Two narrow windows gaze out on the sameness of Kearny, year after year, the stale ironing, soiled screens to keep pigeons out of roof joists, bird nests peeking through broken windows, and the spider’s swift weaving industry in abandoned doorways. The apartment smells like the chicken soup that Desi served her daughter, along with dollar store saltines, for dinner. Yellow label on the can. Yellow label on the box. A noodle in her daughter’s hair. Six months ago Desi was playing with a band at venues all over town. The band ended when her bassist committed suicide. Now she’s folded in on herself, a bird of darkness in her disorderly mechanic’s sweater. She’s trying to puff the smoke from a cigarette out an open window, but the breeze blows it back on her. The windowsill is her ashtray. Her black bangs need trimming. Night falls with the hour reckoned by the chime of a nearby church; outside her window a bridge stained with dying shadows, knife-wide against a weakening sky, rumbles with traffic headed for Happy Hour. An amber gravid moon floats on the varnished bay.
No one will play with her because of a drunken incident at The Black Box that took place a short while after the suicide, during a set by a power metal band from out of town, who happened to be singing about lovers that were buried alive at the moment she decided to rage. She laid a beating on one of her girlfriends and took one from the cops. I want to blame it on the Jäger. She almost had her three year-old daughter taken away, and she’s still on probation. The bassist was probably the father of her kid. Desi assaulted a friend and a cop, a major altercation in a tight venue, one last decisive screw-up in a whole string of implosions after the suicide. She vomited all over herself in the back of a patrol car. When they got to the annex, she wouldn’t take her shoes off at the intake desk, and ended up in an administrative unit instead of general holding on a Saturday night. Singers and musicians who were jealous of her saw the chance to shove her out the door.
Drink with me in a revelation,
your cheap soap smells like wine.
Take me to a foreign nation,
the purlieus of your mind.
Now she works part-time at an Italian place populated by hipsters and frat boys from the university, pack animals who have no idea how to tip, who make comments about her body and what they’d do to her in bed, as they unwittingly munch on pizza garnished with her congealed sea-foam spit. Before the bassist killed himself the band was on the way to making it big.
The apartment looks surprisingly tidy compared to the state of her life. We sit together on a couch drinking coffee. It’s one of those flavored coffees that taste like flat cream soda. Six months ago it would have been tequila. Her couch looks like something you’d find in the alley behind Goodwill; the smell of piss combines with chicken soup to create a bitter bouquet. The upholstery is so badly stained that it’s almost impossible to tell the original color. Mayonnaise white, I’m guessing. Or maybe a hopeful almond. The table lamp with a blue glass shade flickers a little, reminding me of maize leaves rustling or water in the sun. The pizza job pays for rent and gas, but she struggles to feed her child and pay the premium on her state health insurance plan.
“The only way I can feed her is to only eat once or twice a day myself.”
The color of her skin has gone from cream to yellow. She’s wearing a thin red undershirt under the coal mechanic’s sweater, which for some reason makes her look even yellower. I read an article in Psychology Today about some scientists who did a study that “proved” women wear red to signify they want sex. Right now, Desi looks like she’d be content with an orange or a glass of beer.
Her daughter, Aletta, is sitting on the linoleum floor with crayons and a coloring book. Instead of coloring the pictures she scribbles on them. The edges of her scrawls are marking the linoleum. The crayons make her little hands smell like lighter fluid. She’s been eating the tips, and flecks of color stain her teeth.
Desi and I worked together at a bar before her short-lived rise to fame as a local singer. They hired us at The Well even though the two of us were underage. It was a country-western place, with a house band and a dance floor and pool tables in the back. We were just friends, but there was a rumor going around that we were an item. One of the elder bartenders whose whole life was a country song had bought a dozen yellow roses for me to give to her. Someone took a photo that ended up in a cheap frame behind the bar of the two of us kissing, yellow roses in-between. The thank-you kiss started the rumors, and it gave us an act we could play to the hilt.
“Two seven sevens and a rum and coke, my adorable baby,” she would say to me.
“Coming up. Have I told you how gorgeous your eyes look this evening, perfect princess?”
