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Do This In Memory Of Me A
YOUNG-ADULT NOVEL EXCERPT Anticipated
publication date: April 2008 © Lee Harrington 1999 Here's our history. If knowing who we were then will give you a
better sense of who we are now then here's our history. If knowing when things went wrong is
important to you, if being able to trace things back to some road less
traveled, the roads we traveled, then here's our history. But I'm telling you, history doesn't repeat
itself. It can't, unless people and
situations stay exactly the same.
History doesn't repeat itself so much as it echoes. Our past is a sound wave getting fainter and
fainter as more time goes by. Sometimes
I can barely hear it. The
six of us--Scott, Tenny, Bailey, Roll Bar, Wally and I--met on move-in day at
Darlington Hall, a low-rise dorm famous for keg parties, co-ed bathrooms, and
guy who sold mushrooms in Room Seventeen.
Fresh out of high school, the banners of popularity waved high in our
minds, and we were ravenous for quick, new friends. Tenny was my roommate, Bailey and Roll Bar
(good friends from high school) lived across the hall, and exotic Scott, by
some glitch of the computer, was assigned to live with Wally right next door. Within days of our meeting, our life stories
had been exchanged, our strengths and weaknesses defined, and the six-cornered
foundation of a new clique was set.
Tenny was the beautiful one, Wally--there on scholarship--was the
intellect and Roll Bar was the rude, crude, he-man with a patented series of
grunts and belches he could substitute for words. Scott, with her quick retorts and her George
Elliot T-shirts, was our token feminist and Bailey, if he could be categorized
at all, was simply our nucleus, our patriarch, that live-for-the-moment person
we all secretly wanted to be, or at least be near. I, by process of elimination, became the
artsy one, the painting major, the eternal wearer of black. As a freshman I wasn't sure who I
was, or more specifically, who I wanted to be, but I saw in those first
what's-your-major-where-are-you-from conversations an opportunity to recreate
myself, a chance to become all that I was not.
Up to that point I had been your basic awkward red-head--a friendless,
motherless, chinos-and-Izod--wearing product of a Catholic school--whose father
was a stern and imposing Episcopal priest. I was so shy and quiet my neck had a
permanent crease in it from my looking down all the time, and my voice was
perpetually unrehearsed. To top that I
was named Agnes, after Saint Agnes, one of those beautiful young stoic virgins
who was burned at the stake by Romans because she wouldn't give up the
funk. It was the kind of name that
preceded me, just as my too-large breasts preceded me, and gave my schoolmates
first impressions of me that just weren't true.
Up until college my life had been a consistent and incontestable series
of no's. No kissing no gum chewing no
running in the halls. No friends allowed
to sleep over and no by God no sleeping over anyone else's house. No touching no looking down there don't even
think about thinking about a boy. No
dating no makeup no bra until you're sixteen, even if you are fully developed
at twelve. No skirts above the knee no
wrinkles in those skirts don't even think of how wrinkled your father's scrotum
was that time you accidentally saw it, when you were sneaking into his room to
look at pictures of your mother and he was snoring, naked, on the bed. If you can't do it in my presence, my father
and the nuns seemed to say, then you shouldn't be doing it at all. Bailey had the opposite
opinion. Instead of saying no to
trouble, he said yes. For Halloween he
liked to dress up as Molly Bloom and wander through keg parties in laced boots
and a frock, as he called it, reciting yes, I said, yes yes
yes. But that alone does not
characterize Jay Bailey. Bailey was an
incurable prankster, who spent as much time masterminding how to sneak buckets
of squid into the bursar's office as Wally spent on his textbooks--which was
hours. He'd rise at dawn to put dish
soap in the public fountains, fill our shampoo bottles with Golden Bear honey,
and stay up until three in order to wire our speakers to his stereo. Then, at six or so, he'd blast
"Swamp" into our bedroom as a wake-up call, or perhaps "Burning
Down the House." No one actually
saw Bailey carrying out these pranks of his, because he was the sort of person
who never got caught, but we knew from the smile on his face as he rode his
skateboard down the hallway, or winked at us outside the bathroom door before
we took our showers, that he was responsible.
