The Pain Game, Part 2

Day 2


No pain for the second day.
My siamese twin has been cut clean.
I look for you in the usual places -
wretched teeth tearing me open,
fist and muscle, tissue and bone.
But, you are nowhere.
You are free.


And, I am here,
in this body house -
haunted by stories and scars
without you.
Who am I
now?

***

I had a summer of lust, cigarettes, whiskey, and bleeding. I was 19 years old and on my way to South Carolina to be a camp counselor. My thin nylon tote bag was packed: a bathing suit, two t-shirts, a pair of cut-off shorts, a toothbrush and 30 bucks, the last of my loan money. Everyone else had gone away - summer homes, camps, European vacations, and prestigious internships. My first year at Smith College had been brutal in many ways, the privilege of my peers not withstanding. I was, quite literally, the last one on campus with nowhere else to go and no one to go with me. For the first two nights, I hid in one of the campus houses and slept on a bare mattress. The routine comfort of school days were now replaced with empty echos of laughter and the fleeting visions of friends running down the empty hallways. It should be noted that Smith has a long tradition of hauntings and ghost sightings. There is nothing more lonely than a house full of friends that are not there anymore.

The third day I hopped on a Greyhound bus bound for Bar Harbor, Maine. My brother lived in nearby Ellsworth and I knew that I could find work in the tourist town. When I finally arrived, I had no quarter to call my brother or nickel to scrape the gum off my shoe. I headed to the YWCA where they gave me a bed in the solarium. I didn't have any food, but there were nuns and cans of waxed beans. I ate, made friends with the weathered, battered, broken women who washed ashore and had been ushered, like me, to the safety of the Y. Stories came easily. Lily, in jeans and a plaid red shirt, walked for five days along a highway to escape her abuser. She was raped twice along the way. “It was hard, but I was fed,” she told me again and again. Suzy, with plenty of rice crackers and peanut butter to share, talked about children she left behind and money to be made off of rich tourists. She was a dreamer. She offered me cigarettes whenever she passed me on the front porch. Although I didn't smoke, I took them anyway knowing that she had to take care of somebody. Later, I would offer them as barter for food or friendship. 

It took me two weeks, but I found work in a deadhead shop during the day and at The Golden Anchor Inn during the night. Back at the solarium, a long haired girl my age moved in next to my bed. She was on summer break from Thomas More College and while her friends who migrated with her stayed in fancy inns and worked as maids and bartenders, she opted to stay at the YWCA and study with the nuns. She was a curious dichotomy of virtue and vice. With pretty blond hair parted delicately to the side, she peered at me with the clearest blue eyes. “Do you party?”

Party? Me? Yes, I was 19, but I also had not yet smoked cigarettes, gotten drunk, taken drugs, or attended a party where Pictionary was not the central focus. Yes, I had grown up in Germany and gone to discotechs (dance clubs) and sipped blau Nacht (blue night - a mixture of Blue Curacao and Amaretto). Yes, I had gone unchaperoned to Italy as a 15 year old to escape military school. I had kissed one boy, Anton, an Italian theater geek who I didn't even like. But, partied? Was I an innocent? Yes.

“Do I party? Sure.”

That night, instead of going to The Golden Anchor, I followed my nun to Bar Harlem, a transient neighborhood hidden by mansions and gourmet shops in the center of town. Streets were dark; buildings were shacks with plywood doors and crumbling cement stairs. Drunk sailors who bellowed, puked, and passed out in the streets were left there like crumpled paper lanterns guiding us to the party house. Once inside, the nun vanished into a room of boys and booze and I found an empty chair and a book of densely illustrated pages - a kind of Where's Waldo for adults. I lost myself in underwater menageries and imagined safe places on college campuses where the biggest threats were ghost children laughing in the halls and hiding term papers in Norton Anthologies.

A boy, whom I will call Diego, fell onto me. He was profusely apologetic and profoundly drunk. He was drunk differently from the other kids. Diego was not joyful. He bit at the tequila bottle every few minutes like it was the only thing he could do to keep the golden liquid from strangling him. His blue eyes were red and something else. Something like falling or being trapped. Although I wasn't asking for his company, he was the only one talking to me, so I let that happen. And later, I let it happen that he walked me back to the YWCA. I let him put his arm around my waist because at the same time I had put mine around his. And because, for the second time in my life, I felt that invisible door open between two people who are about to kiss, I let that happen, too.

It should be said that Diego was a mystery to me. A white boy with a shaved head, blue eyes and a Latin name; he was a self-proclaimed skinhead. Having grown up in Germany where skinheads were a real thing, thugs with weapons and violence in their eyes, Diego's tight black pants, steel-toed boots, suspenders, white crisp oxford and multiple piercings were laughable to me. Although he watched Romper Stomper everyday, a cult classic for the skinhead, apparently, he vehemently denied racism and sexism. His father was a poet who killed himself when Diego was 14. He was a philosophy student at a small liberal arts college and quoted Sartre's La Nausee at length. He painted pictures of me that looked more like Pocahontas knock-offs (he was fascinated that I was Lakota and German). Mostly, Diego was tender and severely injured.

Eventually, I left the Y and moved into a shack in Bar Harlem with a greasy over-weight cook, a sailor, and a New Yorker who worked at a kaleidoscope gallery. My room was a closet with plywood walls and two stained twin mattress beds fitted into an L-shape on the floor. There was just enough room to open the door and fling myself over my New Yorker roommate onto my own filthy bed. Diego and I had no place to go, so we made out in the dark streets along with the other summer lovers and sometimes used a hood of a car for a bed. 

Diego was rarely sober and spending anytime with his mouth was like sipping my way through a bar. Eventually, I found whiskey. Here was an alcohol worth my time. It smelled like an old leather chair and stung my mouth like a bitter slap. It reminded me of someone far away - lost to me and my childhood. It reminded me of my father, a man I had never known. I drank it down desperately and vomited through drunken chaotic tears while Diego held my hair.

The days went by. Nights watching the dark ocean through the window at The Golden Anchor, days folding Grateful Dead tie-dyed t-shirts, and the hours in between drinking whiskey, smoking clove cigarettes, kissing Diego, and crying about dead and absent fathers. Unbeknownst to me, a secret was brewing in my body. The moment I had put my arm around Diego's waist, I had started to bleed in oceanic waves and did not stop. I did not have sex with Diego that entire summer partially because I was terrified of his sexuality, partly because he was terrified of mine, but mostly because I was having the longest period of my life. By mid-July the alchemy was complete:  I was anemic, pale, suffering from chronic tonsillitis and my first yeast infection.

My smoky summer of lust and whiskey was over. I called a friend from Smith and had her meet me half way between Northampton and Bar Harbor. I needed to go home, to that vacant campus that had kicked me out before I had found a place to go. I needed to find a doctor and nestle back into the bosom of books and papers and all-nighters spent in the library. I woke Diego up from a mid-day nap, my nylon tote in hand, and apologized for being one of the many that would leave.

***

But,
I was left, too.
I had no father.
I had no mother.
No home to run to.
No arms waiting for me.


Instead
I ran into blood
and into pain
I merged my breath
with a vacant body
and told myself
HOLD ON.


HOLD ON.