The car was a rolling sex box and each night found us in a new neighborhood in or out of the city. When the sun would rise in the Sunset, the gray volvo windows would be dripping condensation and our bent bodies would unravel. She would start the day with coffee and cigarettes and I would stare silently at the urban playground we had infested rolling eerily by on the back streets.
We were insatiable, but perhaps not very bright. We had started a band with this mostly blind albino mexican junkie named David. I had met him working at a residential/retirement hotel up from the Tenderloin on Geary. He decided to live outside when I decided to and he claimed that he was going to use me to become famous. He would pull out a magnifying glass to examine drum equipment in the pawn shops and would concatenate odd words to form new insults. In fact, I don't recall anything leaving his mouth that wasn't insulting to someone, if not everyone in a room. He loved metal and jazz.
We decided to practice at my girlfriend Marjon's parent's house. We picked up some apple cardboard and carpet from some dumpsters and proceeded to tack it up to the walls in Marjon's room to dampen the sound. I know, it's not so hardcore living in a car and under an overpass when your girlfriend's parents live in the city and you work at bank of America. Young. Stupid.
She played cello, I played guitar. The songs were odd timed and silly, not quite reminiscent of anything. We finished and she and I went to take a shower (at least once a week was sufficient) in her parents virtual spa of a bathroom.
Everything was tiled and the shower was as large as a queen sized bed, which is exactly what we used it for. Somehow, over the spray of water, slapping of bodies, groans, etc, she heard her parents pulling up. She jumped up as they entered the house. My heart was in my intestine.
Her father was a six three persian man who barely spoke english and forbade her to do almost anything that she did. Her mother was a short japanese woman who also barely spoke english. Neither of them spoke each other's languages either. Messy situation.
She toweled up and told me to wait in the bathroom, that she would signal for me a time to sneak down. Her parents had walked into their house to find an albino man playing a bass guitar in their daughter's bedroom and their daughter in a bath towel attempting to explain things away. I heard the father walking up the stair toward the bathroom. Marjon distracted him and he walked back down. I looked out the window and David was walking down the street with a grin on his face, shaking his head from side to side.
She finally came for me and led me to her closet. I wriggled in, naked and buried myself under some of her dirty clothing. I could see her sitting on her bed through a little crack in the door. It was just enough to see her crying hysterically as her parents took turns yelling at her in their respective languages. She was slapped a couple times and I had this brief fantasy of stepping out of the closet, some birthday suit super hero but then I realized I had to pee.
I really really had to pee. At least a half hour of tag team discipline passed before they decided to take a brake. Marjon came to the closet door and I squeaked "I really really have to pee." She grabbed a 7-up super big gulp container, one of those "diabetes or your money back guarunteed" cups. I filled it, she dumped it and sat down in her bed just in time for round 2. Her parent's voices were becoming hoarse, but they persevered. I still had to pee really bad.
They finally let up and left the room, grounding her indefinately. I filled the cup 2 more times...perhaps 3 liters of pee total? She dumped them each time. She brought me my clothes and I ninja'd my way past the dining room where the two parents were smoldering over tea. I sprinted down the hill outside of her house, feeling the rotten butterflies in my stomach, but god damnit I was free.
Another notable moment in our foolish sexual history took place in a park in the lower Haight. We put up my tent around dusk and promptly began. Perhaps an hour into it, my hand slipped out of the tent, into some poo. I don't really know if it was human poo, dog poo. It could've been elephant poo and still not stopped us from having sex. We wrapped a plastic bread bag around my hand and rubber banded it at the wrist and kept going. The next morning, I wore the bag for a couple hours before we found a place where I could wash.
Everywhere, from elevators to libraries, public bathrooms to, more often than not, the passenger side seat of her parent's volvo, we did it. The last time was a goodbye after she told me about her heroinn habit and after her tryst with the crack dealer. She was wearing a pink tutu and the act was angry and desperate from both of us, unlike the earlier, more innocent and wild moments. We had spent nights together crying in self-pity but the profession of hard drug use snapped me out of whatever reverie we had lived the past year and a half in.
When I left the city six months later I dropped by the apartment we had rented together. We had lucked out after sleeping outside and in the crack hotels and had moved into a $700 a month studio. My hiking pack was there. She had taken out her dreds and her weave and now wore two perfectly round afro-puffs. She looked like some beautiful stranger that would never give me the time of day. I didn't smile, neither did she. She took a drag on her cigarette and said "I can't believe you're leaving." My response, and the last thing I said to her before going was "Why?"
No comments:
Post a Comment