It was all in the smile. Jay
Bailey had the sort of handsome, conniving, irresistible smile that on a second
look said he thoroughly amused himself and would not hesitate to do so at your
expense. Bailey used this smile to charm
the cafeteria ladies, to cajole our poor R.A. into letting us keep kegs in the
bathtubs and, later, to seduce hoards of women, who couldn't have known that
seduction, to Bailey, was also a prank.
Except, of course, in Scott's case.
In high school Scott had been on the
fencing team and on bad days she could cut you to shreds with her tongue. Hers was any icy beauty, slick and precise,
and she had a low voice that made you think of smoke and jazz and the color
blue. She was tall and
lean--five-eleven, like Tenny--but her gestures were quick and masculine. At volleyball she played the net and had the
ability to smash volleys straight at your scalp. To me she was a little intimidating, but at
the same time there was something distant about her, something dark and
unknowable, that made us want to please her all the more. Scott had not one but two majors: World
History and Women’s' Studies, and when she studied her naturally plump red
mouth tightened itself into a thin pale line, the line of a serious
contender. Scott was a Palmer, a Boston Palmer,
as in Palmer Confections, whose exquisitely detailed tins were almost as famous
as the powdered candies themselves. By
the time we all met, everyone's grandmother had a collection of Palmer tins, in
which they stored paper clips, safety pins, extra buttons and the like. "My mother kept my baby teeth in
them," Bailey said when we first got on the subject. "I'll have her bring the tin up and show
you." "No thanks," Scott
said, looking at him strangely.
"That would kind of gross me out." Once a month, Scott’s father would FedEx a
case of candies, most of which never made it into our mouths. Bailey would pitch sour balls at moving
targets and Roll Bar would see how many Apricot Dandies he could stuff in his
nose. Tenny and I found them in our
lingerie drawers, inside the cups of our bras.
"Think of them as sachets," Scott would say, and shrug,
refusing to give those boys the expected reaction of horror. Then she'd crunch the candy, because Scott
could never wait for anything to just dissolve. Tenny. The first thing anyone ever noticed about my
roommate was her beauty: the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the leonine neck, the
model-quality legs. She had a face that
seemed carved out of ivory, by a man who was in love with her, in love with the
world, and in love with his love. Bailey
always said Tenny was beauty personified; a feel-good movie he would call her,
because not only was she physically perfect; her thoughts were always sunny and
her life was paved with gold. One look
at Tenny and people believed there was goodness in the world, that there was
justice and truth. In her presence, people
smiled more often and spoke kind words. As her roommate, I always had the
advantage of being closer to Tenny, of witnessing her small daily miracles
first-hand, and I cherished this privilege.
I loved waking up every morning to witness her excitement, to feel with
her the promise of a new day. I loved
the fact that she found me interesting, that, after a week or so of living
together, she hugged me warmly and declared me her "new best
friend." She told me I was nice,
pretty, considerate, caring, smart! I
loved how many heads turned when we walked through the dining commons. I loved it when Roll Bar said, "Hot babe
alert!" when we came down the hall.
I allowed myself to believe that just by being around Tenny meant that
some of her beauty was rubbing off on me. Tenny was extremely close to her
family--a fact that intrigued and astounded all of us. We were eighteen! Of course we still had issues with our
parents; of course we still smarted from their far-reaching assertions of
authority. But not my roommate. Her father taught at McCauley and her mother
appeared on talk shows on daytime TV.
She saw them, at least from a distance, every day. I'd see them, too: Big Bill, the tall English
professor, the renowned Fitzgerald scholar, who had named his five daughters
after characters from his favorite F. Scott books, strolling across campus
surrounded by students and smoking his signature cherry pipe. And Madeleine, Tenny's mother, the peppy
psychiatrist, whom we'd watch every afternoon at four, first as the invited
"expert" on minor talk shows, commenting on eating disorders or why
men cheat, and then with a show of her own.
Madeleine! was the name of the show, complete with exclamation
point, written in a pink neon script.
