Now I ask Seth the same thing, Who is my family? Who are these people?
He pulled my arm, jerking me to the side of the crowd, “I thought you understood that if you were gonna run with us that you weren’t gonna make trouble — ”
It must’ve looked weird to the outside observer: four lanky warrior boys with a sad-looking 17-year-old girl in tow, eyes trained at the ground. I wasn’t part of their army, but I was part of their war. “That wasn’t part of the deal! If you want to be with us,” Seth kept saying, “if you want me to protect you, you got to be cool!” So I kept quiet. Stayed at Seth’s side where he fed me and petted me and told me jokes. I never said a word but everybody said, Why don’t you smile, little girl? And asked, Why do you look so sad all the time? The truth was, they could never know: I wasn’t real. I wasn’t the way I should be, exactly — and I mean bodily as well as mentally.
I passed, sure. But there was always an element of it that people got caught up on; hmmm they shook their heads as they turned from me. I had to find my sister. She was the only one who could help me with my problem. But it was getting so late. She could die any day. How long could a girl like her last out here? Exposed to the elements night and day, exposed to the lifestyle that her own self-styled “family” (that band of immoral teenage hobo jocks helmed by her b-f Rick) had shackled to her wrists? They were using her. And it was killing her; it was killing us both — we were real codependent that way. I had three months, tops, before Kim hit the ground for good. She was already falling, albeit slow at first. I was running as fast as I could.
She had something on her I needed real bad.
On the road I always got the lion’s share of unwanted attention because I was the only girl. God only knows how it was working out for Kim, considering who she was spending her time with. Ugh, that must’ve looked weird too, sad mopey girl lurking around with some dude and his friends… Seth was the leader of my group like Rick was the leader of hers. But Seth — such a weirdo! A neurotic Superbird. He had a way of being convincing through an unstoppable verbal onslaught, a sustained tone of syllables coming out of his mouth. He was almost 20, like all the others. I can’t remember where we met. Maybe school.
I’m pretty sure I was born in Arcata, California. I don’t know how I became a foster kid. I often demanded of Seth, “Tell me where my real family is!” He just shook his head, “Your parents died when you were a little baby.” THEY DID NOT! I screamed. Thing is, in a dream my mother visited me as an angel, my father visited me as an angel — each taking an opposite form. I sucked the life out of one while the other sucked the life out of me — but we’ll get to that part way way down the road. Till then it’s about beginnings… I busted out laughing, “Beginnings?” I said to no one in particular. What an arbitrary mess of a word. Let’s dispense with all misguided (imprecise) (illusory) (disingenuous) terminology right off the bat.
But it is about beginnings. I saw my first evisceration six miles back in the stockroom of a Coburg gas station. You could say I’m “beginning” to like life on the road. But of course no sooner have I said this than I step into the ladies’ room of a Chevron up on Goodpasture Loop… I was just done washing my hair in the sink when a man walked in. A surprise, the possibility of which I’d only ever played through in my mind 8,000 times. And here it was. I stared at him through cold water in my eyes for what felt like a long time… Frozen with fear I closed my eyes as he swallowed the distance between us; I made note of his nose breath on the back of my neck after he gathered my wet hair on top of my head in a fist ponytail. I opened my eyes just as Seth appeared in the doorway. What I didn’t see were the exchanged glances several minutes earlier in the trailmix aisle on the other side of the door, between Seth and the man, who was a great deal older but not very much taller than me. What I’ve always found to be true is if two beings are tuned into the right frequency then there is no need for anything else. Here words would only cloud the poetry of what was about to commence. Only poised choreography and a certain inept longing filled the space. With effortless grace the man yanked my skirt up over my butt while he simultaneously pushed my head down toward the sink. He was small and I barely noticed him.
