appears in the short story collection
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003
, edited by Dave Eggars. He is the associate producer of Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant
, which premiered in competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or and Best Director prizes.

LeRoy’s writing has appeared in such publications as
McSweeney’s, Black Book, Film Comment, Spin, GQ, Paper, Interview, The Face
, and
Filmmaker
. He will soon be published in The Sunday Times of London and writes a monthly column for the magazine 7 × 7. LeRoy is also slated to write a book about Gus Van Sant’s
My Own Private Idaho
for the influential BFI Film Classic series. He is working with Last Gasp publishing and artist Cherry Hood on a graphic novel version of
Harold’s End
.

LeRoy is part of the rock band Thistle, currently recording their debut release. He is working with No Hands Productions, the creators of the hit series
Blue’s Clues
, on an original children’s feature film.

TOM PERROTTA’S
most recent novel is
Little Children
. His other books are
Joe College, The Wishbones, Bad Haircut, and Election
(the basis of the acclaimed 1999 film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon). Perrotta’s nonaction has appeared in
Rolling Stone
and GQ. He lives in Massachusetts.

TANKER DANE
is an accomplished guitarist and street poet. He has been serenading in the New York City subways for several years and still finds it strange why the tips were fewer and far between during the heyday of the dot-com era. This is his first published work.

LISA TUCKER
is the author of two music-inspired novels:
The Song Reader
and
Shout Down the Moon
. She grew up in small towns outside Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, and has toured the Midwest with a jazz band and worked as a waitress, writing teacher, office cleaner, and math professor. She has a graduate degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and a graduate degree in math from Villanova University. Her fiction has appeared in Seventeen and Pages magazine. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. She currently lives with her husband and son in New Mexico, where she is at work on another novel.

Visit the author’s website: www.lisatucker.com

AIMEE BENDER
is the author of two books:
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
and
An Invisible Sign of My Own
. Her fiction has been published in
Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, GQ, Fence, McSweeney’s
, and other journals, as well as heard on NPR’s
This American Life
.

ANTHONY DECURTIS
is executive editor of
Tracks
magazine and a longtime contributing editor at
Rolling Stone
. He is the author of
Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters and editor of Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture
, both published by Duke University Press. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set Crossroads won a Grammy in the Best Album Notes category. He holds a PhD in American literature, and he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.

HANNAH TINTI
grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in
Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, Sonora Review, Story Quarterly
, and
Best American Mystery Stories 2003
. Her short story collection,
Animal Crackers
, will be published by Dial Press in March 2004. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine.

NEAL POLLACK
is the author of three books: the rock novel
Never Mind the Pollacks, Beneath the Axis of Evil
, and the cult classic
The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
. He is a columnist for
Vanity Fair
and writes regularly for many other fine publications. Visit his website, www.nealpollack.com, for daily satirical commentary on important matters of the day. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.

TOURÉ
is the author of
The Portable Promised Land
, a collection of short stories published by Little, Brown. He’s also a contributing editor at
Rolling Stone
and the host of MTV2’s
Spoke N’ Heard
. He studied at Columbia University’s graduate school of creative writing and lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. A novel called
Soul City
will arrive in September 2004. Visit his website at www.toure.com.

VICTOR LAVALLE
is the author of a short story collection,
Slapboxing with Jesus
(Vintage), and a novel,
The Ecstatic
(Crown/Vintage), which was chosen as a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award.

HEIDI JULAVITS
is the author of two novels,
The Mineral Palace
and
The Effect of Living Backwards
. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
Time, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Harper’s Bazaar
, among other places. She is a founding editor of
The Believer
.

ARTHUR BRADFORD
’S first book,
Dogwalker
, was published by Knopf in 2001. His first feature film, a documentary called
How’s Your News?
, was broadcast on HBO/Cinemax in 2002 and is now out on video.

JENNIFER BELLE
is the best-selling author of two novels,
Going Down
and
High Maintenance
, and a book for children, Animal Stackers. Her stories and essays have appeared in
Black Book, Ms., The New York Times Magazine, The Independent Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mudfish
. She lives in New York City, where she leads a writing workshop in her home and is at work on her third novel.

ERNESTO QUIÑONEZ
was raised in Spanish Harlem. He is the author of the novels
Bodega Dreams
(Vintage, 2000) and
Chango’s Fire
(HarperCollins Rayo Imprint, 2004). He lives in New York City.

DARIN STRAUSS
is the award-winning author of the international best-seller
Chang and Eng
, and of the New York Times Notable Book
The Real McCoy
, which was named one of the 25 Books to Remember of 2002 by the New York Public Library. He is also a screenwriter and has adapted
Chang and Eng
for Disney films. He teaches at New York University, and his work has been translated into thirteen languages.

JUDY BUDNITZ
is the author of the books
Flying Leap, If I Told You Once
, and a forthcoming story collection. Her stories have appeared in
Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Fence, Story, Prize Stories 2000: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, Lost Tribes
, and others.

DAVID EBERSHOFF
is the author of the novels
Pasadena
and
The Danish Girl
and the story collection
The Rose City
. He Lives in New York City and is finishing a new novel,
The Lost Family
. He can be reached at www.ebershoff.com.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL
is the author of
Use Me
, which was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award, a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Ornes Best Book of the Year, and a Border’s Discover New Writers selection. She is currently a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair
and a founding editor and now editor-at-large of
Tin House
magazine. Her work has appeared in, among other places,
The Paris Review, Spin, Spy, Nerve
. She lives in Brooklyn.

ZEV BOROW
has written for
Spin, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Details, Wired, Vibe, ESPN the Magazine
, and
McSweeney’s
. He also writes scripts for television and is the cofounder of G-NET Media, which produces video-game-related TV projects.

NELSON GEORGE
is the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction works, including
Hip Hop America
and
Post-Soul Nation
, a history of the ’80s in black popular culture. His next novel is
The Accidental Hunter
. He also executive produced the HBO film
Everyday People
. He can be reached at www.nelsongeorge.com.

JULIANNA BAGGOTT
has published dozens of short stories and poems in such publications as
The Southern Review, Chelsea Poetry
, and
Best American Poetry 2000
. A recipient of fellowships from the Delaware Division of Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, she won the 1998 Eyster Prize for short fiction. She is the author of two novels,
Girl Talk
(Pocket Books, 2000) and
The Miss America Family
(Pocket Books, 2001) and a collection of poems,
This Country of Mothers
. She lives in Newark, Delaware, with her husband, poet David G. W. Scott, and three children.