Kira Yustak (I love this artist)

www.kirayustak.com
http://www.etsy.com/shop/kirayustak

Brer Rabbit Acrylic on Canvas, 20"x16"

Talking Elephants Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 30"

Chatter Phone Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 16"

Seahorses

Tenderfoot

images from Mikey and Nicky (1976) by Elaine May

Hey tenderfoot

You are kaput

Why don’t you sign on the dotted line?

Why don’t you sign on a valentine?

I have a hunch you laugh a bunch

And then you cry when the party’s through

Hey tenderfoot

Do you think it’s cool

That the night is always night

And the day is always day?

unstuck in time again

I’m always mentioning on here how I try to make dead things from my past (dead people, friendships, places) come back to life by researching them online.  Well I spent hours trying to use Google maps to get an aerial view of a house of a friend of my mom’s that she doesn’t know anymore.  This man was a packrat, but if you have to be one, he was a pretty good one – his floors were littered with money and old paperback books of Peanuts cartoons, his favorite, and also weir things like that Snoopy Sno-Cone maker from the 1980’s that many of us my age may remember.  This packrat indoors was cool in its way but I’m way too used to packrat environs to be interested in all the half-buried treasure trash for long, but he lived in a pretty neighborhood, and his back yard was absolutely one of a kind.  Hidden in the overgrown grass was some of the most beautiful tilework I’ve ever seen.  I had a suspicion that some famous tile person must’ve made and laid these tiles him/herself they were so lovely.  I can’t go back to that house but I thought if I spent long enough on the computer, I could find a picture of it, at least, but no dice. 

However, I did find a current picture of the Glendale bungalow where the ghost that leads me, Bill Tunilla, used to live, also from google maps, and I’ll share it here.  I remember one time when I parked in the lot to the side of the bungalow, I walked past his bedroom window to get to courtyard and his front yard, and I heard him say “Hi Robin,” and, straining to see through the window screen, I saw him laying in bed, reading a novel, maybe Saul Bellow or Barbara Pym, with his cat laying down with him, and I just loved him so much then.  My mom told me a serial killer used to live at his apartment (after him) but I tried looking this up, and, nope.

Sketches by my wonderful friend Valerie

Alphabet of Good Words

Agatha Christie

Brave

Constellation

Doll

Elephant

Feather

Gown

Harry Potter

Incandescent

Jasper

Kangaroo

Lion

Message

Night

Ocean

Peacock

Queen

Robin

Shhh

Traveler

Umbrella

Vagina

Weather

Xylophone

Youth

Zodiac

umbrellas (from www.mortonsalt.com)

Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam

I wasn’t raised to be religious, but when I was a kid our local school district was very bad, so I did go to a private Christian school for 2 years.  My dad was assured by the principal that they wouldn’t manipulate me with religion, like that they don’t have primers that are about how you’ll go to hell if you don’t obey your teachers, and he told me to let him know if the teachers ever said anything manipulative along those lines, so I knew from the outset that I didn’t have to obey any of the religious principles, but I was really young, and this early exposure did turn me into a semi-religious, privately practicing Christian.  I prayed every night and when the house made a noise at the same time I was having a dirty thought, I thought it was Jesus warning me to stop.  Then one night when I was at dinner with the family in sixth grade, I got one of my occasional sinking feelings of depression, and this one was really strong, and I just knew that God and the afterlife weren’t real.  I telegraphed one last mental message to Jesus in case he was real, letting him know that I was through with him, and that’s the end of that.  But sometimes when I have panic attacks I get scared that God and the afterlife are real; it’s a really common theme that runs (and runs and runs, at top speed) through my mind during panic attacks, in fact.  One instance of this, in particular, stands out – I used to like Marilyn Manson, in a tongue in cheek way, in high school.  My real favorite music was Bikini Kill and David Bowie, so I was too cool for Marilyn Manson, who is after all a mainstream band, Satanism and all.  But I really hated Christianity in high school, so I appreciated the band’s stylized blasphemy.  One night, though, shortly before I was leaving for college, I had a really horrible half-awake panic attack, and the whole time, I was just fixated on how I’d been so wrong to listen to Marilyn Manson, and I was worried I was going to go crazy and kill myself from having listened to them so much.  My second notable hell-related freak-out happened on Monday.  Oh god, I had to go to the ER for a migraine again.  I try to always be very brave, but the pain of migraines is a pain I find completely unbearable, so while I always feel embarrassed and depressed about the state of my well-being when I end up going to the ER for a migraine, it’s happened more than once (twice for sure, but maybe as many as four times).  I usually get panic attacks when this happens.  I finally saw the film This is the End on Sunday, and it was hilarious.  It was about movie stars who aren’t transported to heaven when the rapture happens, and who consequentially are witness to the flood, fires and demons that destroy the world.  The movie is very clearly irreligious, and I didn’t even think twice about it, like, it wasn’t titillating or naughty-feeling at all, because disbelief is much more common than belief, and while I could never be good friends with a Christian, I don’t hate religion anymore and am only slightly disdainful to neutral about Christianity.  The only reason I hated Christianity so much in high school is because all my bullies were heavy duty Christians.  But the stupid Christian hidden in the recesses where my soul would be if I had one must’ve been spooked by this movie, because as I had my Monday morning, pre-ER, migraine-fueled, diarrhea and vomit-filled, death-scared panic attack, I kept thinking of the movie and feeling certain that there really is going to be a day of reckoning soon, and duh, I would definitely be going to hell.  Just last week I ran over and broke the hazard cones a tree-trimming company had set up in the road, very much on purpose, making eye contact with the trimmers all the while, because I was pissed off that they were parked so dangerously and were making me drive on the wrong side of a narrow street around a blind corner.  Yes, of course I’m right, but only a stone-cold sinner acts on her urges like that.  Anyway, that movie and my guilt over having liked it and my fear of the rapture were weird and constant thoughts I had all Monday morning.

On a side note, lately I wonder more and more what life is like in a small town as opposed to the big city I was born and raised in.  I always assume that, wherever I am, anything goes and nothing is shocking.  This is often a good life to have, but sometimes I think, “Does anything leave an impression on anyone anymore?”  That’s what I was thinking in the ER, which is always a really devil-may-care environment in my experience of Los Angeles and Philly emergency rooms, having never been to one in some small town in the Midwest.  On Monday’s visit to the hospital, there was a drunk guy who kept threatening violence, and going to the bathroom to throw up, and then on the way back from the bathroom, standing like 3 feet from my bed, silently watching me, in full view of the nurse and security guard on duty, and they didn’t seem to notice or, if so, to be bothered.  For my own part, I pretended to be asleep whenever he did this.  Part of me knew he’d be drawn to me the second I started hearing him bellow.  Another weird thing is that there was an emergency button on the wall right outside where my hospital bed was, and apparently it had stopped working, so like 3 electricians crowded into the space where I was holed away crying and closing my eyes, and they were just pressing on this button that makes a siren noise over and over again, and talking as loud as possible, with me right there.  Are there just too many people in L.A. to start caring about strangers?  I started trying to desensitize myself to everything at a very young age, because the world is a bizarrely dangerous place, but maybe I’m actually deficient in de-sensitivity?  I do cry every time I watch a Harry Potter movie (aka once a day) but I’d always chalked that up to craziness.      

me

jesus

Harry Potter

CLOSETS AND MEDICINE CABINETS

Kelli

Margaret

Nick

Jon

Robin

 

two of my heroes

elizabeth cotten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm5-WdB_aVE

Pawn my watch

Pawn my chain

Pawn everything that was in my name

Oh, lordy me

Didn't I shake sugaree?

Everything I got is done and pawned

Everything I got is done and pawned

Karen Dalton

You've got me feeling again
The feeling you gave me before
But to you those nights like any other night
Tonight is just one more
Just one more night makes no difference
As long as there's another night
To make right what you did wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oRJyffGdIY

Zine Fest

Hi!  I haven't had much time for this blog because I've been insanely busy being the woman who has it all, but also I've been focusing on preparing some zine and craft wares from my partner in crime's booth at the upcoming SF Zine Fest:

http://www.sfzinefest.org/exhibitors/

The booth is called Gypsy Tart.  She will of course be offering tons of breathtakingly revolutionary and beautiful wares, but the things of mine she'll be peddling are a few of my little yarn crafts, hard copies (meat space!) of a few issues of my old favorite sweetheart zines, and a BEST OF SWEETHEART REDUX (admittedly a slender volume, as I didn't feel I needed to include all my back and forth rages with unfair Etsy sellers and assholes who used the word "retard" in Facebook convos .... it doesn't really translate well on the printed page!).

