Some people are true New Yorkers, and they’ve only been in town a month. That’s how it was for her. She never wondered if she belonged there. She just fit in immediately, flicking her cigarettes on the pavement, waving for taxis right out in the middle of the street. She moved around the city like it was her own, elbowing back the other eighteen million people, shoving her way into the subway car. She lugged her DAG bags up the 108° stairwell; cheered the chicks with dicks in the gay parades; flew along in early Sunday morning cabs, her forehead against the window, watching the long row of timed green stoplights bloom along 6th Avenue.
She was, standing tall, 5’3”. If it helps to have a face to imagine, she looked more than a little like the actress Lili Taylor. Her eyes were hazel green. She was tuned in. Always. Aware. Hyperaware. She didn’t miss shit. She was an 8000-megawatt emotional receiver, her crowded dial picking up radiated irritation and bits of interpersonal conflict from ox and cart villages in China. She noticed and felt everything.
She didn’t walk into somebody’s party so much as she exploded into it. She charged in at full volume, arms spread wide, palms open and back, loud, throwing her black coat off onto wherever it landed and greeting friends with her made-up pet names, her kick-your-ass black lace up boots stepping right over the stranger’s glass table and their cocaine mirror and the book open to a delicate Mapplethorpe calla lily, all so that she could hug her Lamb Chop like she hadn’t seen him in a hundred years, but really it was only yesterday, and they’d been on the phone half the afternoon. Her crinkly eyes flashed, and her smile spread out and across her face like a card-deck joker.
She bust in and broke up the slow-motion cigarette tapping and the feedback-loop artistic conversations and the $800 pressed trousers crossed carefully one leg over the other with her riot and her decibels and her dervish. Then she’d race back out and find whoever was in the next room, but not before noting mid-step, in a pause coming back over the coffee table, that that calla lily (she’d just say “that flower”) is pretty (and just “pretty” or something similar, she wasn’t in a vocabulary contest). Then off she’d go, her voice ricocheting back somewhere from the next room. The players would re-cross their legs and take their places again, trying to get back to their performance, but feeling silly about it now.
People either liked her immediately or they could kiss her ass. Or “My ass,” she’d say, gesturing to her own bottom (she was proud of her bottom), and the way she said it made everyone laugh because she could harness her intensity into something entertaining and unthreatening. She could laugh at herself and play the clown to make things light. She could put her hands on her hips, and smile her watermelon slice smile, and thrust her belly out in a funny way for the photographer. She made her height and size and her body something to have fun with. They were part of her show.
She didn’t need to be smarter than you. She didn’t need to be better looking or funnier than you or anything. She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t competitive in that way. She didn’t jump in during the middle of your story to tell hers. She wasn’t ambitious or trying to prove herself to the world. She didn’t need to win all the fucking time. And unless she felt wounded, she did not want to hurt you. There was something childlike in her, and there was something childlike in the strategy of how she chose to relate to the world that made her feel safe and made others safe around her. It was, mostly, a strategy that worked.
She made her living as a bartender which meant she had to handle men twice her size and get serious about people, too. She could, almost miraculously, yell at them from the other end of the bar, making them sit back the fuck down for a goddamn second, and I’ll get you your drink when I get you your drink. She could say this and then break into a smile, and it was a kind of theater sitting there at the end of the bar and watching her work. Her ability to sass and control and win these drunken assholes over amazed even them. Later they’d bring her presents, funny lighters shaped like PEZ dispensers or stupid shit from novelty shops and ten-dollar bills folded into swans to amuse her and make her joker’s smile come out, and the crap would accumulate on her dresser at the apartment. And most of the time anyway, they did sit back the fuck down and then she’d make them laugh later, and even give her one of their cigarettes when she practically demanded it from them, and they’d decided it was just easier to become friends with her than to fight her.
But there were other times, too, when they were deliberately mean or hurtful or cruelly vulgar and she lost control of them, or, worse yet, a barstool ally turned traitor or some worthless employer would join in the laughter about her, and then she’d come home with the hurt and insult and disgust of it, and it would get on her skin and under her skin, and it was like she’d been shit on, and it would make her angry, and then it would make her cry bitterly. It was very hard to convince her to let go once a dark feeling took hold of her.
Her feelings, every single last one, came at her at 180 miles an hour and each one took full control of the wheel while it ran its course. She was its ecstatic or terrified passenger. It didn’t matter what the feeling was: happy, sad, or fuck you, or I’m so sorry or never again I promise, or this time it’s over for real. (I said all of those things.) And then she’d get very hard on herself for things that had nothing to do with what had actually happened, and she’d say she didn’t think she was very smart, and hated that she was bartending, and everything else about herself too, but the smart thing really was crap. She was very, very smart and anybody who ever got in a really good fight with her knew how fast and effortlessly her mind worked once it stopped tearing itself apart in the mirror.
