critter

i fell in love with Tracy at the Santa Monica Pier. I can’t ever tell her that. I tried to once and she kicked my ass. Just looked at me through those slitty eyes of hers and said if I ever said that shit to her again she’d break her beer bottle on my face. I kept my mouth shut after that.

That one night was different though, I think because she didn’t really know me and when things happen with strangers it’s different than with people you know. Or people who know you, really, is what it is: Tracy thinks she can keep anyone from getting to know her, and she gets pretty pissed when you prove her wrong. But that first night I was just a kid she’d seen around on the sidewalks. I knew friends of her friends in that thing that happens on the street when all the little circles of people link up and make a chain, but no one I knew’d had sex with her and I didn’t know her name. We both hung out in Hollywood, so it was weird that we wound up out at the pier, weird enough that it made us actually smile when we saw each other, start to talk. I’d been sleeping just south of there in Venice for a week, since the rainstorm of Eeyore and Scabius: things got too crazy up on Sunset so I took off for the beach with its rainbow fuckin’ flowers and old dried-out hippies who lugged their shit around in guitar cases. Vacation. After a while I couldn’t deal with the drum circles, though, so I followed the bright lights north to the pier.

It’s at the arcade that we see each other. Some hyper kids are playing that old-school game where you have a bunch of plastic guys all attached to a rod and you have to slam them around so they kick the ball onto the other side. Dumb. For some reason the fact that they’re yelling and jumping and getting all worked up about this stupid ancient plastic-guy game is pissing me off and I’m watching them, trying to narrow down my eyes to points so they’ll turn around, be scared of me and scatter. I’m full-on focused on my goal when Tracy comes up next to me. She doesn’t say anything, but I know she must’ve been there for a minute, because when I finally feel someone standing there she’s already comfortable, leaning back on her heels with her arms crossed, copying my stance. It’s weird, the switch from the feeling of total one-pointed focus on smaller-than-me people who I could’ve made flinch, to looking down and realizing that the whole time she’s been watching me. My center of gravity is gone. I uncross my arms and she smirks. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I smile back.

“Having fun?” she asks. I right away realize what an asshole I look like, standing there staring at a bunch of twelve-year-olds playing whatever the fuck that game is called, and a second after that I realize that not one single girl in seventeen years of my life has ever made me feel like an asshole, ever. I want to be pissed at her but she’s looking up at me with her sly little eyes through her blond stringy bangs, knowing I probably have zero retort, and she’s just so fucking cute I can’t hate her. “Not really,” I say, and it’s almost the truth.

I don’t let her know till later that even right away it’s fun with her around. Which is especially corny coming from my mouth because “fun” has sort of lost its edge for me; I’m not the type of person who runs around the amusement park and goes “Wow!” and is amused. Usually it takes some kind of substance, and even that’s just another kind of normal. But like I said, not one single girl in seventeen years has ever made me feel like an asshole before. It’s kind of fun.

“Well what the fuck are you doing in here then?” she says. “Get out,” and nods toward the open door, framing lights and boardwalk and past them the black of the ocean. I look at her and then the dark and say “Okay.” She leads the way.

There’s not much to do out there: photo booths and whack-a-mole and rides cost money and I don’t have much left today. Sometimes you can just walk around with someone and not do anything, but I don’t know Tracy well enough for that. When we walk by the Ferris wheel I think of hijacking the control booth so we can swing our legs way up at the top and make everyone freak out, but the guy in there is pretty burly, and getting kicked out isn’t worth it. I wish I had enough change to win her a fuckin’ ugly orange teddy bear. Which is weird. The whole thing is weird, how I want it to be a Date, how I suddenly have to Show Her a Good Time like some fifties jocko guy with his ponytailed blond chick out for an evening. Usually with girls it’s this: hang out, fuck, talk afterward or not. It’s not like I take them to the movies or something. And she’s not even hot or whatever; to tell you the truth she kind of looks like a rodent the way she squints her eyes and is so superskinny. But I don’t know: every time she smiles at me, even if it’s just a closed-mouth halfway smirk, I feel like I earned something.

Luckily I’ve got enough change in my pocket to buy her cotton candy at least. It’s funny seeing her eat it, pink ringing her mouth like dress-up lipstick on a kid. For a minute I see us from the outside in our grimy black and backpacks and piercings with her toting around this Barbiepink ball of fluff, and I laugh out loud in the middle of the boardwalk. She looks up at me with her red-stained face like I’m crazy.

