Marcy’s family lived nearby as well, in Alexandria. She was a slender Slavic beauty with a waterfall of ice-blond hair and eyes like aqua headlamps, and the only one of us with a glamorous job — she worked as a model and receptionist at the most expensive beauty salon in Georgetown. But by early spring, she had pretty much moved back in with her parents too.
This left me and David. He was still taking classes at the Divine, getting a ride with one of the other students who lived in Queenstown, or else catching a bus in front of Giant Food on Queens Chapel Road. Early in the semester he had switched his coursework: Instead of theater, he now immersed himself in French language and literature.
I gave up all pretense of studying or attending classes. I worked a few shifts behind the counter at the Queenstown Restaurant, making pizzas and ringing up beer. I got most of my meals there, and when my friends came in to buy cases of Heineken I never charged them. I made about sixty dollars a week, barely enough to pay the rent and keep me in cigarettes, but I got by. Bus fare was eighty cents to cross the District line; the newly opened subway was another fifty cents. I didn’t eat much. I lived on popcorn and Reuben sandwiches from the restaurant, and there was a sympathetic waiter at the American Café in Georgetown who fed me ice cream sundaes when I was bumming around in the city. I saved enough for my cover at the discos and for the Atlantis, a club in the basement of a fleabag hotel at 930 F Street that had just started booking punk bands. The rest I spent on booze and Marlboros. Even if I was broke, someone would always spring me a drink and a smoke; if I had a full pack of cigarettes, I was ahead of the game. I stayed out all night, eventually staggering into some of the District’s worst neighborhoods with a couple of bucks in my sneaker, if I was lucky. Usually I was broke.
Yet I really was lucky. Somehow I always managed to find my way home. At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. I’d crash into my apartment, alone except for the cockroaches — David would have gone home with a pickup from the bars, and Marcy and Bunny had decamped to the suburbs. I’d be so drunk I stuck to the mattress like a fly mashed against a window. Sometimes I’d sit cross-legged with the typewriter in front of me and write, naked because of the appalling heat, my damp skin gray with cigarette ash. I read Tropic of Cancer, reread Dhalgren and A Fan’s Notes and a copy of Illuminations held together by a rubber band. I played Pere Ubu and Wire at the wrong speed, because I was too wasted to notice, and would finally pass out, only to be ripped awake by the apocalyptic scream of the firehouse siren next door — I’d be standing in the middle of the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, before I realized I was no longer asleep. I saw people in my room, a lanky boy with dark-blond hair and clogs who pointed his finger at me and shouted, “Poseur!” I heard voices. My dreams were of flames, of the walls around me exploding outward so that I could see the ruined city like a freshly tilled garden extending for miles and miles, burning cranes and skeletal buildings rising from the smoke to bloom, black and gold and red, against a topaz sky. I wanted to burn too, tear through the wall that separated me from that other world, the real world, the one I glimpsed in books and music, the world I wanted to claim for myself.
But I didn’t burn. I was just a fucked-up college student, and pretty soon I wasn’t even that. The following spring I flunked out of the Divine. All of my other friends were still in school, getting boyfriends and girlfriends, getting cast in university productions of An Inspector Calls and Arturo Roi. Even David Baldanders managed to get good grades for his paper on Verlaine. Meanwhile, I leaned out my third-floor window and smoked and watched the speed freaks stagger across the parking lot below. If I jumped I could be with them: That was all it would take.
It was too beautiful for words, too terrifying to think this was what my life had shrunk to. In the mornings I made instant coffee and tried to read what I’d written the night before. Nice words but they made absolutely no sense. I cranked up Marcy’s expensive stereo and played my records, compulsively transcribing song lyrics as though they might somehow bleed into something else, breed with my words and create a coherent story line. I scrawled more words on the bedroom walclass="underline"
I HAVE BEEN DAMNED BY THE RAINBOW
I AM AN AMERICAN ARTIST, AND I HAVE NO CHAIRS
It had all started as an experiment. I held the blunt, unarticulated belief that meaning and transcendence could be shaken from the world, like unripe fruit from a tree; then consumed.
So I’d thrown my brain into the Waring blender along with vials of cheap acid and hashish, tobacco and speed and whatever alcohol was at hand. Now I wondered: Did I have the stomach to toss down the end result?
Whenever David showed up it was a huge relief.
“Come on,” he said one afternoon. “Let’s go to the movies.”
We saw a double bill at the Biograph, The Story of Adele H. and Jules et Jim. Torturously uncomfortable chairs, but only four bucks for four hours of air-conditioned bliss. David had seen Adele H. six times already; he sat beside me, rapt, whispering the words to himself. I struggled with the French and mostly read the subtitles. Afterwards we stumbled blinking into the long ultraviolet D.C. twilight, the smell of honeysuckle and diesel, coke and lactic acid, our clothes crackling with heat like lightning and our skin electrified as the sugared air seeped into it like poison. We ran arm-in-arm up to the Café de Paris, sharing one of David’s Gitanes. We had enough money for a bottle of red wine and a baguette. After a few hours the waiter kicked us out, but we gave him a dollar anyway. That left us just enough for the Metro and the bus home.
It took us hours to get back. By the time we ran up the steps to our apartment we’d sobered up again. It was not quite 9 o’clock on a Friday night.
“Fuck!” said David. “What are we going to do now?”
No one was around. We got on the phone but there were no parties, no one with a car to take us somewhere else. We rifled through the apartment for a forgotten stash of beer or dope or money, turned our pockets inside-out looking for stray seeds, Black Beauties, fragments of green dust.
Nada.
In Marcy’s room we found about three dollars in change in one of her jean pockets. Not enough to get drunk, not enough to get us back into the city.
“Damn,” I said. “Not enough for shit.”
From the parking lot came the low thunder of motorcycles, a baby crying, someone shouting.
“You fucking motherfucking fucker.”
“That’s a lot of fuckers,” said David.
Then we heard a gunshot.
“Jesus!” yelled David, and yanked me to the floor. From the neighboring apartment echoed the crack of glass shattering. “They shot out a window!”
“I said, not enough money for anything.” I pushed him away and sat up. “I’m not staying here all night.”
“Okay, okay, wait …”
He crawled to the kitchen window, pulled himself onto the sill to peer out. “They did shoot out a window,” he said admiringly. “Wow.”
“Did they leave us any beer?”