Authors: Abby Bardi
1968
In the rec room of someone's split level house in South Shore, Cookie sat on a black vinyl bar stool, listening to The Doors on a portable record player that was turned up as loud as it could go. The parents of the guy whose rec room it was were upstairs watching TV and pretending not to realize that everyone downstairs was some combination of stoned and drunk, or maybe they really didn't know. Emily had smuggled a bottle of gin into the party by pouring it into two plastic bags, tying a string to the bags, and running it through her sleeves on the inside of her coat. Cookie and Emily had drunk most of it themselves, and now Emily stood in the middle of the room trying to spin a hula hoop. The hoop kept falling to the floor, and finally, a guy Cookie knew Emily thought was cute stepped into it and tried to spin it around both of them. They began to kiss and the hoop clattered to the floor again. Cookie yawned. To Emily's left, a girl who had drunk a bottle of cough syrup took off her shirt and started dancing. She was wearing a training bra. No one paid any attention to her. A guy on downers, who Cookie knew slightly from 57th Street, staggered up to her with a can opener in his hand.
“Can I write my name on your face?” he asked.
“No,” Cookie said. He staggered away.
Someone held out his hand to Cookie, a boy with an angel face and brown wavy hair. Thinking he was asking her to dance, she took his hand. He led her across the room and through a door into a bathroom. He closed the door and locked it behind him, and they started to kiss. His mouth tasted of cigarettes and rum, and he had a round little
tongue. As they kissed, she kept her eyes open and watched him. His face was unfamiliar in the dark. Through the closed door, she could hear Jim Morrison singing, “Break on Through.”
He put his hands inside her shirt and together they slid down to the floor. His tongue was inert in her mouth like some kind of food, a fig or a peach. He lifted up her shirt with one hand and unhooked her bra with the other. She was impressed; that move took a lot of practice. He brushed his hands against her breasts and then moved downward, lifting up her denim mini-skirt. It was probably time to stop him, but she felt paralyzed and curious. He hooked his fingers around the top of her underpants, and she found herself thinking that she was glad she was wearing the nice bikini ones and not the ripped cotton ones she usually wore to school. She felt his hand slide down her stomach, then disappear. She heard a zipping noise, then felt something pushing between her legs. With some difficulty, she disengaged her mouth and said, “What are you doing?” She realized as she asked that this was a stupid question. He didn't answer. Jim Morrison was still singing.
What he was doing didn't feel good, in fact it hurt, and her head was crashing against the base of the toilet. The next day, she would have a small egg-shaped bruise on the top of her head. A thought was trying to form itself in her mind: why was this hurting? Was this supposed to hurt? All of a sudden, she was frightened, and she took her breath in to say something, or maybe even to scream, but suddenly he stopped. She wondered why he was stopping. He pulled away from her, stood up, zipped up his pants, unlocked the door, opened it, and left.
1973
“I know this is a stupid question, Rachel, but why didn't you just say no?” Michael had asked when I told him about Chad. Though we had been together for about six months by then, it had taken us a while to trade stories about losing our virginity. I was reluctant to tell the Chad-bathroom story because I didn't think it made me look too good. “Or scream or something?” We were naked in our bed, listening to it rain, which it supposedly never did in southern California.
“You don't understand.”
“You're right, I don't understand.”
“It's hard to explain.”
“Try. I'm really interested.”
“Okay. I guess it's like this. The fact is, if I had done anything like scream, or kick him and run out of the room, it wouldn't have been cool. Everyone would have laughed at me. You should know this, you were cool in high school.”
“Not cool like that. The people I hung out with were too cool to have sex at all. We just smoked a lot of dope.”
“Well, at least you did that.” We kissed for a while.
“It was rape, you know, Rachel,” he said, pulling away from me. His sunny hair was messy and his lips were red from kissing. He leaned on one elbow and stroked the side of my face. “You were only fourteen.”
“It was my own fault.”
“I don't see it that way.”
“It's the coolness thing. Everywhere you went in my neighborhood, there were strange men on the corner asking if they could come home with you. It would never have occurred to anyone to object to that. You just smiled and said no thanks. If you said, âMy body is a temple and I wouldn't dream of desecrating it,' people would think you were a nerd.”
“Your body
is
a temple,” Michael said, lacing his fingers through mine.
“Actually it's only half a temple. And half a church.”
“Don't joke.”
“I think it's funny.”
“Oh, I forgot, everything's funny.”
“You don't get it,” I said.
“Maybe I do.” He looked at me the way a person does when they think everything will always be okay between you.