It’s weird how fast you can spill everything to a person if you think they’re listening. That’s never happened to me before, the spilling part or the listening part either, but somehow I recognize them both right away. It’s crazy: Tracy tells me just about nothing about herself or where she came from; I don’t know if she’s got brothers or sisters or what her hometown’s called or anything. Normally nobody talks about that kind of stuff, I guess, but this night isn’t normal and I wind up walking along the lit sidewalk, telling her every single thing that ever happened to me practically. Next to the ringtoss she grabs my hand—well, not really grabs, more like our hands brush each other and she just hooks on—and all that shit they say is supposed to happen happens, like my chest gets all tight and my throat chokes up, and it’s like wanting to fuck someone but different because I keep seeing her face and thinking how right it looks.

Right about when my fingers start sweating she says “Let’s go down to the beach.” You can bet I’m happy about that, but it’s not even what you think—I just want to be with her in the dark where it’s quiet and I can pretend she’s the only other person besides me. So much of the time I wish everyone would just fuckin’ disappear, and the only reason why I don’t really wish it is that then I’d be alone. But now all those fuckers could die and I wouldn’t be lonely. Two birds with one stone.

You can’t go down steps or anything to get to the beach so I turn around and start backtracking to the parking lot— you can walk straight onto the sand from there. But she’s like “Where are you going?” and when I tell her she looks at me like I’m stupid and walks right to the edge of the pier. You can’t tell how far it drops in the dark or even if it’s solid below; it could be water or cesspools for all I know and I’m not about to just jump. But she looks over her shoulder at me with a face that says What are you waiting for? and then she’s gone. I’m not gonna walk through the parking lot after that.

It’s kind of a fall, to tell you the truth. When I hit the ground my ankles jam up into my knees which ram into my hips which shove my breath hard through my chest and out my mouth. But I land on my feet, so I can swallow the ache and fake it. I amble up behind her like I’m taking my time.

Halfway down toward the water there’s a place where the side of the pier is hollow and you can duck in, tucked away from the waves. It’s like a wet wooden cave in there, all salt water and soft logs. You’d think it’d smell like trash or something rotting but it doesn’t, it smells like sea and tree trunks, and it makes me want to take off my shoes and put my feet in the sand like some hippie from Venice. Which I don’t do. The light from the pier bounces off the water and into our little hideout, waves mixing with the yells from above us, and Tracy’s face is bathed in the gray-yellow glow like some underground angel and all of a sudden she’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anyone be beautiful before. It’s weird.

When she asks me if I have a bag, oh my God I’ve never been so happy to have drugs on me in my life. Which is saying something. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself: it’s perfect. I’ve got a needle, too, only one but she doesn’t care and when she sinks it in the smooth pale skin inside her arm I have this flash like I’m going inside her. It makes me breathe loud enough to hear for a second but by then it’s already hit her, she doesn’t care, I can act like an asshole as much as I want and she won’t notice the rest of the night. She hands it over to me and I could just about tell you it was better watching her get off than doing it myself, but that’s only almost true.

After that I kiss her. It’s like water, the feeling of it, and also like sleep, the kind that comes when you’ve been up three days and your head finally hits a pillow and you can practically hear every single cell sigh relief. Obviously you could also say that it’s like junk, the way it floods in and makes things better, but it’s different. It’s not just the silk-blanket numb, the Bubble-Wrap protection from everything sharp; it’s something realer, more alive. She makes me naked even though I’m still in all my clothes, the cuffs of my jeans getting heavy wet cold from the sand, and her hands feel like they’re erasing every lie I ever told even though they’re just hooked into my belt loops. When she reaches down for the zipper I realize I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean, give me another couple minutes and I’m sure I would’ve, but in the sugar rush of kissing her I forgot there was anywhere else to go. I’m not used to getting distracted like that: I have to admit I usually skip to the good part. But it’s like all of her is the good part, her mouth and her teeth and her skinny ribs under my hands and our skins melting, and we’re not divided into good and bad at all.