“Lookin’ pretty fit yourself, boy doll.”
We would retreat to a storeroom where the mix tanks were stored during our break and secretly do shots, emerging a short while later pretending to be out of breath and with disheveled clothes and hair. Our act gave us plenty of attention, and at one point the manager married us, using the ship captain’s privilege. All the flattery and games never led to anything real, but at the end of a long shift she would sit on my lap and rest her head on my chest.
“You smell good,” she would whisper to me, without the audience in attendance.
We both knew the problem.
Desi’s a dime and I’m at best a five. Desiree Alvarado has long black hair and cruel blue eyes. Her perfect dancer’s body is the subtle perianth of an orchid. We’d only be together in a fairy tale.
She always looked spectacular on stage during her brief singing career, her words hard fragments, her voice a knife of obsidian or flint, belligerent, lacerating, peeling appearances back as it made slow progress through newly-turned clay. She wore iridescent beads like dragon scales in her hair, and sang barefoot for luck, standing high on tiptoe with tattooed ankles taut and anxious. Desi the performer was extermination in a brilliant bottle, all of her pain set in the throat. Her beauty made the instant holy, and underneath the Dionysian frenzy, a sober artist’s calculation, a cold exacting need to make the ritual faultless, the forfeiture of limits absolute, the screams and the tears and rage pitch-perfect, agonizingly apposite, the wrath transformed to skill, desire.
I lean back on the couch. It’s been a long week. Under her right eye, at the top of her cheekbone, Desi has a tiny white scar in the shape of a crescent moon. She once told me that as a child she had fallen off of a wall and struck her face on a metal pipe that was buried in the ground. The razor-sharp edge of the pipe had cut into her face all the way to the bone. I used to wonder why she never had the scar repaired. Desi would just laugh. She wore her mystic little moon with pride. In the tentative light of her apartment the scar looks like a teardrop.
“The guy across the hall, the short guy, tried to kill his wife last week.” Desi bites the fingernail of her pinkie. “He’ll probably get less community service than me.”
“He didn’t assault a cop.”
“Resisting, not assault.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“From whom?”
“That guy who wears the kilt.”
“Rana? He wasn’t even there. Your loser friends better shut up about me. He can’t even play a d-minor without it sounding like shit.”
“He’s not my friend. I only see him at shows. He’s just saying what everyone else is saying.”
“And you’re going around repeating it, too.”
“I defend you. I can’t control what other people say.”
“Then don’t say it to me.”
“Besides, it wasn’t your first time at the rodeo.” She has a couple of drug misdemeanors in her past.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”
She’s invited me over to ask a favor. A couple of cases of CDs sit next to her on the couch. The guy who owns her former band’s label gave her a few dozen copies of their CD, Hired Gun Truce, at no charge, when he heard about her tough circumstances. He owns a chain of computer repair stores that are doing very well. The music business is just a hobby.
Desi wants me to take a case and try to sell them for her.
“What?” I say to her as something moves at the corner of my eye.
“If you can get eight dollars a copy, I’ll be happy.”
Who wants this crap? I’m thinking to myself.
“You’re trying to turn me into a capitalist-roader.” She doesn’t get the humor.
I could just give her a couple of hundred dollars, but things wouldn’t be right after that. She’d always feel like I, in one way or another, expected her to pay me back, and that’s not a burden I want her to carry. She has enough in her life to make her feel guilty and stressed. Besides, there’s already something toxic between us.
“I’ll see what I can do. But what happens after that?”
“I’ve got the word out, and ads all over. I’ll get another gig.”
I could see Desi and her kid ending up like the bass player. Another American tragedy. How did she get here? How did we all get here?
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“What would I do with my girl? My mom’s out of town.”
For a few seconds I feel like the game that Desi and I used to play in the bar wasn’t a joke; that her daughter could be my kid. A few more minutes of small talk and I make for the door with the box of CDs. I want to get away.
“You know, they say CDs are becoming obsolete. It’s all going to be digital audio files.”
“But vinyl’s also coming back,” she says hopefully.
“For collectors. That’s why they color the vinyl. It’s not actually made to be played.”
“You’re an expert. You’re always the expert.”