Big Bill and Madeleine always treated the six of us like family,
extending an open invitation to visit them any time whether we were with their
daughter or not. "Here, take some money,” Tenny
said when her mother gave her cash to buy clothes. Her mother gave us books, record albums, skin
creams, all promo items from people anxious to get on her show. Tenny called her mother "our
mother"--meaning her and me--and any package sent was sent to us. I belonged to a family in a way I had never
known. In a way that felt real and
glorious. On Sundays she'd drag me to their
house for dinner, where she would share with them stories of exploits that I
could never, ever tell my own father. He
wouldn't have even wanted me to witness such antics on TV. He would have called it shameful,
pornography. But Tenny's father roared
with laughter as she told him, say, that she got so drunk last night she
returned to the wrong dorm room after a trip to the bathroom to puke, and ended
up crawling naked on top of Roll Bar. "Oh, my, goodness," Bill
would say, holding his stomach.
"And then what?" "I fell asleep," Tenny
said. "We laughed about it in the
morning." Each morning Tenny slept through two
alarm clocks and then skipped afternoon classes to work on her tan. She loved Dynasty and MTV, loved to watch day
time soap operas in her fluffy pink robe, and loved, when she was a film major,
to bring out her little Super-8 camera and make us pretend we were making a
video for Duran Duran. Because of these
loves she was constantly late in handing in her papers and mid-term projects
and such, but still she got A's in all her courses, because hers was the kind
of beauty that made people want to give her things. Bus drivers waved her through turnstiles and
bartenders gave her free Greyhounds--and little napkins with their phone numbers
on it, which she used to blot her lipstick in the bathroom mirror, or wrap up
her stale gum. "Girls like you have
got it made," Roll Bar would say as Tenny came home with six
tickets to a Clash concert that was technically sold out. "All you have to do is stand there and
let the world worship your ass." Tenny got a true kick out of life,
and within the first four months of college she changed her major about seven
times. Back then a lot of us declared
our majors as casually as we now order things from Kitsch's menu: we chose what
sounded good, what would please us at the moment, knowing that if we didn't
like it we could always send it back, or order something different the next
time around. Our parents were paying,
after all. And Tenny greeted each new
subject with as much enthusiasm as she had the last. "I had so much fun as a French
major," she would say, thumbing once again through the dog-eared course
catalog. "Do you think Italian
would be good?" To Tenny college
was an enormous salad bar, an all-you-can-eat buffet, and she had the
fearlessness and the metabolism to consume it all. Roll Bar's real name was
Gunter. This name came not because of
any Nordic ancestry, but because his daughter-of-an-ambassador mother wanted
her children to have exotic-sounding names.
He had two brothers named Ivan and Ricardo and three sisters named Maya,
Towanda and Albertine. "I thought
it would make them think twice about privilege and stereotypes," she told
me once at a Parent's Weekend. But Roll
Bar wasn't the type to think twice. He
barely thought once. In high school, Roll Bar had been a football
star and he carried himself as though he were always waiting for a band to play
and the crowd to break out in a wave. At
six-foot-four, Roll Bar had huge shoulders, well-defined biceps and the largest
hands we had ever seen; an indicator, he liked to remind us, of the gargantuan
size of his hog. He was handsome from a
distance but merely interesting-looking up close, because his teeth were
crooked and his nose had been bent to the right in the roll bar accident, but
he walked with the confidence of a man who is assured a position in his
father's chemical company, "provided you buckle your ass down and goddamn
graduate," his father had said. Meanwhile,
Roll Bar rarely attended any of his chemical engineering classes, but his
primary interests seemed to be drinking, cat-calling, and lifting weights. Our gentle giant, we called him. Around the boys, his oaf qualities came out
of him, but with us he was thoughtful, he listened, he gave surprisingly
articulate advice. And his eyes were so
blue and mesmerizing and his eyelashes so uncannily long, we forgave him a lot
of things: his habit of making us stop conversations to listen to him fart, his
eloquence when it came to talking about "chicks," and the fact that