She pushes ahead faster than I would, but it’s fine: the normal equipment problems junk causes are miraculously not in attendance and mostly I just care that she’s close to me, I don’t think about order or speed. She unbuckles and unbuttons, lets my clothes fall to the soaking ground and keeps her T-shirt on; I run my hands under it like it’s sixth grade except this time I know how to unhook her bra. She’s so tiny underneath: my arms circle around her like our little cave surrounds us, like the ocean wraps around the whole pier and even the city, and the whole time I’m inside her. She’s the only person that exists besides me. I don’t have to pretend.

The next morning I wake up sandy, dried-up ocean caked in my eyelashes. The beach is full of burned-out coals and green glass bottles; the pier looks empty with the Ferris wheel paused and the lights dimmed down, like a play set or a skeleton. Tracy’s still asleep next to me. It’s the first time I get a good look at her, really, without her watching. She must’ve lost her T-shirt eventually, because she’s curled up in her bra and I can see her tattoos. India ink, mostly, and crappy. She looks different in the light, paler, her back scratched up and full of zits. Her body is all white and scabby red and bones, but I know I must love her because instead of being grossed out I just think she looks like some kick-ass alley cat.

I don’t want to wake her up because I know when I do it’ll be the weird thing of what’s going to happen next. Usually that thing only lasts a few minutes because I say I need some coffee and take off. But I have a feeling Tracy’s more like me than I am: probably she’ll be the one needing coffee, and I kind of want to drag this out forever. If I have to let her sleep the whole time it’s okay as long as we both can still stay here.

What’s crazy is when she wakes up she sticks around. I keep waiting for her to do all the shit that I do: throw her eyes over my shoulder like she’s looking for something, stop talking, start making excuses. Or else play the girl part and get all clingy, although I kind of know that isn’t gonna happen. But she doesn’t do any of it. She just pulls on her hoodie, yanks my stocking cap off and wipes her eyes with it, and says “Come on, let’s get a donut.”

We wind up hitching all the way back to the Winchell’s on Hollywood. I can’t believe the two of us get a ride looking the way we do but we do, and end up winding down Sunset, taking the curves too fast in the back of some rich guy’s Escalade who probably thinks we’ll go home with him but is too sweaty and shy to ask. All through Bel-Air and Beverly Hills I think about holding Tracy’s hand and don’t do it. But she comes back with me, all the way back to Winchell’s, and winds up sticking by my side when we hit my normal sidewalks and I introduce her to my friends and then finally I let myself think, Maybe she’ll stay around for a while.

I don’t make predictions about people, except I can tell when someone’s gonna be an asshole. What I mean is I don’t expect anything from anyone, not ever, really. You can’t. At some point everyone will always fuck your friends or hit you or hit you up, steal your shit when you’re sleeping, suck your energy like a vampire or lie. Including me. But everything’s been different so far with Tracy, so like a dumbass I let myself think maybe she’ll be different that way too. To tell you the truth I guess I’ve got some kind of stupid hope that comes from somewhere in the same vicinity as that fifties jocko win-her-a-teddy-bear shit. I mean, I can’t deny it. But I’d never tell her that.

For a while we do it everywhere. I never knew L.A. was so big. We get to know practically every underpass beneath the 101: Franklin, Gower, Sunset, Western, Santa Monica also known as historic Route 66. We duck just behind the guardrails two feet from the road and if we want to talk we have to yell above the cars. Mostly we don’t want to talk, though.

It’s amazing how a person can make a place feel different. I thought asphalt and concrete all looked the same till Tracy started taking me places and I started noticing things like smells and potholes and how each place we go is specific in a way I couldn’t even describe to you, except to say they’re all exactly themselves at exactly those moments in a way that is secret and ours. The other thing that’s crazy is that the whole thing makes me start using words like amazing and secret and ours. A month ago I would’ve heard that and called myself a corny naive little shit. I mean, it’s not what you’d think, all soft-focus lenses and movie bullshit, where the guy gets the girl or vice versa, and everyone laughs about how adorably awkward they are, and at the end you sniffle in your hanky and clutch the hand of whoever’s next to you. It’s not like that. It’s just that we both have these edges that’ve always scraped up against everyone around us, but somehow with each other they line up so they fit together perfect and no one gets cut.