A tiny trail of black ants is making its way across the floor, in pursuit of soggy noodles scattered over the linoleum by her daughter. Too many singers out there—too many bands. The ants appear out of nowhere and wait until they’re all over you before they sting, as if on signal. They attack for excitement. The bassist’s life must have been hell, even with stardom.
I give Desi a hug. My chest hurts. Her eyes are defiant. I realize that even though she’s asking for a favor, and even though I’m one of the only people who’s a part of the scene that will even talk to her, there’s an undercurrent of hostility towards me that comes out almost every time I’m with her. She’s always civil, and eats up my compliments and encouragement, but I know that underneath it all she actually detests me. I wish that I could hate her back. Instead, I just get sour. I have no idea what I did to deserve her hatred. I don’t claim innocence. Sometimes a blameless joke is like stepping on somebody’s heart. “But you hurt me, and that, I suppose, makes it easy for a man to forget.” I remember those awful words of the little singer in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. Underneath all the smiles and politeness, she abhors me.
I want to talk to her, but I know she’ll just deny it. Nobody ever admits to anything, especially if it puts them even remotely in the wrong. She used to be one of the popular kids, but now she’s just like me: passed over.
Chemical messages, the smudged air smells like rain in the indigo false night. She hugs me back, but it feels as fraudulent as her banter. I want to leave her with some kind word just to make her feel worse about hating me, but nothing comes to mind.
“Man, you smell so good,” she says to me. She doesn’t even care enough to waste her venom as she opens the door to let me out into the clangor of the city, half curled up, arms folded, trembling a little in her charcoal-grey sweater, a wasp that’s been poisoned with avermectin, safeguarding her sting for another time.
The echoes of dogs barking through the streets lined with sooty brick apartment buildings, blocks of lighted windows and overhanging iron balconies showing touches of Art Deco and the obsession in the twenties with Moorish design, breaking up the night like glass splinters, cries of abandonment and ache. Piles of poor-quality Chinese cardboard boxes tossed out on the sidewalks in front of dollar stores look like mining tips waiting to be picked over by scavengers. The city has installed, at God-knows what cost, trash barrels designed to use solar energy to compact their contents. The doors on the fronts of the army green boxes only open as wide as a mail box. The unit on the corner has vomit from a night of celebration covering the silicon patchwork that makes light into energy by handing off electrons. I stand in the breeze that is driven by the seasonal rains, ash-colored heat lightning erupting all around me, as I stuff the plastic cases, one by one, into the opening that smells like orange peels and tobacco and cheap stale beer.
No one will play with her because of a drunken incident at The Black Box that took place a short while after the suicide, during a set by a power metal band from out of town, who happened to be singing about lovers that were buried alive at the moment she decided to rage. She laid a beating on one of her girlfriends and took one from the cops. I want to blame it on the Jäger. She almost had her three year-old daughter taken away, and she’s still on probation. The bassist was probably the father of her kid. Desi assaulted a friend and a cop, a major altercation in a tight venue, one last decisive screw-up in a whole string of implosions after the suicide. She vomited all over herself in the back of a patrol car. When they got to the annex, she wouldn’t take her shoes off at the intake desk, and ended up in an administrative unit instead of general holding on a Saturday night. Singers and musicians who were jealous of her saw the chance to shove her out the door.
Drink with me in a revelation,
your cheap soap smells like wine.
Take me to a foreign nation,
the purlieus of your mind.
Now she works part-time at an Italian place populated by hipsters and frat boys from the university, pack animals who have no idea how to tip, who make comments about her body and what they’d do to her in bed, as they unwittingly munch on pizza garnished with her congealed sea-foam spit. Before the bassist killed himself the band was on the way to making it big.
The apartment looks surprisingly tidy compared to the state of her life. We sit together on a couch drinking coffee. It’s one of those flavored coffees that taste like flat cream soda. Six months ago it would have been tequila. Her couch looks like something you’d find in the alley behind Goodwill; the smell of piss combines with chicken soup to create a bitter bouquet. The upholstery is so badly stained that it’s almost impossible to tell the original color. Mayonnaise white, I’m guessing. Or maybe a hopeful almond. The table lamp with a blue glass shade flickers a little, reminding me of maize leaves rustling or water in the sun. The pizza job pays for rent and gas, but she struggles to feed her child and pay the premium on her state health insurance plan.
