Rat Bohemia Read online

  In it, one woman touched another woman’s face and kissed it. Another scene showed a different woman take out her breasts while a fourth laid a hand on them. Then the first woman put a piece of glass in her vagina and rubbed the blood across her mouth. Throughout, a clock was ticking and people were whispering in Swedish. The subtitles said, “Forgive me.” I went downstairs into a stall in the ladies’ bathroom and masturbated. Then I went up and watched it again.

  Chapter Five

  When I was a girl my father and I were always fighting. If he told me to get out and never come back, I’d be hovering on the front stoop for hours screaming to get back in. If he put his foot down and told me I couldn’t go out, I’d do it anyway by going down the fire escape.

  Our street, Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights, was so quiet that me yelling or him yelling was enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. After a few people started complaining my dad got into the habit of calling the local precinct as soon as we’d get into a fight.

  “Officer,” he’d say into the telephone. “We have a girl here, out of control.”

  There were Spanish kids in Jackson Heights then, but not as many as now. The Spanish and the whites never mixed. That really dates me. There was only one Puerto Rican guy who worked with my dad, but he lived up in the Bronx. There was a psychological divide then that was only violated, occasionally, by a passing beat-up Ford Falcon blasting salsa music from the radio. I didn’t know that was the sound of the future. Rice and beans were what you’d have to eat if you didn’t amount to anything. They were a threat. Not something delicious, orange and black with pork fat, hot sauce and fried plantains. Out on the street we only saw good-girl German Jews coming home from their violin lessons and lots of Irish kids blaming themselves for everything starting at the age of twelve. I knew a girl who lived two apartments up from ours named Claudia Haas and she started out as a good girl but ended up as a tramp.

  My father was a rough guy. He’d already chased Howie out of the apartment and off to California somewhere to find peace and fortune. Dad’s second girlfriend had dumped him about a year before and it was taking him longer than usual to find another one, which also put him in a foul mood. So when he tossed me out for the fifteenth time, I shrugged it off and went to the candy store to buy a pack of Salems.

  There was Claudia Haas, tight jeans, tight V-neck short-sleeved sexy knit top. She was hanging out, a real hitter from Queens. She was drinking Mateus Rosé out of the bottle and listening to Seals and Crofts on WPLJ radio. The real truth is that Claudia Haas fell in love with me and I fell in love with her even though it wasn’t possible on a warm Queens night in 1975 because neither of us knew what a homosexual was. It wasn’t a word that was bandied about the newspapers then as it is today. Even I, who had already experienced it, had never uttered the word. I had never conceptualized myself that way.

  Claudia and I talked together until late that night. We sat on cars, smoked cigarettes, listened to Yes do Close to the Edge and fell in love. Claudia’s boyfriend wore his Vietnam army jacket, turned us on to Thai weed, drank beer, listened to Grand Funk Railroad, to War, to Average White Band and Janis Ian, to the Allman Brothers singing “Whipping Post” live at the Fillmore East, to Carly Simon singing “You’re so Vain,” to the Stones, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Acoustic Hot Tuna, and the Dead. It was a different, stupid America. We hadn’t yet given up trying to get over Vietnam. We reveled in our mediocrity. America wasn’t nihilistic yet. We weren’t all suffering.

  That night, after partying, the sky was all mine, warm on my skin. I followed Claudia up to her parent’s tiny apartment, like ours, four rooms smashed together in a purposeful square. Remove the walls and we’re all head to toe, head to toe. Her mother had left the kitchen light on, illuminating a plate of muhn kuchen, invitingly untouched on the rickety table.

  “Come on,” Claudia whispered, leading me into the family bathroom where we spread out towels to lay stomach down on the cool tile floor.

  “What’s the green stuff? ” I asked.

  “Herbal Essence shampoo. Smell it.” It smelled good. She had all kinds of things, special kinds of hair brushes and sponges, powder. I never learned how to use products. Didn’t even know where to begin, having spent my life staring at mothers with lipstick and hairstyles, panty-hose—all those mysteries no one ever explained.