I’ve never known how to not hurt someone before, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t either. It gives us permission, I think, and beneath the overpasses, in the ditches, behind the Dumpsters in the alleys we rip into each other pretty good. She always leaves scratches on me and sometimes she shoves her hands up against my throat and keeps them there, shaking, while I kiss her. I know she’d never hurt me so I let her do it, even when her eyes go weird and she pushes me back against the Dumpster hard enough to bruise my spine on the rusty green metal, even when she yanks on my hair till it comes out in her fingers, when she bites down on my shoulder and takes out little bits of skin. All that shit makes sense to me in this weird way, like it clicks with something in my brain: it’s right for her to do it. Sometimes she hits me when she comes, her hands hot against my chest and arms, and I feel like a kid, like home, this weird time warp into something familiar and black and outside of my skin. Then she’ll stop, finished, and I’ll open my eyes, see her little naked body there, and this feeling of myself will rush back into me hard and fast enough to hurt.

We never get high until afterward. I wish I could tell you it’s like that first night over and over, that we shoot up and every time it’s some crazy aphrodisiac thing where I’m man enough to overcome the junk and give it to her good. But that’s not really the deal. We tried one more time after the pier to do it like that—shoot first, fuck second—with pathetic results. I would’ve been totally embarrassed if it weren’t for the fact that I was high and therefore didn’t give a shit. She didn’t either. But I learned my lesson. Every time after that I make sure we start making out before she can go rooting around in my backpack. When we’re done I pull out cigarettes for us to smoke while I cook up the shit, and then we do it like falling asleep in each other’s arms. Better than cuddling, I’ll tell you that much. Plus it kind of sidesteps the whole thing of guy-wants-to-sleep, girl-wants-to-talk, which probably wouldn’t ever happen with Tracy anyway, but whatever.

I’d be happy if this time would last forever. Even if forever was really fuckin’ short and I had to die at the end of it. I mean, she even hangs out with my friends, who up till now have been the only thing I’d ever call important—although you know I’d never say that to their face. Girls usually think they’re a bunch of fucks, especially since Eeyore’s gone and there’s no cute-factor left. Eeyore’d already split when Tracy and I got back: home to Mom and Dad, I figured. Now it’s just Rusty and Scabius and Squid, all crusty guys like me who sit around and stink and swear at people on the sidewalk. But they’re pretty much all I’ve got in Hollywood or anywhere, so it’s cool that Tracy doesn’t make me choose.

Everything about her is cool; that’s the thing that kicks my ass. Her India-ink tattoos, stringy cigarette-blond hair, how her ribs poke my chest when she leans up against me, the way every once in a while she quits slitting her eyes and I catch them wide open, reflecting the glow of the lights all around us and I just watch her like that without telling her. Plus, of course, the following facts: she curses better than any of my friends, fucks like a goddamn rabbit, and never wants to talk but somehow understands everything I’m ever thinking like some fuckin’ telepathy. She matches me.

I even start to come into money after hanging around her for a while. I guess she must make me more appealing to the masses, or at least less scary, because all of a sudden the guys up on Hollywood start taking me up on it when I mutter “candy” out of half my mouth. I’d always had enough sales to get along, but it was all to kids I sort of knew. But now we plop down on the sidewalk by the wax museum and when the junkies come by Tracy gets all excited and says “Let me do it,” like we’re hitching and she wants to be the one to stick out her thumb. She’s cute about it, like a little kid. And people stop for her. Guys who’d never duck into an alley alone with me are all about stopping when Tracy cocks her head sideways and makes the offer. She trails us around the block, watches the deals go down like I’m some rock star and she’s my manager or something, making sure nobody stiffs us. It’s like her job.

Sometimes the guys we sell to think they’ll get something else out of it too. I can tell, the way they hang around after, flick their eyes back and forth between me and Tracy like they’re watching Ping-Pong. Sometimes they’ll stay on her too long and I’ll hock a big one on the sidewalk, making sure they remember I’m there. Then they look back at me and straighten out their sleeves, pretend they’re thinking about something else besides fucking my girlfriend. I don’t know what they think: that I’ll just say “Here, you can have her,” or that I’m pimping her or what. Whatever it is, it’s bullshit. It makes me feel sick to my stomach, actually, like here’s this thing that’s real and mine and they just want to blur it back into the rest of the world and make it disappear. She never says anything to them, though, and she won’t look at me either. She just stands there and watches the guys like she’s waiting for someone to tell her something.