“The only way I can feed her is to only eat once or twice a day myself.”
The color of her skin has gone from cream to yellow. She’s wearing a thin red undershirt under the coal mechanic’s sweater, which for some reason makes her look even yellower. I read an article in Psychology Today about some scientists who did a study that “proved” women wear red to signify they want sex. Right now, Desi looks like she’d be content with an orange or a glass of beer.
Her daughter, Aletta, is sitting on the linoleum floor with crayons and a coloring book. Instead of coloring the pictures she scribbles on them. The edges of her scrawls are marking the linoleum. The crayons make her little hands smell like lighter fluid. She’s been eating the tips, and flecks of color stain her teeth.
Desi and I worked together at a bar before her short-lived rise to fame as a local singer. They hired us at The Well even though the two of us were underage. It was a country-western place, with a house band and a dance floor and pool tables in the back. We were just friends, but there was a rumor going around that we were an item. One of the elder bartenders whose whole life was a country song had bought a dozen yellow roses for me to give to her. Someone took a photo that ended up in a cheap frame behind the bar of the two of us kissing, yellow roses in-between. The thank-you kiss started the rumors, and it gave us an act we could play to the hilt.
“Two seven sevens and a rum and coke, my adorable baby,” she would say to me.
“Coming up. Have I told you how gorgeous your eyes look this evening, perfect princess?”
“Lookin’ pretty fit yourself, boy doll.”
We would retreat to a storeroom where the mix tanks were stored during our break and secretly do shots, emerging a short while later pretending to be out of breath and with disheveled clothes and hair. Our act gave us plenty of attention, and at one point the manager married us, using the ship captain’s privilege. All the flattery and games never led to anything real, but at the end of a long shift she would sit on my lap and rest her head on my chest.
“You smell good,” she would whisper to me, without the audience in attendance.
We both knew the problem.
Desi’s a dime and I’m at best a five. Desiree Alvarado has long black hair and cruel blue eyes. Her perfect dancer’s body is the subtle perianth of an orchid. We’d only be together in a fairy tale.
She always looked spectacular on stage during her brief singing career, her words hard fragments, her voice a knife of obsidian or flint, belligerent, lacerating, peeling appearances back as it made slow progress through newly-turned clay. She wore iridescent beads like dragon scales in her hair, and sang barefoot for luck, standing high on tiptoe with tattooed ankles taut and anxious. Desi the performer was extermination in a brilliant bottle, all of her pain set in the throat. Her beauty made the instant holy, and underneath the Dionysian frenzy, a sober artist’s calculation, a cold exacting need to make the ritual faultless, the forfeiture of limits absolute, the screams and the tears and rage pitch-perfect, agonizingly apposite, the wrath transformed to skill, desire.
I lean back on the couch. It’s been a long week. Under her right eye, at the top of her cheekbone, Desi has a tiny white scar in the shape of a crescent moon. She once told me that as a child she had fallen off of a wall and struck her face on a metal pipe that was buried in the ground. The razor-sharp edge of the pipe had cut into her face all the way to the bone. I used to wonder why she never had the scar repaired. Desi would just laugh. She wore her mystic little moon with pride. In the tentative light of her apartment the scar looks like a teardrop.
“The guy across the hall, the short guy, tried to kill his wife last week.” Desi bites the fingernail of her pinkie. “He’ll probably get less community service than me.”
“He didn’t assault a cop.”
“Resisting, not assault.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“From whom?”
“That guy who wears the kilt.”
“Rana? He wasn’t even there. Your loser friends better shut up about me. He can’t even play a d-minor without it sounding like shit.”
“He’s not my friend. I only see him at shows. He’s just saying what everyone else is saying.”
“And you’re going around repeating it, too.”
“I defend you. I can’t control what other people say.”
“Then don’t say it to me.”