P.S If you have no interest in zines, at least make an appearance to feast your eyes on this beautiful beautiful mermaid manning the booth.  what a pair of gams and a smile that won't quit.

foreboding

This world of ours appears to be 
separated by a slight and precarious 
margin of safety from a most 
singular and

unexpected danger.

(sir arthur conan doyle)

My Interview with Leon Bing

Leon Bing is a family friend I used to deeply idolize when I was a kid.  I was too young to know her biography or to have read any of her books, but what I admired about her was her artistic lifestyle, her cool house with the pretty knickknacks and her devil may care personality and beautiful clothes.  I managed to figure out Twitter well enough to get back in touch with her recently, and to ask for this great and enlightening interview, which includes the best beauty tip I’ve ever heard, a must-do for renegade girls! 

Ms. Bing is a model turned writer who worked with iconic fashion designer and gay activist Rudi Gernreich in the 1960’s, and later became a journalist for L.A. Weekly, before writing several critically acclaimed non-fiction books.  Much of her personal history is covered in her memoir, Swans and Pistols: Modeling, Motherhood, and Making It in the Me Generation, so our interview focuses more on preferences and inspirations.  

  

What were your favorite and least favorite things about modeling? 

Favorite thing about modeling:  getting the clothes I showed at a discounted price.  Oh – and my hourly rate, which was pretty damn good.  And, of course: being paid to show off.

Least favorite things:  Not very many.  I had a good career and I knew that was a lucky break.  Modeling, contrary to what many people think, is a fairly easy gig.  Show up on time.  Hope for a great dresser who will get you out on the runway on time and looking good.  Keep your hair well trimmed and clean and don’t gossip in the dressing room.

What were your favorite and least favorite things about the social scene of the 1960s?

I liked the fact that I could pretty much pick and choose socially, and since I’m not an avid party-goer, I mostly just hung with my friends.  I didn’t like when guys asked me out only because I was a model.  Those jerks never scored.

You are a strong, smart and successful woman – I am unsure if you’d consider yourself a feminist, now or in the 60’s, so instead of that term I’ll use “empowered,” and ask you this – what was it like to be an empowered woman in the 60’s in the fashion world? 

I don’t know if I was “empowered”, but I was treated very, very well when I was working in fashion in the 60’s.  I always felt respected both as a woman and as a model.

Do you have any story from your modeling and/or social career that you’d like to share that you think was just a perfect, crazy and typifying moment in time? 

No single moment.  But a couple of doozies show up in the memoir.  Well, more like shockers.

How do you feel about contemporary culture?  What are your favorite recent films, writers, bands, fashion designer? 

I’m okay with contemporary culture, even though I bitch a lot.  But then, I always did.  About my favorite films and writers, et al:  I have rather catholic tastes:  I very much like Hilary Mantel, Joan Didion, Antonia Fraser, Scott Turow, and David Sedaris.  I re-read Henry James often.  For films?  That’s a little tougher.  Lot of dreck out there lately.  The last movie I liked was The Iron Lady; Meryl Streep was great as Margaret Thatcher (whose ultra conservatism drove me nuts).  Just ordered the series House of Cards on Netflix. Saw the PBS version years ago and loved it.  For TV, although you didn’t ask:  I’ve seen every episode of The Sopranos more than twice, and  wept when James Gandolfini died.  I also like Breaking Bad.  Favorite bands:  Florence and the Machine, and everything Van Morrison has ever sung.  Fashion designer?  Three: the late, great Gernreich,  Armani and Donna Karan.  Great tailoring is as important as design.  But I pretty much live in beat-up 501’s, t-shirts, and boys’ pajama bottoms and wife-beaters when the weather is too damn hot.

