My mother throws these parties on alternate Saturday nights in our apartment on the Upper West Side. A few of the men are disgusting. They keep pulling me onto their laps, bouncing me on their knees, only I’m no kid and they know it. Maybe one man is the worst out of all of them, with his dirty ponytail and stiff, wiry goatee. He leaves his hands on my hips for too long. As if, I say as I pull myself off his lap. I can do better than some gross old man.
So after a few of these parties I start to make plans to be out of the house the entire evening. I help my mother cook, I share a glass of wine with her best friend Betsy while Betsy smokes a cigarette out the kitchen window, and then I go, I’m gone, and I do not return until the next day. I see shows at CBGB and go to raves in Brooklyn and I hang out in Washington Square Park until it gets too late and scary. Sometimes I go to see my brother’s band. I listen to records with my friends in their tiny bedrooms until their parents tell us to go to sleep. I like Nirvana and Hole and David Bowie and Pink Floyd and My Bloody Valentine and Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest. I listen to tons and tons of Mozart, in particular when I’m painting, because my father the musician had told me Mozart was good for the brain. I dream about living in Seattle or London or Los Angeles, but I would never leave New York, because there is no better city in the world. This last part I firmly believe, even though I have never been anywhere else.
One night, I go to the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the East Village. My friends Asha and Jack go with me and we spend all our money on cans of Jolt cola, which we mix with rum that Jack bought at the liquor store on 10th Street that also sold dime bags of so-so weed and absolutely terrible coke, which half the time was cut with baby laxative. Sometimes we had Jolt and sometimes we had bad coke and sometimes we had OK speed, which Jack got from his older boyfriends. It didn’t matter to me one way or another. This was my way of keeping things going. And now I was going.
On the train home, Asha and Jack sit across from me, kissing, and it’s dumb because they’re both gay.
“Why are you guys making out?” I say.
“I don’t know, something to do,” says Jack slyly.
I don’t want to go home because of the party but no one else’s home was much better. Either there’s a bad parent or no room. At Asha’s house I’d have to sleep in the same bed as her and she always wanted to spoon and I didn’t always feel like it because it meant more to her than it did to me. “I love your hair,” she’d say, and sniff it and wrap it around her wrist. My hair is long, and wild, and huge. I couldn’t stand the pressure.
Sleeping in the same bed as my friends used to be something innocent, and now all of a sudden it’s not. Not when there are so many newly alert nerve endings. Not when the brain always click-click-clicks late at night, even when I’m alone. There is no such thing as the sleep of the innocent anymore.
“If you’re trying to make me jealous, it won’t work,” I say to Asha and Jack on the train.
“We don’t care what you think anyway,” says Asha. “We’re just making ourselves feel good.”
“This is so stupid,” I say. I care a little bit, but not in the way they think. They were just ignoring me; that’s what I hate.
They start getting really into it, putting their hands all over each other, shoving their tongues in each other’s mouths really deep. Asha makes an exaggerated moan. It starts to gross me out.
“Fuck this, I’m out,” I say, and I jump off at 86th Street before they can say anything. I wave goodbye to them through the window as the train moves out of the station.
Now I’m alone on the street, and I’ve got fifteen blocks to walk. I take Broadway because it’s the best lit, the most chance of running into other people, but it’s three a.m., and it’s uptown, and contrary to popular belief, the city does sleep sometimes.
Right around 92nd Street, I pass a man, not a kid, definitely a man, drunk, holding a 40 in a paper bag. He offers me some. I say, “No thanks.” I walk faster. He follows me and says, “How about you buy me another?” I say, “I don’t have any money,” and he says, “Yeah, right,” and I say, “I’m broke, I’m probably broker than you are,” and he says, “Who says I’m broke, why you think I’m broke, maybe I just want your money anyway,” and I start running now, why not run, why stand still just to prove some point? I have zero points. I hear glass break behind me and he’s running too, I can hear him breathing heavy, he’s a big guy, longer legs, but I’m pretty fast, I scored high in the Presidential Fitness Test at school, speed and flexibility, those are my strong suits, but no strength, so there’s no way I’d win this fight. Don’t stop, I tell myself. He is a man but you are a girl and you are on fire. Run all the way home. But then I feel a hand on my shoulder and I stumble and then somehow, just nearly, I escape his fingers, but I’m at the corner of West End Avenue, I run into a red light, and then a cab stops short in front of me, honks at me, honks at him, there’s a light rain, I now notice, a sheen on me and the cab, and the wipers are going, and the man is gone. “Motherfucker,” I exhale. I wave at the cabdriver. I mouth thanks. He doesn’t know why I’m thanking him. He honks again.
Six more blocks and I’m home. I run the whole way. We live in a tall apartment building, no doorman, pretty clean, and, most important, rent-stabilized. It was my father’s place first, and his aunt’s before that. “It was the best thing I got out of this marriage,” my mother was fond of saying, ignoring the fact that, hey, there were two kids who came out of it, too. It has a dining room and a small sunken living room with two big windows so the room is bright during the day. The kitchen has a black-and-white-tile floor and pots and pans hanging everywhere from hooks my father installed and a radiator that steams up the window. There are three bedrooms, each with its own closet, and windows facing a back alley, and also there is one bathroom with pink tiles and an enormous claw-foot bathtub, where I take long baths after school every day and read. Even though we have no money, this apartment makes us rich, because we were not crawling all over each other like a lot of other people in New York City, not to mention the rest of world where people live in huts and tents or nowhere in particular at all. A door you can close for privacy and sunlight sneaking through a back alley: forget it, we were millionaires.