Pretty soon we rack up enough money in a day to get a real bed. My boys down on Sunset don’t like that too much, me leaving them out on the street while I yuppie it up in clean sheets. Cable TV and a bathtub: of course they’ll wind up jealous. But I’m sure they’ll understand. The cops have been circling around more than usual, leaning out their windows like they want something from us, and there’s only so long you can convince them they’ve got nothing to arrest you for. And besides, Tracy and I could use a little privacy.

The first time, we try to stay in this motel called the Vagabond Inn over on Vine. I like the name. Little pink stucco place with aqua trim and a Coke machine by the pool. I’ve got a whole fantasy going about it, the lock on the door and the box spring and the shower, me and Tracy in the big bed pointed toward the TV; I’ve been eyeing it since we started making money. They have an ice machine there, too. I recognize ice machines from a trip I took back when I was a kid; I don’t know where the trip was to or what we did, but I remember the orange-and-brown plaid carpets in the hall, how I walked on them to get a plastic pail full for my mom so she could ice her face. That’s all I remember. Anyway, my plan is to bring a bucket back to our room at the Vagabond Inn and run the ice all over Tracy’s body so it’ll melt into little rivers in the dirt on her skin, and she’ll shiver, clean in the spots where I touch her.

Unfortunately, the guy who runs the place is a fucking shit. He looks right at my grimy shirt and Tracy’s tattoos and says “Sorry, you can’t check in without a credit card.” He doesn’t even ask if we have one. Stupid fuck. I’ve never wanted a credit card in my life, but right now I want a Platinum Visa so bad, just so I can rub it in his fucking face. What I could do without the Visa is punch him, but there’s bulletproof glass between us, and a counter where you slide the money back and forth. I guess that’s why they put the glass there, to keep the people who own shit safe from people like me. Stupid Fuck says “Just below Santa Monica there’s a hostel, they take cash.” Tracy tugs at my sleeve and says “Come on.” On the way out I spit on the glass.

So the hostel is our lap of luxury the nights we can afford it. Guys’ rooms and girls’ rooms are separate with twelve bunks in each one and bars on the windows; it’s not exactly ice machines and free HBO. Not gonna brag to my boys down on Sunset about bringing her here. But the halfway-house dropouts doze off early, and once they’re snoring Tracy and I sneak into each other’s rooms, stay up all night and use the chlorine-smelling showers. Her hair smells better dirty.

It’s in the hall outside the girls’ room that we fight the first time. Actually it started on the street, but our beds are paid for so we wind up taking it inside. Here are the facts: we’ve been selling enough shit to run out, my old connection’s fucked, the cops are everywhere, and Tracy finally found a guy she says can get us more. I was supposed to be at Donut Emporium at ten with the money; I was fifteen minutes late. The guy left, I spent the next two hours circling the block trying to find him. By the time I gave up and got back to Benito’s it was after midnight. Tracy wasn’t there. Scabius spun on an orange stool, drinking a 40 alone in the fluorescent glow, face flushed and clothes mussed like he’d been in a fight. He gave me this weird creepy grin but said he had no idea where she was.

Now I find her four blocks down in front of the hostel, rocking herself on the curb, her eyes bloodshot and empty. I’ve never seen her eyes like that. She doesn’t notice me, staring into some tunnel only she can see. I’m half a foot away by the time she startles out of it, and then she freaks on me like a cat who’s eaten someone’s speed. “Where the fuck were you?” she screams, loud enough to make the actress-type parking her Miata ten feet away turn around and look. “You were supposed to be back two goddamn hours ago!” She never cared how long I’ve been gone before.

The empty in her eyes fills up; now they’re wild, shining like she might cry just from being so mad. I notice blood on the backs of her hands, like they got scraped on brick or sidewalk. Her clothes are stretched out and ripped, and she’s jumpy: digging into her arms, leaving bright pink trails and little bloody moons. It’s almost like she’s more than angry, crossed over into some other kind of territory hotter and sharper than anything I’ve seen.