“Besides, it wasn’t your first time at the rodeo.” She has a couple of drug misdemeanors in her past.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”
She’s invited me over to ask a favor. A couple of cases of CDs sit next to her on the couch. The guy who owns her former band’s label gave her a few dozen copies of their CD, Hired Gun Truce, at no charge, when he heard about her tough circumstances. He owns a chain of computer repair stores that are doing very well. The music business is just a hobby.
Desi wants me to take a case and try to sell them for her.
“What?” I say to her as something moves at the corner of my eye.
“If you can get eight dollars a copy, I’ll be happy.”
Who wants this crap? I’m thinking to myself.
“You’re trying to turn me into a capitalist-roader.” She doesn’t get the humor.
I could just give her a couple of hundred dollars, but things wouldn’t be right after that. She’d always feel like I, in one way or another, expected her to pay me back, and that’s not a burden I want her to carry. She has enough in her life to make her feel guilty and stressed. Besides, there’s already something toxic between us.
“I’ll see what I can do. But what happens after that?”
“I’ve got the word out, and ads all over. I’ll get another gig.”
I could see Desi and her kid ending up like the bass player. Another American tragedy. How did she get here? How did we all get here?
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“What would I do with my girl? My mom’s out of town.”
For a few seconds I feel like the game that Desi and I used to play in the bar wasn’t a joke; that her daughter could be my kid. A few more minutes of small talk and I make for the door with the box of CDs. I want to get away.
“You know, they say CDs are becoming obsolete. It’s all going to be digital audio files.”
“But vinyl’s also coming back,” she says hopefully.
“For collectors. That’s why they color the vinyl. It’s not actually made to be played.”
“You’re an expert. You’re always the expert.”
A tiny trail of black ants is making its way across the floor, in pursuit of soggy noodles scattered over the linoleum by her daughter. Too many singers out there—too many bands. The ants appear out of nowhere and wait until they’re all over you before they sting, as if on signal. They attack for excitement. The bassist’s life must have been hell, even with stardom.
I give Desi a hug. My chest hurts. Her eyes are defiant. I realize that even though she’s asking for a favor, and even though I’m one of the only people who’s a part of the scene that will even talk to her, there’s an undercurrent of hostility towards me that comes out almost every time I’m with her. She’s always civil, and eats up my compliments and encouragement, but I know that underneath it all she actually detests me. I wish that I could hate her back. Instead, I just get sour. I have no idea what I did to deserve her hatred. I don’t claim innocence. Sometimes a blameless joke is like stepping on somebody’s heart. “But you hurt me, and that, I suppose, makes it easy for a man to forget.” I remember those awful words of the little singer in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. Underneath all the smiles and politeness, she abhors me.
I want to talk to her, but I know she’ll just deny it. Nobody ever admits to anything, especially if it puts them even remotely in the wrong. She used to be one of the popular kids, but now she’s just like me: passed over.
Chemical messages, the smudged air smells like rain in the indigo false night. She hugs me back, but it feels as fraudulent as her banter. I want to leave her with some kind word just to make her feel worse about hating me, but nothing comes to mind.
“Man, you smell so good,” she says to me. She doesn’t even care enough to waste her venom as she opens the door to let me out into the clangor of the city, half curled up, arms folded, trembling a little in her charcoal-grey sweater, a wasp that’s been poisoned with avermectin, safeguarding her sting for another time.
The echoes of dogs barking through the streets lined with sooty brick apartment buildings, blocks of lighted windows and overhanging iron balconies showing touches of Art Deco and the obsession in the twenties with Moorish design, breaking up the night like glass splinters, cries of abandonment and ache. Piles of poor-quality Chinese cardboard boxes tossed out on the sidewalks in front of dollar stores look like mining tips waiting to be picked over by scavengers. The city has installed, at God-knows what cost, trash barrels designed to use solar energy to compact their contents. The doors on the fronts of the army green boxes only open as wide as a mail box. The unit on the corner has vomit from a night of celebration covering the silicon patchwork that makes light into energy by handing off electrons. I stand in the breeze that is driven by the seasonal rains, ash-colored heat lightning erupting all around me, as I stuff the plastic cases, one by one, into the opening that smells like orange peels and tobacco and cheap stale beer.