I looked back at him, and the icky love and trust I felt for him welled up in me again, totally uncool. His face looked open and vulnerable and that scared me because open, vulnerable things were rising in me, too. I felt like putting my arms around him and begging him to never leave me while at the same time running out of the room to somewhere far away. Something in my head said, you will never again find someone you love this much, and something else in my head said, bullshit.
1974
Bert's Woodlawn Tap had been decorated for Christmas. Posters from all the major beer companies with red and green messages of greeting had been slapped onto the black walls. Lights winked on and off above the rows of bottles that ran the whole length of the bar. A scowling bartender stood behind the bar wearing an elfin stocking cap.
Emily and I always raced over to Bert's the minute we were back in town from college. I generally had a quiet dinner with my parents on my first night home. My mother would cook all my favorite foods, and they would all taste strange to me, like I'd never eaten them before. Then my parents would go to bedâthey always went to bed right after dinnerâand before their heads hit their pillows I was out the door in the family station wagon, cruising down Woodlawn Avenue. Emily and I always met at the bar in the front room at Bert's. We always wanted to see each other, though it always seemed to me that she didn't actually like me.
There were a lot of bars in my neighborhood, each with its own distinctive aroma. In summer, you'd walk down the street and these smells would drift out to you on a wave of cold air from inside. Each bar was different. Some were full of students, though due to some archaic liquor laws, no bars were allowed next to the university. Others were full of blue collar workers and neighborhood people. Others were full of pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. No matter what kind of mood you were in, you could find just the right bar.
Emily and I liked Bert's best, not just because they accepted our obviously fake I.D.s, but because Bert's was a historical landmark. I once heard a story about a guy from
my neighborhood who was arrested in Turkey on drug charges. When they took him before the judge, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Woodlawn Tap” on it. The judge took one look at it, exclaimed, “Bert's!” and let him go. Another possibly apocryphal story was Emily's claim to have been conceived at Bert's; her parents were graduate students at the time. Her suggestions that she ought to get a discount on drinks because of this were repeatedly rebuffed.
At Christmas, all the students were gone and Bert's was strangely vacant, except for the same guys who always sat at the bar watching the Bears, the Blackhawks, the Bulls, the Sox, the Cubs. Emily and I would start at the bar in the front room, then move to a table where we could keep an eye on the door while pretending we were not at all interested in who came or went. When guys tried to pick us up we told them we were lesbian stewardesses. Most of the time people left us alone, and we sat watching until someone we'd known from 57th Street would come in, someone we hadn't seen in a long time. They would see us, we would see them see us, and Emily would casually rake her hand through her hair. Emily hated her hair, and for that matter, my hair, too. They would slouch over to our table and say, “Oh wow” and we would say “Oh wow” back to them. We would ask them where they had been. It was usually California, Colorado, New Mexico. Emily, who went to college in Massachusetts, would murmur, “O pioneers.”
“Why did you all go west?” Emily asked me one time. “I just don't get it. I mean, what's out there? There's no culture. Just a bunch of rocks, am I right?”
“People go west to expand. People go east to contract. That's the rule. I'm an expander. You're a contractor. That's why we've always gotten along so well.”
“None of your sarcasm, missy,” Emily said.
“Okay. People who go west are Platonists, people who go east are Aristotelians. I learned that in college.”
“What about the people who stay here?”
“Crazy. Stupid. On drugs.”
“Which Greek philosopher would you say that was?”
“People who go east are Apollonian. People who go west are Dioâ”
“Stop.” She held up her hand. I stopped.
Bando had never left. Whenever I came back, he was the person I most wanted to see, even though sometimes seeing him didn't turn out too well. I was watching the door, waiting, knowing that seeing me would startle the shit out of him like it always did, even though he knew perfectly well I'd be home for winter break. I hadn't heard from him in a while and was wondering how he was. Seeing him was a comfort, maybe because I'd known him for so long, or maybe because he'd always been the only person on earth who thought I was special. “You're an archetype,” he said to me. I liked being an archetype, though I had no idea what it meant. When I read a little Jung in college, I came home and said, “You're an archetype too,” but he didn't seem as pleased as I thought he might be. “I want to be more than that to you,” he said, looking me right in the eye. I put a finger to his lips and said, “Shh.”
When the front door of Bert's opened, I glanced up, hoping it was him. I loved the way he walked, as if demons were chasing him. Instead, it was Chad. He had avoided me for several years after the bathroom incident, but after a while, when we kept ending up in the same places, we both pretended to have forgotten our first meeting. The thing I loved about drinking was that you could always say you didn't remember what happened
while you were drunk, even when you did. Now that we were old acquaintances, I didn't really mind him sitting with us, although Emily, out of ancient loyalty to me, wouldn't speak to him.