I don’t even know why she’s so weird and mad except it’s been two days and she must be needing junk. It seems like more than that, but something stops me from asking. I just try to calm her down. I pull Tracy in off the street so Miata lady will stop staring. When I grab her arm she slits her eyes at me, hissing: “Don’t you ever fucking touch me again.” She means it, I guess: when I ignore it and yank her inside, she reaches up with her free arm and rips at my hair, squealing. I push her off me, but I think it makes her mad how easy it is for me to get out of her grip, because she starts fighting like a girl, all sharp teeth and fingernails and nasty words. She says all this shit to me: I never fucking show up when I’m supposed to, if I’m not gonna come through why the hell is she fucking me, I’m not worth the work it takes to fake it. I think she’s trying to get me to hit her, but I just stand there while she freaks out snarling like a pissed off mean little dog.

I don’t know. Usually I want to kick people’s asses when they fuck with me. And it’s not that I love Tracy so much I can’t hit her or some shit like that. I don’t think love has anything to do with it. Just for some reason I can’t click into the place where she is. It’s like in cartoons when the bad guy backs you up against the wall and at the very last moment you just vanish and reappear behind him, turn yourself to nothing, never real enough for him to catch.

After that I know I can always be invisible if I need to. It makes me hate her a little, that I can’t count on her to catch me, that she’d let me slip out of her grasp like that. I’d never do that to her.

I don’t believe in prophecy or fate but you have to admit it’s pretty fucking weird that me and Tracy have our first fight the very same night Laura rolls into the city and checks into the girls’ room. I can look back and feel that girl through the wall, and it comes down on me like a too-hot blanket, the doom of it, how that night Tracy started to leave. It’s weird how things can seem just like life when they’re happening but when you look back later you see it was all part of some inevitable plan that’s a thousand times your size.

I should’ve taken the cops as a sign. Cops are a bad omen, always. They keep trolling around more and more till suddenly it’s twice a day, and finally they get out of their cars and come up to Scabius and me, hard, hands on their belts, and ask us what we did with Eeyore. I guess she didn’t go home to Mommy and Daddy after all. I stay cool, despite the copious amounts of shit in both my pockets. Officer Asshole swivels his bulging stubbly face toward us; from the corner of my eye I can see Scabius sharpen up. I start talking fast so Scabius can’t butt in and screw it up: lots of “Officer” and “Sir.” I tell the cops that Yes we know Eeyore and to look in Venice, so they’ll stay away from us. They do. At least for now.

There are too many bad signs around all of a sudden: the cops, the fight, Tracy’s weird mad bloodshot eyes. But I’m still clueless, too wrapped up in my little lovesick world to let myself believe that something’s wrong.

Because at first it’s just like: okay, Tracy has a friend. That’s cool. It happens. Just another kid come to L.A. from the desert for refuge. But Laura isn’t one of us; she’s an outsider. And outsiders will fuck with you. You can tell: she’s not hard enough at the edges to be really running from anything, and her yellow T-shirt’s spanking clean, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that looks like it’s been brushed ten times just today. She’s even got earrings, not safety pins or steel rings but real ones, little hoops made out of gold. And she latches on to Tracy like a baby sister or a crushed-out kid.

But Tracy likes her, so I make nice. I’m all gentlemanly and shit, letting her and Laura have their little powwows or whatever. I keep my mouth shut when Tracy stops hanging out with the guys, pulling me out of the pack, away from them, without even saying hello. She tells me to keep Scabius the fuck away from her, always, every second, and I do. I don’t even make a fuss when Tracy takes off with Laura for a while. I know she’ll always come back and find me at Benito’s, pull me back into the alley where it’s too dark for little-girl Laura to see, and Tracy and me will be back alone in the asphalt and dirt and the steel of the Dumpsters. We stay on schedule, meeting up near noon and five and then again at night; one time out of three we fuck first and the others I just lean up against her, close my eyes. I count on it like I’d count on a watch if I wore one and I know she won’t slow down on me or stop.

The problem is it all starts shrinking. Before, Tracy and I would crisscross all of Hollywood, underpass to underpass, block to block. Every place belonged to us in the way that places do when you find them together, and L.A. had more ground than we could ever cover so the world called Ours stretched out for miles. But now I’ll say Come on, let’s go out by the 5, and she’ll be like I’m tired, I need to be nearby, I want a taco. She says she likes the alley by Benito’s, she feels safe like it’s home, and I sure as hell have never seen Tracy give two shits about feeling safe but I go along. We memorize that alley: green chipped paint on the rusted Dumpster, rats in the cracks, the brick of the buildings against our heads. And you know I could even get into it in a cozy settled-down way if the time part didn’t go and start shrinking too.