he wore his varsity football jacket well into senior year. "Give it up," Wally would finally
say at graduation. "I think it's
safe to say the chicks just aren't impressed." Wally, our token scholar, edited the
school newspaper, presided over the computer club and, later, would graduate
top of our class. He carried his
intelligence in the same way Tenny carried her beauty, that is, he seemed only
half-aware that he was blessed. When he
wasn't studying or reading Sartre for pleasure, Wally could be found watching
Monty Python re-runs, smoking pot (to slow down his brain, he always
explained), or catering to Scott, to whom he was devoted in a suspiciously
fraternal way. Without his glasses
Wally was boyishly handsome, but he seemed not to be aware of this, because
without his glasses he was also as blind as a bat. He had that messy-haired, distracted look
usually found master chess players and computer CEO's, and he refused to wear
anything but a green pair of khakis and a white oxford shirts. Wally owned twelve of each, which he would
wear with a Brooks Brothers belt and a pair of worn leather loafers. Every two weeks or so he would drive to
Laundro Express and zip through a volume of Proust in the time it took the
Laundro Express ladies to wash and iron his clothes. Wally's genius--and his long, lanky body--was
fueled entirely by Hostess products and thick, black coffee, which he would
steal from the dining commons in a large Pyrex thermos he kept hidden in his
bag. "We have a coffee maker,"
I would tell him as we left the dining commons with the thermos plus twelve
tuna sandwiches for a late-night snack.
"You don't have to steal it if you don't want." "Stolen foodstuffs,"
Bailey would say, sticking his face close to mine. "Always taste better than those
legitimately purchased. Don't tell me
you didn't know that." There was a lot I didn't know, at
eighteen. But I was willing to
learn. First, I became an art
major. Doing that, becoming an art
major, was easy. It would take me years
to realize that talent was only a small part of being an artist--you had to
have vision and steel--toed determination and someone like Jay Bailey in your
past to douse your raw heart with gasoline and set it on fire. Then, and only then, could you be a real
artist. But in the meantime, in the easy
years of college, I got myself accepted into the Fine Arts program, proved to
have enough technical talent to earn myself a scholarship the following year,
and spent many a day painting sweet, proper things--flowers and landscapes and
women drinking tea in sunny backyards.
I learned how to rip strategic holes in my jeans, how to lean
disdainfully over my morning cup of espresso, as if it pained me to do
something so common as to breathe this bourgeois air, and even how to smoke
Galouises, the red kind, the kind that make you choke if you don't inhale with
expertise. "You smoke?" Scott
had said on move-in day. The six of us
were gathered in the Darlington Hall lounge, a strategically ugly room with a
coarse brown rug, concrete walls, and bright orange furniture of the wood and
vinyl school that seemed to have been built for the specific purpose of
discomfort. We had left our childhoods
only hours earlier, and already we seemed determined to do everything and
anything forbidden us under our parents' roofs.
For years I would get that kind of
response when people met me. You
smoke? You drink? You give blow jobs and even swallow? It was my face, I guess. And my sundresses and the white skin. The freckles.
If I did these things than everyone's little sister did these things too
and the world had gone to pot. You
have HIV? Scott looked me up and down that day
the way she would always look at me: as if suspect that someone of my
countenance could exist. Her face was
all angles and her eyes blazed with confidence.
She seemed to have already done everything worth doing by the time she
was twelve. "You don't look like a
smoker." She peeled the silent cellophane from a pack of Marlboros and
tapped one out. "You look like one
of those Amish people who make their own clothing and never drink
Coke." She lit a cigarette, leaned
back, and blew a perfect smoke ring with her perfect red lips. "In a good way, of course." "I'm the girl who lit the wrong
end the first time I tried one and laminated my lungs," Tenny said. "I smoke sometimes," I said,
lying. "We used to steal Virginia
Slims from my neighbor's mom." But
as I leaned forward to take the cigarette Scott offered the vinyl stuck to my
thighs like adhesive. Or like a
conscience trying to hold me back. "So did we," Bailey said,
taking the lighter from Scott's hands.