Back outside in the parking lot I choked on my own glowering sadness, each sigh bringing more tears. Burrowing into my sweatshirt I gummed a piece of candy with a mouth full of mucous as the other boys whooped and fake punched each other in the stomach. I lose track of them. Each boy in our group all seem to blend into one mechanical teen felon meathead in my mind. I’m only half affectionately looking out for them, bearing witness to the march of their pathetic, over-determined lives. Since all the boys are a bit older than me, they’ve been out on their own, away from their families, for a long time; they are legally “men” while I’m still a girl. I can’t picture myself being anyway else. For now I’m getting used to wearing the same clothes every day, eating ground-scored snacks and brushing my teeth with a bottle of tap water in the sand. I have agreed to show no signs of weakness.
Some self-righteous Krishna Punx at the Portland free clinic tried to start a fight with us this afternoon, saying our lifestyle is immoral and we spread disease all over the world, singling me out for whoring it up “wicca-bad.” They cinched up their scarves and hissed in our direction Gypsy motherfuckers. Josh threw a cup of ice at them and we yelled, “We’re not waiting anymore, these assholes are trying to kill-slash-indict us,” and stormed through the back doors demanding our medicine. Yeesh, we’ve toured the countryside, fucking in breakrooms all over the Pacific Northwest. Just run in, barricade the door, bone down and run away. Problem is, these bloodsucking gakkers I truck with have been getting worse at jumping on trains, to the point where this morning Knowles tripped and hit his shoulder on the ledge; we scraped him up a bit dragging him over the side but he could easily have ended up under the damn train and that’d be where we’d leave him. Being high used to make it easy to jump on even modern trains, now there’s no bigger joke than watching five spindly losers try to scale a rail car doing 18 mph. There’s a couple tips some old hobos have told us — one from some lifer named Boom Box — and that’s to get your sneakers in shape. Also, don’t eat for twelve hours prior — no problem. Be drunk, taking a Quaalude will make it easier for your friend to hoist your body onto the train if you’re a girl. Try not to piss off other hobos with your yelling and fighting and dumb music. All dogs must be on a leash — “or a rope-leash.” Give the old-timer in the car a beer too. Being harassed on the street by a bunch of crappy-pants assholes in Dockers, straight-laced guys with knives hidden in satchels, tie clips with razor edges, etc., truly blows. They may be mortals but they sure as hell have a fuckin chip on their shoulder for us. They want us gone and will stop at nothing to annihilate our bodies with rock-hard force. The whole other section of society just doesn’t see us, we’re a bunch of friggin ghosts to them. And that helps.
Seth, Knowles, Josh, Murph, and I were smoking cigarettes out in front of a diner in the middle of a moist Monmouth night after we robbed this guy who was totally baked for thirty bucks and some orange vitamins. From far away I begin to pick up the sound of seagulls, throngs of them, their oscillating squeaks building until, looking up, I’m able to make out the vague, blurry pods some distance overhead appearing out of the vapor, emerging as fuzzy flecks out of black, hundreds of them tossing up so much racket, visually too with the lame half-falling way they fly. I was sure something horrible had happened to produce this; perhaps a giant dumpster had been disturbed a mile or so off, behind a Safeway, a huge noise in itself, where the gulls had become increasingly upset as to scatter like flecks of ash from an amoral fire. In other news, historically speaking, I originally turned vampire on my fourteenth birthday three years ago, as a symptom of, or maybe a response to, things getting really bad at home. Kim was gone. When it’s just you and your friend alone together in the shark tank, and then they bail, you’re gonna want to follow them. I started sneaking out every night to suck men’s blood; my house mom had no idea until one morning I came home late and she was waiting for me. I kept it up and eventually got caught with my mouth on some guy’s neck in a Safeway breakroom. After that she power-drilled the window shut, warning me that if I kept it up she would send me away. I unscrewed it with a screwdriver, went out again, woke up in a married man’s car, this guy I met at another grocery store, and it was six a.m. I went home and went to sleep — fuck going to school. Later that day I awakened at one in the afternoon to my house mom and a social worker standing over me. My house mom told me to pack my shit ’cause I was moving. I went hysterical and cried non-stop. The social worker had to be an asshole about it and took me to a cemetery on the way to Eugene. He told me that seeing my sister’s grave might help me get with the program. “It’s empty,” I whispered, mildly, until he left me alone.