But guess what, it does. Tracy shows up and pulls me back there by the hand and it isn’t like before, where there was this bubble around us and we’d get so lost it was scary and cut-loose and right. Now her hands are lazy and pushy all at once—but not pushy in the good way of wanting, pushy in the way of getting it over with. When I shove her up against the wall she just lays there and her eyes go blank. She never looks at me. She doesn’t shove back like she used to, and my skin stays smooth, unscratched. I miss the marks she cut into me. I feel too clean.

It’s weird to think about what I’d be if Tracy’d never happened. I start thinking about that a lot after a while, once Laura starts looking like she’s sticking around, once Tracy goes off and has her dyke affair or slumber party or whatever and forgets everything that’s important and real.

See, I’m still using shit words like important and real. I swear to God that girl turned me into a pussy.

At first it weirds me out, because everything still seems kind of normal. You know, she has her friend, she comes back to me, we eat tacos, we fuck, we shoot up. But there must be some part of me that knows it’s different already, because I start imagining all the time: what if Tracy was gone. I’ll be sitting with Scabius and Rusty and Squid and just space out, trying to remember what it was like before Tracy, and they’ll be like “Man what is wrong with you” just as I’m realizing I can’t remember it without her. I just can’t. It just seems like a big empty pit, like a blackout where afterward everyone tells you you said shit and did shit, but no matter how many details they give you none of it feels real.

I start counting the time she’s gone. When the two of them take off I shuffle my feet outside Benito’s, trying to front like I don’t have an eye on all four directions in case she turns a corner, comes back into frame. I camp out by the hostel door, squat on the sidewalk with the trannie whores. When they try to pick me up I tell them to fuck off. They say “What, you waiting for your girlfriend or something?” and I just stare off at the hills because there was no way I’m gonna tell them the truth, which is yes.

Then I start doing things to try and hold on to her. Shit like asking where she’s going and when she’ll be back, and then showing up at McDonald’s or Tang’s Donut just to let her know I’m checking. Like listening to the words she uses, slipping them into my sentences so she’ll think I know her mind. Copycatting, watching, trying to slide into her shadow. Pussy shit, too: I even stick up for her stupid friend. The one time in forever that the two of them come around my crew, run into us by accident at Benito’s, Scabius pipes up. He calls Laura “Country Girl,” tells her to give him a blowjob or get out. He’s kidding or whatever, and it’s ridiculous how girl Laura is about it, all serious and lame, but she just won’t budge from her little-baby stance. Finally Tracy freaks out on Scabius, gets all weird and spits on him and tells him to fuck off. I back her up. I know I’ll get shit for it later, but whatever. All I can do right then is watch what Tracy does and try to copy it so she’ll be happy.

But I can’t make her be; she keeps running back to Laura who I’m sure keeps telling her some shit about some kind of category I’m part of, some category that really means: not them. Not their little perfect frilly fuckin’ world. It’s like they have some kind of secret, even though I know there’s nothing Tracy could tell Laura that’s as real as the things she says to me without talking. I may not know the facts of Tracy, but that’s only because nobody does. I know everything else.

I know everything and I can see straight through her, and the night of the day of the Scabius blowjob incident, right before the sun sets, Tracy comes over to see me when Laura’s up on Hollywood spare-changing for their tampon fund or whatever. I see right through the surface of her eyes like it was plastic wrap. I know she wants junk and that’s why she came back.

She’s all like “Sorry about before, I know I was sort of a bitch,” and even though I’m the one they think is a bitch, I’m like “Yeah, well, whatever.” I can’t look at her: I know Tracy is constitutionally incapable of saying sorry and meaning it, but at the same time that “Sorry” is the thing I want most of all, and there she is saying it.

It’s weird, hearing what I need and knowing that it’s just a lie, like wanting to be touched and having someone hit you. It still feels good even though you bleed. It’s the best you can do. And sometimes it’s enough: sometimes you settle, and you start to look forward to getting hit because at least someone’s hand is on your face, at least there’s something else touching you besides cold naked air, at least something makes the blood rise, and the tingling in your skin keeps you warm for a while. But then there are times when it turns to an insult, a mean joke that reaches into your ribs where you keep the buried shit, the shit you need, the shit you never say, and pulls it out and holds it up in front of you and everyone like dirty underwear. And everyone laughs but you can’t, and you can’t cry either, and you also can’t stand there but they won’t let you run and the hole in your ribs lets the air in and the bubble of it swells and swells inside you till you pop.