  There’s so much now that I wish I’d understood. But no one ever sat me down and looked me in the eye, lovingly, with information. To tell me that some things lead to certain other things and letting me in on the codes, shortcuts, and signs. Everything about the future came to me in the form of threatened punishment. Or a silence surrounding my own wild imagination.

  “Here, I’ll brush your hair,” she said, pulling it off the back of my neck.

  “I looked at these at Field’s,” I said. “But I didn’t know what they were.”

  The brush felt so good against my neck, her hand there too.

  Then we lay back on the floor, whispering, passing back cigarettes and blowing the smoke out through the open window.

  “I’m going to Queens College in the fall,” Claudia said, feet up, straight blonde hair cut back in a soft shag. “What about you? ”

  “I kind of stopped going to school,” I said.

  “What did your father say?”

  “He hasn’t mentioned it. I’ve been working at J. Chuckles in the city. Is Queens College really that great? ”

  “My sister’s been there for three years. One more and then she’ll move out. After that I’ve got the bedroom all to myself. I got wait-listed at two other places though, so the future is really unknown. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Are you in love with Herbie? ”

  “Sure,” she said. “You know what? He had this rubber last night. It said, Put a tiger in your dot dot dot. Everything’s fine except there’s one thing about him that I really hate.”

  “What’s that? ”

  “When we’re doing it, you know, balling? Sometimes he pushes my head down there because he wants a blow job. I get really pissed off. Don’t tell me what to do. I’m not some Vietnamese girl who has to do what he says. It’s not nice.”

  She rolled over on her side. I was used to the dark by now and the distant streetlights started to work for me, started to light us up. Then Claudia started singing.

  “Du bist zaire ferucht. Du mus nach Berlin.”

  “What does that mean? ”

  “Don’t you know German?”

  “My mother forgot to teach us.”

  “It means,” she said, brushing a piece of my hair back with her hand, “you are so crazy, you must go to Berlin.”

  I felt her touch me and I saw her do it as well. I saw a certain gentleness, a womanly softness, as though reaching out to touch me was the most natural thing. It was of course. But somewhere, barely perceptible, I detected an excitement. Something crackling.

  “Fallink in luff again, nevah vanted to,” she started singing. “Vat am I to do? Cahn’t help it.”

  Chapter Six

  The reason that all of this background information had been on my mind was because I spent most of last summer thinking about the fact that, frankly, I have not made as much of my life as I would have liked. I have never learned how to achieve. That’s why I’ve saving up to move out of New York. Florida might be nice. Learn how to drive. Go swimming.

  Working this job is a real downer except when we go out for the kill. That’s the best. But in the meantime, I have to sit here with the crew from Food and Hunger and listen to them make small talk. Especially that Mrs. Sabrina Santiago. She almost always has a city worker attitude and therefore kicks my butt psychologically and regularly. Everything is about her territory and her ability to lord it over me. But she has nothing to brag about since she moves real slow and wouldn’t say “How are you? ” if it was worth a million dollars in food stamps. These types of relationships and social encounters are what has made me question my life.


  Killer and I talk about this all of the time, about how we are going to better ourselves. The problem with Killer is that she’s a pretender. She pretends that something is going to happen when nothing is ever going to happen. Then, when it is over, she pretends that something did happen when actually it was nothing. I love Killer. I don’t mean to judge her, but I have to.

  It all goes back to that lack of information that has plagued me most of my life. Without instruction I had no inkling as to how things would work out. But once you get really burned, you become suspicious and resentful of those telltale signs.

  Killer says I’m nagging her, but she’s got to understand what can be taken away from you if you’re not realistic. Pretending is too contagious. I already lost one friend that way over the summer and I’m not gonna lose another. It was so damn hot. One-hundred-and-two-degrees for eight days. The floorboards were hot. The metal faucets were too hot to handle. The refrigerators were groaning, couldn’t keep up with the heat.