What is your favorite book you’ve written and why?

Favorite book I’ve written is Do or Die.  Probably because A: it was the first book about the L.A. gangs, B: it’s never been out of print, and C: because it’s still relevant.

When you were interviewing members of the rival Los Angeles-based gangs the Bloods and the Crips, for your 1992 book Do or Die, did you ever come to feel completely at ease with those you spent time with on a regular basis?  Could you say you grew to genuinely like any of the gang members, and vice versa?  And did getting to know them have any impact on your ethical stances; for instance, were you 100% anti-violence until you saw how it can be a necessity for some people, or any ethical changes like that?

Yeah, I was at ease with the gang members (both Crips and Bloods) I interviewed and got to know.  I made some good friends and am still in touch with some of the guys. One just got married to the sweetest girl; he’s been in prison for nearly twenty years (sentenced at 18) and I love him like a son.  He’s up for parole soon, and we’re hoping...

What gave you the idea for your book Smoked:  About the Kids Next Door?  Did it start with a sociological interest in the lives of affluent youth, or did an interest in them grow from hearing their story in the news?

Smoked started out as an assignment from my editor (Bob Love) at Rolling Stone.  But then HarperCollins wanted it as a book.  I wish I’d done more research on that one; it could and should have been a better book.

Does your book Wrongful Death, A: One Child's Fatal Encounter with Public Health and Private Greed, about a young teen who commits suicide while supposedly being closely watched in a psychiatric facility, feel like an extension of the themes in Do or Die and Smoked?  I see a motif of youth in distress in all 3 books, for instance, and I wonder if this is a particular instance of yours?

I guess there is a theme of youth in distress in my first three books, but the real reason for writing A Wrongful Death was my outrage at corporate greed.  Christy Scheck’s tragic death while on a suicide watch in one of those for-profit psychiatric units was the heart of the story, and I extrapolated from there.

Did you enjoy working as a journalist for L.A. Weekly?  Do you read that publication, and if so, any thoughts?  (Personally, I’m really disappointed in the sloppiness of a lot of their blog journalists’ writing.  I used to love reading it when I was a teenager, but ever since a shockingly blasé treatment of journalist Lara Logan’s sexual assault at the hands of several Egyptian protesters during the time of Mubarak’s overthrow, I haven’t respected it as a paper anymore.)

I truly enjoyed (and was very lucky) to do my first pieces of journalism for the L.A. Weekly.  I had a brilliant editor --  Eric Mankin – and I worked with a great photographer,

Howard Rosenberg, who remains one of my closest friends.  There’s a whole chapter about breaking in as a writer in Swans and Pistols.

What are you working on these days?

I’m currently at work on a long piece about an ex-bullshark of a gangbanger who has turned his life around in a nearly unbelievable way. 

You’ve stayed so, so beautiful and glamorous.  Any fashion or beauty tips to pass along?

I don’t know about “beautiful and glamorous” (I’ll have to remember that the next time Gareth Seigel (my Mister for nearly 11 years: smart, gorgeous, and an extraordinary photographer and person who makes me pee my pants laughing) but my biggest beauty tip is NEVER use soap on your face and/or neck.  Just Lubriderm and a warm washcloth.  Filth would seem to be the answer here.  Filth, and a great sex life.

Any thoughts you’d like to leave us with?

I guess my parting shot would have to be this:  If you want something badly enough, then go after it with everything you’ve got.  Just make sure you can deliver the goods.

List for a Summer Friday

The Pretenders' Brass in Pocket

I try to approximate the time travel Billy Pilgrim is able to effortlessly accomplish in Slaughterhouse 5 by researching every facet of my memories on the internet.  If I suddenly remember that for a long time I saved a postcard of cats dressed as people in a box of special things for years and years, I look up “postcards cats as people” and voila, now I know that what I’m remembering is a postcard  by Alfred Mainzer.  Three shadows from my past are coming to mind, however, as unsolvable mysteries that I can never find adequate online information about, at this is them:

Nardi’s Gay Bar in Pasadena, CA on Colorado Boulevard:  when my mom’s best friend Bill Tunilla was still alive and before his legendary used bookstore went out of business, I spent at least 3 hours a weekend sitting in the little area of collapsing, gray from filth wing chairs in the center of the store, encamped among stacks of books and magazines mom and me set aside to look through before they got shelved for sale.  Bill’s loyal customers always thought those chairs were there for them, that Bill, their god of cat/England/literature-loving bachelorhood put these chairs there because he loved talking to them so much, but HELLO!, those chairs were there for me and my mom, the queen and princess of Bill’s bookstore.  The 3 of us were outcasts, and as a little kid I thought of gay people as outcasts too, so I loved the fact that there was a gay bar next door to the bookstore, and I was endlessly pleased when I heard songs I liked (usually The Pretenders’ Brass in Pocket) coming through the wall from their juke box.  I only got to go in there a couple times and only for a few seconds each time.  It was eventually torn down.  But when?  I don’t remember, and this seems a very important fact for me.  I have so many dreams where Bill is still alive and we’re hanging out in an old version of Pasadena that no longer exists, often in his bookstore that was torn down along with Nardi’s, and the dreams feel so real but they are just dreams.  But if I could only find some cache of information about Nardi’s online, preferably a pictorial history of it, I would feel so much less frustrated by the fact that Bill can be so alive in my dreams and so dead in the waking present.

Little Nell:  Like many weirdos, I loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was a teenager, feeling that it was “my” movie, and getting excited when I noticed little things in it I’d never noticed before (“Wow, did you see that?  The people in the crowd at the wedding are the same actors who play Magenta, Riff Raff and Columbia!  Is that supposed to mean that they had their eye on Brad and Janet from the get-go and somehow orchestrated their flat tire so they’d have to end up at the castle?!  I wonder…”).  By far my favorite character was Columbia, played by a woman named Nell Campbell, called “Little Nell” in the film’s credits.  What would be my dream Rocky Horror minutiae to unearth some day while very bored and looking at stuff online?  Pictures and pictures and pictures of Little Nell in her day-to-day life as well as in her other film roles, and very many in-depth interviews with her about her dreams and aspirations.  But she has hardly any online presence.  The Wikipedia page about her has no photos, and when I type “Little Nell Campbell” on Google, it auto-completes to “Little Nell Dead?”  Shit, if she is dead, I want to see what her urn is an unusual shape and if Tim Curry did the eulogy.  But I never find any adequate information about her to sate my curiosity.

Michelle Johnson:  Michelle was one of the artsy adults I totally wanted to be like when I was a little kid.  She was a friend of my mom’s, and when I was a teenager, we hung out a few times without my mom, practically as peers.  Because her name is so common, I have a particularly hard time Googling her, because there are so many women with her name, even just living in the area she used to live in when I still knew her.  I have to be satisfied just wondering what she looks like or thinks like now, when I wake up from dreams in which she’d been a character.    

an Alfred Mainzer cat postcard

Little Nell as Columbia

This is the bookstore that expanded on Colorado Boulevard -- the owner owned the whole block and raised Bill's and Nardi's rents impossibly high so he could make them go out of business, and expand his store.  This is where retired CalTech and Occidental College professors go to buy $7 slices of carrot cake and Cafe Au Laits to sip while sitting in the coffee shop there, listening to Enya and looking over their recent purchases:  The new issues of the New Yorker and The Atlantic.  That's alright, but what about the outcasts?