"Me and Roll Bar. Used to
steal Virginia Slims from his mom!" He snapped the Bic quickly and a
flame appeared a flame which he held out to me.
Boldly, I looked into Bailey's eyes for the official first time. He seemed unscarred by the past, not in the
least bit afraid of his future, and fully convinced that he would never get
punished for anything he did on the present day. "Madame?" he said. I held the cigarette in my
palm. It felt harmlessly light,
benevolent even, and I closed my eyes and leaned toward Bailey's flame. That first breath of smoke choked me, a shock
of foul forest-tasting smog, but I coughed in what I hoped was an artsy
way. "That's darling," Bailey
said, and a new me was born. Back in college, everyone had a
nickname and if you didn't--say you were visiting for the weekend--Jay Bailey
would give you one. My full nickname was
My Darling Clementine, shortened to just plain Darling or Darley by our junior
year. And Tenny was so named because she
was A Perfect Ten. In those days being
merely pretty carried little weight--you had to have full curves, blonde hair,
and legs so long they wouldn't fit underneath the dining hall tables to be
called a perfect ten. Scott wouldn't
let us give her a goddamn nickname, but secretly Bailey called her Pap, as in
Pap smear, as in the first initials of her full name: Prescott Arden Palmer the
Second. Seriously. Scott was named after her Dad. Wally's real nickname was Wall Street,
because of the journal he read daily and because of that fact that, at
eighteen, he already knew exactly what he wanted to do, which was to major in
finance, spend each summer at his uncle's brokerage in Newly
christened, we became like super-heroes, each of us capable of our own
cartoonish feats. My job was to point
out the visual possibilities of all our antics.
I drew quick caricatures in salt on the dining hall tables, painted
exquisite graffiti on the elevator walls.
Tenny's job was to gain us entrance.
Scott made sure we took no shit.
As a group we were indestructible.
Individually, too, we fed off each other's super-human powers. Backed by Tenny's beauty, Scott's
fearlessness, and Wally's brain, I became invincible, more powerful than I
could ever have been on my own. Darley. By that name, I used to think, I would be
invoked by all generations to come. By the end of the first week at our
large state college, we were eating our meals together, studying for tests
together, even brushing our teeth together, twice a day, side by side. As an only child, I had never experienced
this kind of closeness before, especially with boys, and I felt more alive and
justified than I ever had in my life. To
speak in the first person plural!
Tenny's unconditional fondness, Scott's playful bantering, Bailey's
chummy good night kisses after we had all brushed our teeth were proof to me
that I was acceptable. That I, St. Agnes,
was well-liked. I loved the fact that
there, in the small but limitless world of our dorm, the six of us became woven
so tightly into one another' lives that most private details--from Bailey's
third nipple to Scott's menstrual cramps--became common knowledge within
weeks. We learned that Tenny liked to
put oatmeal masks on her face every evening.
We learned that Wally had a stomach problem and was addicted to Tums. From Roll Bar we learned never to use the
bathroom at "Nothing?" Roll Bar
said. The six of us were gathered in
Bailey and Roll Bar's room on what was our first official weekend of college,
waiting for someone to decide what to do.
I remember being thrilled to be part of something, even if that
something was indecision. It was warm
that night and with the windows open we could hear the sounds of a simmering
fall campus waiting to boil. Ten
separate stereos played ten separate songs, a group of girls' laughter rose and
fell like the flight of a bird, and from somewhere close by I heard the snap,
hiss and curl of a beer can tap. "You never stole a Butterfinger
from Woolworth's?" Roll Bar
said. "Never accidentally kill a
rabbit with a lawn mower?" I shook my head no. The maleness of that room was exciting to me
in a foreign way. There were football
trophies and girlie posters and a huge world map, and it even smelled what I
assumed to be masculine, as if their clothes and bedspreads had been balled up
in a basement somewhere for a period of months. "Never cheated on a test at
school?" Wally said. "Or even
at cards?" "So I take it you never puked in
the girl’s room at school dances?" Bailey said. "I
never drank." All eyes were on me. My face at that point was the color of the
bombardment ball Bailey was tossing back and forth in his hands. I shrugged and laughed. "The opportunity didn't present itself
much, unless you include the Blood of Christ." Tenny looked up from her toenails,
which she was painting Heartbreak Red.