  I crossed the street carefully, so blurry in my thinking that the speed and distance of cars was difficult to determine. The path to Joan’s building was like every other block. Filthy. It stank of putrid rotting urine and three-day-old cooked garbage. Plus there’s that oh-so-familiar smell of rotting rat carcasses, rat flesh. The other rats feast off of it for days. That’s what makes them different from us. They sponge off each other’s bodies even after they’re dead.

  I remember when Joanie got in a really bad way. We had a party for her but she was three hours late. Then she spent another hour in the bathroom. When her girlfriend, Siri, used to call up friends for money, they always gave it, but only in checks made out to the land-lord or the phone company so their cash couldn’t go up in smoke.

  On the walls of the basement were photos of Joan and Siri taken at different happy occasions. Joanie eating flan in Puerto Rico. Joan and Siri sitting together in a chair. Siri making a birthday cake. Nine people came to the memorial service. Siri was supposed to come, but no one even mentioned that she didn’t show up. I looked at the pictures for a while and for the millionth time ran through my memorial images of Joanie. Joan laughing. Joan sitting in the heat without a shirt drinking a wine cooler. Joan and Siri dancing. Joanie with a needle in her arm. Joan standing in front of a crack house on East Fourth Street. Joanie saying “You have to let me go.” Joanie shot in the chest in a drug deal in Puerto Rico. Joanie, such a tiny little thing.

  Someone had her diary from 1979 to 1982 when she first came to New York from St. Louis. I worked with her for a couple of summers in Youth Corps. She was the social worker and I was her assistant. So, how come I never knew that she was using drugs? I must have been pretending. Here’s what she wrote in her diary.

  I’ve been spending all of my money on heroin. I had to borrow forty dollars for food and ended up copping instead.

  That was eleven years before her death.

  In Harlem they have a kind of heroin called “Watergate.” I shot it in Roger’s front room in front of the TV. Then this show The Word is Out came on. It was about gay people standing up. I could see that we are ready to emerge. Long live PBS.

  No, Killer better grasp, right now, that if she’s gonna sit around and deteriorate due to lack of realistic planning, then I’m gonna be on her case every step of the way. I can’t stand to lose another thing.

  Chapter Seven

  Mrs. Santiago called me out of my sorrowful reverie and asked if I would messenger something over to the computer store on Forty-Third Street. Now, I know that she was supposed to bring that over herself because Food and Hunger doesn’t have the kind of money to buy a messenger service. I also know that Mrs. Santiago lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn—which is in the opposite direction from Forty-third Street. So out of the kindness of my heart I said yes. Then she made me stand there, freezing my butt off in that central air-conditioning while she chats away on the phone for forty-five minutes. City worker.

  Of course I’m eavesdropping because I’ve got nothing else to do and the whole conversation seems to be about these storerooms filled with flour that the city got ahold of. But, all of this flour doesn’t do hungry people any good because most of them don’t know how to bake bread. Or, if they do know, they’ve got no place to make it. Especially if you are a person with a substance abuse problem. You will never find the time to make bread.

  Therefore, all this potential food was sitting there going to waste. Mrs. Santiago was suggesting on the phone that they could get all the new prisoners in all the new jails to learn how to bake bread and they could bake up all this flour and distribute it already made. She was suggesting that, in the future, when they build prisons, they could include bread-baking facilities and kill two birds with one stone.

  By the time she actually handed me the package and we got downstairs, I found out that Killer had been waiting around in the lobby because both detectors broke down and everyone was being searched by hand.

  “Fuck that,” I said and we both set off for the computer store.

  Unfortunately we decided to take the subway which promptly got stopped between stations.

  After about ten minutes the conductor’s voice came on over the PA system.

  “Attention passengers. Due to a police shooting at the next station we have been temporarily delayed. But we will now proceed with caution.”