Billy Pilgrim 

A Personal History of Tim Burton

Tim Burton

I have been thinking of Tim Burton today; he’s someone whose existence as a creative force I’ve taken for granted the past decade or so, and when I was a kid, like, since I saw Beetlejuice 3 times in theatres in 3^rd grade and then a ton more once it came out on VHS, he was really important to me, as a weirdo in the mainstream making movies for weirdos.  Now, you can spend 5 minutes on a search engine and find such cool merchandise that references the most seemingly obscure details from books and movies, but in the 80’s and 90’s when I was growing up, it was harder and more fun to find merchandise if you were an enthusiast like I was.  Like, to find really cool Sonic Youth stuff, I remember I wrote to the fan club that was promoted in the liner notes of a Sonic Youth cassette tape – weird!  and with Beetlejuice, which used to be me and my mom’s favorite movie, she sent away for a Warner  Brothers catalogue and we bought such cool merchandise from there, like a paper bookcover that looked like the book “Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” which I covered one of my text books with in 3^rd grade, and I would just look at it every time I opened up my desk and it made me feel like I was somewhere  far away from the shithole of a public school in a shithole part of L.A. that I lived in (aka The Valley) at the time.  And before Frankenweenie was an animated film, it was a live action short film (1984) that had this weird-looking girl named Domino in it; I LOVED that actress, and since I couldn’t just look her up on the internet, I would ask Gothic-looking adult friends of my mom’s if they knew who she was, like, “Have you ever heard of this little girl named Domino?”  Guess who she turned out to be?! – Sofia Coppola!  I only found that out recently, from a little invention called, you guessed it, the internet.  Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns were all among my very favorite films, and they are all Tim Burton creations.  Somewhere along the way he lost my appreciation though.  Some of it has to do with my feminism, and the fact that the romantic interests in his films are uniformly dreamy waifs:  Sally in Nightmare Before Christmas, Kim in Edward Scissorhands, Kathy O’Hara in Ed Wood, the first daughter in Mars Attacks!, Johanna Barker in Sweeney Todd, Katrina Van Tassel in Sleepy Hollow, Sandra Bloom in Big Fish, .  To some degree, this doesn’t bother me, because these female characters are all pretty lovable and great – I’d fall in love with Kim in a heartbeat if I were Edward Scissorhands, she’s beautiful and sweet.  But I loved that movie so much, and I especially loved it (I think I was in 7^th grade when it came out) as a romance, and I wanted to have a dramatic, tragic romance just like it, but if that meant I had to become like the Kim character, what did that mean? – that I had to be so pretty I outclassed the boy who loved me and therefore it was a heightened experience for him to win me?  That I had to be so pretty my boyfriend and my secret crush would both want me more than anything, and end up fighting over me?  That I had to be so pretty the boy I loved would pine for me forever?  There just wasn’t the meat there for me in that story line.  I don’t blame Tim Burton for this, because he’s a man, so yeah, it makes sense he’d be making films from a male perspective, and what did I expect, for the love interests to be prickly awkard-looking girls with short tempers who pretend they don’t want to be loved?  Well, yes, OF COURSE this is what I expected from him, but I recognize it as unreasonable.  I do remember feeling really sad once though because the boy I had a crush on said in front of our poetry class that the girl he had a crush on is Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas.  It was the 1990’s, the decade of the waif as a beauty ideal for girls, and it smarted to hear this boy, who I considered my equal in poetry genius (oh teenagers!) and thought would surely appreciate my angst for the way it matched his own angst, tell everyone that he wanted a sweet, patient girl like the zombie Sally. 

Then, also, I find Burton’s more recent movies obnoxious.  The Michael Jacksonesque Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the addition of the subplot of Wonka’s estranged dentist father, and the absurd rewrite of Alice in Wonderland in the eponymous movie (“Wonderland” is really “Underland”?  Hmmm…) are two examples that come to mind of a cutesy cleverness that made me feel almost embarrassed for Tim Burton when I saw these 2 films.  So now how it stands is that when Tim Burton is mentioned, I say “Oh, neat,” but I have really gotten used to him and never take special notice anymore.  I was just imagining what it would be like to be a teenager today, though, and I could imagine loving these dud movies of his and thinking of them as ‘my’ movies the way I used to think of Beetlejuice or the original Frankenweenie as being my movies.  Even if the girls in his movies are a little spineless, they are still unconventional, and if a teen today, I would probably find a way to admire the werewolf girl in Dark Shadows.  Tim Burton is a mainstream director who the mainstream lets be weird, and as a kid and teenager, I liked the specialness of underground or no-name movies (my other fave in 3^rd grade, besides Beetlejuice, was Babycakes, a made-for-tv movie mom taped on Valentine’s Day, starring a very fat and great Ricki Lake as an outgoing and lovelorn mortuary cosmetician), but I also felt the necessity for Tim Burton and his success, and his successful weird movies.  Today I feel that way about the mainstream but still special Wes Anderson.  I think of his movies as ‘mine’ even though there are unpoetic, unweird fashion photographers biting his aesthetic for fashion photo spreads in GQ etcetera (and I don’t think Anderson minds any of this, even if I do), and even though my favorite character, Margot Tenenbaum, is played by the same woman who puts out the ridiculous millionaire’s-club blog Goop and is this year’s PEOPLE Magazine Most Beautiful Woman.   