"Blood of Christ sounds so disgusting." She was sitting at the foot of Bailey's bed
in her pink frilly nightgown, which she would always wear until about an hour
before we went out. "The first
drink I ever drank was green vodka. My
sister Zelda sneaked it out of our father's liquor cabinets in a Scope bottle,
so to disguise it better she colored it green." I looked out the window in time to
see a pair of underwear float by. Or
perhaps it was a plastic bag. I imagined
it would continue its formless flight until it got snagged on a tree. Scott handed me a cigarette. "What about spin the bottle?" she
said. "Did you play that at those
junior high school parties?" "She wasn't allowed to go to
parties," Tenny said, patting the top of my head. "We wish we had known each other in high
school, because I'm the girl whose parents let everyone come to our house. They thought it was better for us to drink in
front of them than out on the streets.
Like "Well, with a body like
that," Scott said, pointing at my breasts with her lighter. "I can understand why your father didn't
want you going out of the house. Ooh la
la." Feeling my face turn red, I tried to
slouch so that my body was somewhat hidden. "Can't hide the fact that
you're a brick house, Darl," Roll Bar said. "Weren't you bored?"
Bailey said. "Always staying out of
trouble like that?" "I guess. But I didn't think I
was missing out in anything. No one at
my school went out." Bailey stood. "There's only one thing to do
here." He set the needle onto Side
One of Tattoo You and held his body still until the needle grabbed
"Start Me Up." Then he
air-guitared his way across the room.
"Let's get hammered." I felt the music move through my
body like foreboding and true goosebumps rose on my skin. "How are you going to get alcohol?"
I said with a thrill in my voice. "I know where we can find a
bottle of vodka," Bailey said.
"Plus two cases of beer." Of course Bailey had vodka. He seemed to have anything anyone ever needed
at anytime. He announced that we were
going to play quarters and led us all to the lounge. We followed him like disciples, and sat where
he instructed us at the wooden lounge table: me, Roll Bar, Scott, Wally, Tenny,
then Bailey at my right. For the rest of
our years together we would sit like this--in the dining commons, at "Darling has to go first, since
this is her initiation," he said, handing me a quarter, and as I took the
coin, warm from his palm, I had the sensation that my life was about to change. Bailey taught me the complicated
rules of quarters--bounce it into the glass, point at someone to drink, bounce
again--and he also taught me how to drink. That is, how to drink to get
drunk. Vodka, he explained--showing me
how to bounce the quarter on the flat part, not the edge--was stronger that
Lowenbrau and it went to your head quicker if you pounded it with something
fizzy, or drank it through a straw. If
you don't really want to taste the vodka, he said, clinking the quarter into
the glass, you aim for the back of your throat.
"Now, pound that liquid." He fished the quarter out with his
fingers and handed me a shot. I sipped
the vodka and shuddered. Drinking
something so vile seemed to me a brave thing, something arrogant and adult, so
I stuck my pinky out and downed it.
Everyone clapped. I felt oddly
alive as the vodka singed my insides, as if I'd received an electric shock. "I still don't feel drunk, though,"
I said a few drinks later, straightening up importantly in my chair. "Wait until you try to
stand," Tenny said. She wiped the
quarter on a tissue before bouncing it.
"You really have to be careful, Darl." Later she would gets her words crossed and
tell me to be dareful, Carl. She was right, of course. But in the meantime, I continued to
drink. We joked, laughed, exchanged
stories, smoked cigarettes, sent the quarters glass around and around. Hours passed, the sun set, and the more I
drank the more, it seemed, I became the center of attention. The world got smaller until it was only us,
there in that room. At some point our
game changed from quarters to some form of "I Never," in which they
all wanted to know what kind of bad things I hadn't done. Have you ever snuck out of the house, Scott
wanted to know. Stolen money from your
folks, Roll Bar asked. No, no, no, I
kept answering as the eternal quarter clinked.