  “Proceed with caution?” Killer asked. “What is this, Stage-coach ? ”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “Look,” she said. “When we pull into the next station, duck behind the seats. You gotta get lower than the bench in case the bullets come through the window.”

  So when the train eased into the next stop, we ducked. But we both kept sticking our heads up to peek because we wanted to see what was going on. Sure enough the place was swarming with cops and a bunch of medical personnel, all looking very tired and overworked. Then the guy across the aisle from us started to have a psychotic episode. He started meowing. At the next stop, Killer and I got off the train.

  “Killer,” I said as we walked uptown. “Tell me something. What the fuck are we doing? What are we doing with our lives? I think about this all the time now and I can’t figure out what category I’m in.”

  “Category?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I don’t have any money but I’m not poor. I have aspirations but they’re spiritual ones, not careers. I look around at how people are really living and I can’t identify. But when I turn on the TV I don’t understand that either. What the hell is going on, Killer? ” I asked. “Who the hell do we think we are?”

  “We’re bohemians,” she said.

  “What? ”

  “We’re bohemians. We don’t have those dominant culture values.”

  “We’re bohemians?” I asked, meekly.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Ever heard of it? ”

  “Of course,” I said, indignantly. “It’s people who go to foreign movies.”

  I was identifying already.

  “Look, in the past there were decade-specific names,” Killer said. “Like hippies, beatniks, New Age, punks, or Communists.”

  “What do we call them now? ”

  “That’s the whole thing,” Killer said, her black hair flapping carelessly back. “Nowadays it’s not generational. Bohemians aren’t grouped by clothes or sex or age. Nowadays, it’s just a state of mind. Anyone with a different idea is IN.”

  We were standing by the front door of the computer store and Killer obviously wasn’t planning to enter. So we stayed out on the sidewalk and discussed existence like any New Yorker would do in our place. We were outside in that inside kind of way. There’s weather and a sky at the top of the corridor. The walls were made of buildings, and streets ran on like cracks in the plaster.

  “But what about turn on, tune in, drop out, socialism, and other social-outcast stuff? ” I asked.

  “Listen,” Killer said. “In the fifties, the Beats, those guys were so all-American. They could sit arou
nd and ponder aesthetic questions, but a cup of coffee cost a nickel. Nowadays, with the economy the way it is, you can’t drop out or you’ll be homeless. You gotta function to be a boho. You have to meet the system head-on at least once in a while and that meeting, Rita, is very brutal. Nowadays you have to pay a very high price to become a bohemian.”

  Chapter Eight

  What was I supposed to say? Killer took off down Broadway and I walked into the air-conditioned computer store, bursting through to that other reality. The opposite of my heart. There were a lot of men running around like big overstuffed rats. Big ones, boring with stupid glasses and bad values. I stood on line waiting for my turn at the counter and what do you know? Right ahead of me is this really beautiful Spanish girl chatting with all the salespeople. She knew them all and they knew that she was really some character, but still likeable. Plus, she looked really sexy. She had stylish cotton pants that ended halfway down her brown calf and black slippers and this loose cotton shirt that moved this way and that so you could see her belly once in a while. I knew this girl had spent half an hour in the dressing room of some department store twisting and turning to insure that her belly showed once in a while.

  After another minute of watching I had a second layer of observation. This was the kind of girl who gestured big and talked big and showed her emotions big, but she wasn’t really showing anything. All her actions turned out to be one big flirt. But, if you paid attention, as I did, it became obvious that she was flirting with no one. She was keeping all her real passion on reserve. That’s how I knew she was a lesbian.

  We started chatting about this and that and she was going into incredibly boring detail about computerland. Then she let me sit down next to her at the terminal and watch things come up on the screen. It was funny, everything on the screen happened quickly and so she happened quickly. The machine got her all geared up, constantly anticipating the next move, ready to jump.