But even just watching her eyes move as she spoke or when somebody else laughed a certain way she liked, or didn’t like, and then you could see it surface, the whole marvelous power of what moved within her. But it did not help to point this kind of thing out or remind her of any of that or argue facts with her. She tunneled in alone, and she tunneled out alone.
She was a champion of the underdog, not because she had a chip on her shoulder and was against the big guy, but simply because she was on the side of the little guy. She naturally defended anyone marginalized. She was in the AIDS Walk very early on, and each year she raised a small fortune, holding her customers hostage, shaking down her employers, demanding her friends contribute until they did, telling them how much exactly was still not enough, and getting away with it, filling long, oversized pledge sheets with scribbled donations.
And woe to the stubborn non-contributors! Or, god help them, anybody who wanted to argue about the disease or tell her, rolling their eyes and muttering that the gays probably deserved it. Later on, back at the apartment she’d go into a total conniption about those fucking fucks! They were only a hair’s-breadth away from saying the fags deserved it, and she could just hear it, and the closed-heartedness of it all upset her and, to tell you the truth, she didn’t actually know how to respond then.
Because it was like they were evil. She didn’t want to see anyone with feelings abandoned, and the fact that there were people out there who would abandon other people right to their face and then give some bullshit, cold-hearted, hateful reason for it was a giant storm cloud of shit hanging over life itself. It sent an electric jolt of confusion and powerlessness through her. She hated that. Just hated it.
Oh, but she loved the Mets (I LOOOOOVE the METS!!!!!! she wrote once), and one time at a game that was rain delayed for hours and had run into extra innings, she stood up in front of the last stragglers in her section, and turned around, and announced suddenly to everybody that they all need to stand up and right this second because Hernandez is going to walk, and then Strawberry is going to hit one. And her voice must have carried all the way down to the field, because everybody did as they were told (the fans and the players both) and then everyone in our section came stepping down over the blue and orange fold-out seats to high five her with both hands in the air like she was the one who’d hit the walk off with that marvelous Strawberry looping swing of his and the front leg thoroughbred kick.
She was practically bumping chests with the other fans, her arms held in victory, radiating her 8000-megawatt intensity the other direction now, the star-crossed lovers in China suddenly seeing the bright side, and deciding to give it another season and somehow work it out.
*
She could kick your ass at this driving game she had at work. Every day she used to play it before her shift, and after a while she could always get all of the way to the end, all five levels or whatever, totally focused on the thing, locked in, swearing and steering, talking to the machine, spinning the wheel aggressively, man-handling the stick shift, telling it what it was about to do before it did it (under her breath whispering blue car coming on the right, blue car on the right, blue car on the right and then laughing and yelling, aware of the audience behind her, there you are, you FUCK!), and then the blue car would appear, and she’d cut it off and drop it behind her without another word, just taking care of business, a Rapid Roy Stock Car Boy menthol cigarette burning at the edge or her mouth or precariously from the side of the machine as she raced past tropical trees, and polar snowfields, and upside-down nighttime highway until the machine had nothing left to throw at her and timidly puttered down and let her into the winner’s circle.
After she’d get to the finish line, she’d enter her initials, spinning the steering wheel, and stomping on the accelerator, and going yeeeeah with as deep a voice as she could fathom and turning back towards the room. She’d scrunch both her fists, and tighten her whole upper body, and bare her teeth in fierce athletic triumph, and for about half a second, it was like she’d won Wimbledon. Then off to work. If they had a sliver of conscience the bar owner, or the chuckling early shift barflies would have returned her quarters.
She had a serious tomboy in her by which I mean that she slept with who she wanted, their gender and color and, maybe it’s better not to think about it in my case, probably the timing were her business. From time to time, she’d wear this pair of men’s jockey underwear she had, and she didn’t really give a shit, and she liked to do it for the shock value, and it did shock and unsettle me, but that kind of thing was just her, and you weren’t going to change it. I’d never really met anybody like her. And, of course, there’s the obvious reason for that.
But you should not be fooled, because sometimes there was a ballerina in there, too, behind the tomboy and the card-deck joker and the clown, past the ass kicker and the drama queen and the race car driver, on a stage right at the center, right at the heart of her, was a ballerina – a child ballerina, beautiful but scared to go out – and everybody close to her knew that tiny dancer, and tried to encourage her from time to time, and speak to her in comforting words when she was frightened. (Because when she was frightened, then we were all frightened.) And we would try to remind her how beautiful she was and letting her know she didn’t need to be afraid to go out there.
To go on.
And for the three years that we were together, happy or sad, drugs or no drugs, whether she might not want to go on was an open question.