“Hey,” he said, pulling a chair up to our table and straddling it.
“What's hap?” I said, a sixties greeting that burst from my mouth sometimes. The one good thing about Chad was that because he had stayed in the neighborhood, he was up on all the gossip. Sometimes I thought he honestly didn't remember what had transpired between us, and he looked so different now, coarse and worn out, that I could almost think of him as someone else anyhow.
“How's college?” he said in a voice that I knew was making fun of us.
“
Brûle en enfer
,” Emily said under her breath.
“College is fine. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life. What's been going on around here?”
Chad answered with a brief update on several people I didn't have much interest in, including himself. He lit a Camel and French inhaled, something Emily and I had often practiced in her mirror and now thought was disgusting. Emily coughed and waved her hand in the air, but he didn't seem to notice.
“I guess you heard about Bobby Bandolini,” he said, his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth the way all the boys had thought was cool back in eighth grade.
“Bando? No, what about him?”
“You didn't hear?” He looked at me with curiosity. His skin looked translucent, as if bad weather had worn it out.
“Hear what?”
“He offed himself.”
“He what?”
“You know. Suicide. A few months ago. He jumped out of the window of his father's apartment building. 27th floor. You know, I always thought about doing that. I used to lie in bed at night and think, what would it be like to just jump? I figured it'd be like flying, at least for a minute or two. How long do you think it would take toâ”
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” Emily was getting her scary look.
I put my hands on the table top, sticky from decades of spilled beer, and clung to its edge while the room tilted, and the Meister Brau signs above the bar, the giant rusty bell they rang at closing time, and the rows and rows of bottles, and the Christmas lights in the mirror, lurched sideways and began to spin.
“No,” I said, smiling pleasantly at Chad. “No. I hadn't heard that.”
1975
“Yeah, I was pretty upset,” I said to Joey. “I was pretty fucking upset.”
“I'm sorry, Cookie, I shouldn't have brought it up.” He reached over and grabbed my hand. His hand was surprisingly soft and warm, like an ombudshand.
“It's okay, I mean, I can talk about it. I just never really believed it. Even now, I sit here and figure he's going to walk in, like I'm just waiting for him. Sometimes I think I'm okay, I'm over it. Then sometimes I think it just hasn't sunk in yet. You know, I never even cried when I found out. Hell, I didn't want to cry in front of fucking Chad. It wouldn't have been cool, right? Emily got hystericalânot that she even liked Bando that much, but she was freaking out on my behalf. I calmed her down and got rid of Chad and then I went home and it felt like it was time to cry, but I just lay in my bed and nothing happened. I waited, I figured okay, give it a little time, eventually it'll hit me. I'd make these little sobbing noises and sometimes it would seem like tears would almost come to my eyes, but then nothing. Nothing. Could I have another beer, please?”
“I don't think so.”
“So all this time I still haven't cried, and I think the trouble is, I just don't believe he's gone, I keep thinking he's going to call me like he always did and ask me to meet him somewhere, and I'll ask him how he is and he'll refuse to tell me because he hates telephones, he thinks they're trying to steal his soul. And I'll go meet him and then I'll find out how he is, and that's what I always want to know, because sometimes he wasn't so well. I guess you know about that.”
“Yeah.”
“So anyway, I went back to school, and everything was normal there. It was
so
normal, like nothing here ever was. And Michael was there, and he said lots of comforting things. He kept telling me to go ahead and grieve, cry, let it out, and I still couldn't. And nothing was ever the same again. Everything looked the same, but it wasn't. Everything was black and white, like in a movie.”
“So you came back here when you graduated.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I came back here.”
I didn't want to go home, so I asked Joey if he wanted to drive around for a while, though there was nowhere I felt like going. We got in his car and ended up parked next to the lake watching a ball of tumbleweed roll through the parking lot. The radio was on, and we just sat there, not saying anything. On the radio, the Spinners were singing “Games People Play.”
“You used to be able to hear the conga drums from here,” he said after a while.
“That's how you could tell it was summer.”
“Now all you hear is traffic.”
“You know, I lived here my whole life until I went away to school, but ever since I can remember, this whole city has truly given me the creeps.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It's like I said about my reasons for things, like with the sunglasses, and how I never really know what they are or why I do anything. I was supposed to stay in California and live with Michael. I can't even remember deciding to
come back hereâI just did it. And I haven't really thought much about it since. But it was like a weird compulsion.”
“You felt guilty?”
“Maybe. Like . . .”
“What?”
“Like it had something to do with Bando. Like in some way, I came back here to find him.”
“He's dead, honey.”
“I know,” I said.