For the first time in my life, I felt truly interesting, and would have
told them anything at that point, just to see them smile. I told them stories of nuns, saints, masses,
familiar things to me that, for some reason, made the others laugh. "Are you religious?" Scott
said. "Not really," I said. "I believe in God, I think. But I've never really thought that hard about
it. It's just what I've been
taught." "I'm not religious," Scott
said. She tried to raise a beer bottle
to her lips but smacked it into her chin.
"I think Catholicism sucks." "From now on," Bailey
said. "Our religion is
booze." And he poured us all
champagne. How and when the champagne
got there I couldn't be sure. All I know
is that with every glass I drank, the scene seemed to expand before my eyes
into something significant and profound.
As the hours passed and we somehow and segue-wayed from champagne to
peach schnapps, I realized that every person in that room was somehow
connected--directly and elementally--to my life! These were my friends! I loved them so much. We had so much in common--we were college
freshmen!-and I was so happy to be in this room. I watched their faces, listened to their
laughter, saw how the lights from the quad outside gave the room an unearthly
yellow glow. David Bowie's “Golden Years”
played in the background like our own personal soundtrack, and as I looked
around it seemed our movements were choreographed to the beat. Tenny's flash of smile. Roll Bar crushing a can with his fist. Scott throwing her head back to laugh. So beautiful.
Wally lighting a bowl. I found
myself becoming strangely sentimental, for this moment, for my new friends, and
I told myself to concentrate on the song, the smells, the voices of my friends,
whom I loved so, so much. It was the
first time I experienced to motion of missing the people who were still in the
room. Bailey left the lounge. To drain the dragon or something stupid like
that. See a man about a horse. The door seemed to yawn shut behind him, as
if the entire room would now be bored.
I put my head down, just for a minute, until he came back. "Darley, did you hear me?"
Bailey said, and I looked at him, he was back! and I realized he was the love,
love, love of my life. "I said, are
you all right?" "Yes," I said. "Why?" Then, of course, my insides contracted two or
three times and I vomited, before I even knew what was going to happen. The minute someone calls attention to the
state of your stomach like that, you're bound to puke. Perhaps Bailey knew. In any case, I puked all over Tenny's
slippers and part of Wally's day-seven pants.
Then Roll Bar, I'm told, slung me over his shoulder like Tarzan and
carried me down the hall. I kind of
remember how long and bumpy that short journey felt, how I knew without opening
my eyes that he had taken the first door to the bathroom and then carried me
past the shower stalls. I remember
smelling Tenny's Yardley English Lavender and I feeling a crusty shower curtain
brush against my face. We turned right
past the sinks and past the row of brightly lit mirrors and then I was being
lowered gently toward a toilet until its cold seat pressed against my
face. Strands of hair were stuck to my
chin and I wanted to wipe them off but couldn't; my hand seemed too heavy and
too foreign to lift. "Stop eating
your hair," Bailey whispered, close to my face. He brushed the hair from my face with his nose. God knows how long he had been there, and
where Roll Bar had gone, but I realized it was Bailey's hands that were holding
me up. I vomited one last time, then let
my body go slack, or rather slacker, and asked Bailey to take me to my
room. He told me to put my arms around
his neck and he carried me like that in his arms. I had to keep my eyes closed because opening
them made me feel terribly dizzy, but I swear I could feel Bailey smiling at
me, that smile. There was talk as he
carried me across the threshold and placed me carefully on the bed. Muffled, soothing voices, his voice, words I
didn't understand, and I felt like a baby, pre-language, soothed by just a
sound. He pulled the covers over me,
tucked me in. Then I think he kissed my
head. When I woke up in the morning, with
my memory fuzzy and my throat boiled raw from bile, I felt something had
changed significantly. I saw it in the
way Scott brought me a cup of hot echinacea tea in the morning, in the way Roll
Bar tried to snap at me in the showers with his towel. I was one of them now. And through them, with them, and in them I
had entered a new zone of experience from which I could never turn back. |