short fiction

REGRETS I'VE HAD A FEW

In second grade I was very unpopular.  My only friends were 2 kids I only saw afterschool when we waited together on the schoolyard for our respective rides home, and one of them was a girl who was nice to everyone, so her friendship was less of a prize.  The other friend was a kid named Jason, so blonde and freckled he was like the personification of a Beach Boys song; there was also a melancholy that clung to him like the better Beach Boys songs that Brian Wilson wrote when he got more ambitious and crazy, and this was because Jason was poor, usually wearing the same red t-shirt 5 days a week.  Oh god, he had a crush on me.  How sweet to have a crush on me, when everyone else made fun of me all day, calling me a Gaylord because I was overly affectionate with girls I admired and being such overly astute witnesses to all my little embarrassments, like the time I had to wear mom’s sagging underwear to school and everybody saw it when I sat down with my legs open.  Jason adored me.  He was sarcastic and affectionate and loyal.  But I thought girls got popular from being mean, and not mean from being popular, so I was mean to him, in hopes of winning more friends.  Then I went back to the same school for third grade and found out that he’d been hit by a car while riding his bike over the summer, and was killed.

Once I told a homeless man named Malik to wait outside of a 99 Cents Store for me, because I was going to bring him out some food and a pair of flip flops.  Then, while shopping, I got a phone call from a guy I liked who invited me to a happy hour at a nearby bar, and I only had a half hour to get there, so I left from a different exit than the one Malik stood by and walked along the other side of the store to get to my car, so I wouldn’t have to spend valuable minutes on him. 

In Junior High, I branded myself with a hanger crudely bent to spell “CUNT,” on the back of my neck, and it is still readable to this day.  I have had to keep my hair long all these years, and worn it loose covering my neck, even when it’s so hot outside I get a rash of little red bumps over the brownish-red, shiny lines of CUNT. 

Once, when my brother was talking to a boy he was in love with, I picked up the phone and yelled “Mark picks his nose and eats it!” and then hung up.  I thought I was just being funny.  Mark always laughs at things like that, even though I know they are just pity-laughs (he appreciates the chance to be charitable, though), but this boy, Jude, was really popular.  If he came out of the closet it was going to be especially for Mark, a pimply but handsome young punk rocker who was maybe or maybe not worth coming out of the closet for – Jude still wasn’t sure.  He just laughed and said “Oh my God!  You’re sister sounds as bad as my stepbrother!” when I did that.  But then, when they went on their first covert date, to a party thrown by college kids Jude knew from sneaking into The Coconut Teaszer all the time, they were about to kiss, standing alone together on a patio, on a warm summer night, the summer the cicadas were alive.  “He was going to kiss me, Laura.  ME.  He touched my elbow and I shivered!  It was going to be the best night of my life!” he’d tell me later that night, crying so much I was scared he was going to choke on his drool.  At the last minute, Jude burst out with a casual laugh and said “I’m sorry man, I just keep picturing you picking your nose.”  They never talked on the phone after that, or saw each other outside of school.  Jude’s first kiss was with a girl named Jacky and Mark’s was with the Algebra II teacher that everyone thought was so cool for letting kids screw around in class.

Once, forty years ago, when I was an old woman with long loose breasts and a short, prickly beard, I went back to my home town, back to the old 99 Cents Store I used to shop at as a vain, wild young woman.  It felt scary to be back somewhere that’d once been so familiar, so long ago.  It is how the Darling children would have felt if they were real and had somehow found their way back to Neverland.  I got off the bus, tucked my glasses into my bosom, and hobbled over to the side of the store where the recycling bin and the small homeless encampment had been, just for old time’s sake.  Oh god, oh horrible me, Malik was still there, ageless, waiting for me to come back with his food and his sandals.  

Alphabet of Girls