After Delores Page 14
“Turns out some girl went to the police a few months ago and tried to file a complaint against him. A dancer. He gave her a ride in his cab home from New Jersey one night and called her up the next day saying he would kill her. Turns out she ended up dead a couple of weeks after that but no one put it together.”
He was so cool, he could have been talking about anybody. I could see that Daniel was becoming a man.
“How come nobody put it together?” I asked, playing his game now because I didn’t have one of my own.
“Well, the paper says the cops wouldn’t take the complaint. They asked her how she knew that the guy on the phone was the same as the guy driving the cab. They wanted to know how she could be sure. ‘You talk to lots of men,’ one of the cops remembered saying.”
“What did she say?”
“I can’t remember. Look in the paper.”
I fished it back out of the garbage and turned to page eleven. I could tell Daniel was walking away, real slow. We didn’t need to say goodbye.
“Men don’t call me” is what she said to the police that night. “Men never call me.” But the cops couldn’t figure out what Punkette was talking about. They didn’t get it.
I was so lonely at that moment, I have never been so lonely. I considered trying to remember every time in my life that I have needed comfort and someone was there to give it to me. But instead I walked back into the park and sat down on a bench watching the old people with their young dogs. I watched two skinhead teenagers trying to score and a man drinking wine out of a paper bag. An older woman was trying to explain something difficult to a younger woman and an older man and a younger man were in love. I saw art students in funky clothing smoking cigarettes and a straight couple having a fight. I saw everything because the sun was shining so brightly, the top of my head was cooking up a storm.
It made me cook up some very private things.
My moods swing like mad.
I feel close to people when I’m afraid of them.
Every person I’ve met, I’ve used as a measure to see what relating to people is like, how much I want it and how often it disappoints me.
It’s all over, I thought.
I remembered everything that had happened and all I had to show for it was Priscilla’s gun. I took it out of my pocket, wiped it clean, and wrapped it up in an old potato-chip bag sticking out of the garbage can. Then I tucked it under the bench, where someone who needed it could find it.
There wasn’t anyone to be afraid of anymore.
At that moment, I didn’t miss any of it. I didn’t miss Priscilla and her polyester, not Charlotte and her power, not Beatriz and her desire. None of it was fascinating anymore. None of it was groovy. I didn’t want to end up in any more go-go clubs or dirty theaters or smoke-filled bars or AA meetings. None of it meant anything to me. There was only one thing I missed. I missed Delores.
SARAH SCHULMAN is the author of sixteen books: the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of two films, The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project.
Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for “Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies” from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting, a Fulbright Fellowship for Judiac Studies, two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.