I hit her. I hit her hard and her cheekbone pokes into my knuckles like a rock or a knife, sharp, and I know if I’d been one step closer, if she’d been one second less ready, I’d have shattered it. Her face would’ve caved like giving in to me, like surrender, the sharp of her would’ve gone soft and I would’ve won.

But she doesn’t, I don’t, instead her cheekbone rams into my knuckles bruising the hell out of my hand, and it’s just another fucking blow to me, just another way she kicks my ass even though there she is bleeding through her fingers dripping brown onto the sidewalk and she looks up at me with her fuckin’ stupid-ass weepy eyes, faking that I hurt her feelings, and I know she’ll cry to Laura who’ll stand in solidarity against me as the big mean nasty guy. Bitch. I can’t stop getting my ass kicked by Tracy even when I throw the punch.

After that, I keep going to the spot by the Dumpster to look at her blood on the sidewalk. There are five drops of it, dirt-brown like liquid rust on the grit of the asphalt, perfect circles. Weirdly it’s beautiful, the residue of her, beautiful like the gray-green glow off the Santa Monica Pier, like the alley-cat scratches on her bony shoulders. It’s beautiful because it’s real, and because I made it happen, but most of all because no one knows what it is. If anybody ever even saw it they’d think it was shit or dirty gum ground in the sidewalk, but they’d never think of it as blood from someone’s face. It’s a secret I have with Tracy: I can see her whenever I want. If I squint hard enough I can almost see her face in it, or sometimes her cells, all the parts of her she hides from everyone. She thought she could hide them from me too, but she can’t. That’s the thing of it. She walks through the world so tough, her and Laura holding hands and whispering like it’s fourth fucking grade and they have some world nobody else is part of, but the secret is that I can see right through the walls around that world. It doesn’t matter whether Tracy thinks she’s letting me look; I can see everything inside her.

Now it’s the day after that night, the night she’d probably call The Night I Hit Her, and my knuckles hurt. Her face was so sharp it scratched my skin across the bones, and now they’re swollen up like purple popcorn; I keep my hands in my pockets because I really don’t feel like getting into it with Scabius and Rusty and Squid. They’d just be like “Fuck yeah, you showed her” and reduce it to their level, which is nothing like the real of it, the secret real of it where Tracy made me swell inside till I burst through my skin and burst hers too and now I can see inside her when I want. There’s no way they’d ever comprehend that, and besides if I told them it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, tucked down between me and her; they’d be able to go out by the Dumpster and see her too. And that’s bullshit. So I stuff my hands down in my dirty pockets and keep quiet, and when Tracy marches up to me with her purple-as-a-sunset cheek I grab her arm and pull her down the block.

* * *

I can tell when I see her that she has big plans. She’s probably gone over and over it with Laura, exactly how she’ll tell me off, bring me down notch by notch by notch. She’s trying to puff her skinny chest up like some bird or animal, but her ribs are tiny; I can see right through her.

“I’m fucking quitting,” she says; it’s the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m taking off and quitting so that I don’t have to eat your fucking shit, and I don’t care if it hurts and I puke till my stomach’s dry, so don’t even try to tell me that’s what’ll happen. I don’t fucking care because it’s better than having to fuck your sorry scabby ass. I’d rather puke up blood than ever touch you again, so fuck off and go find some other bitch to pollute with your nasty fuckin’ jizz.” That’s what she says. And then she turns around and walks toward Hollywood.

If I was smart I’d run after her, grab her shirt and make her stay. But I have that cartoon-invisible thing again where I vanish and reappear behind her, turn myself to nothing, and it slows me down, way down so when she walks away all I can do is stand there watching. She’s walking north and the mountains are beyond her soaking in the gray-blue smog, Hollywood sign half hidden by it. It’s like at the ends of movies, like she thinks that she’s some cowgirl on some screen riding off into the distance alone. Pretty soon the smog will swallow her up and she’ll just disappear.