common.”
I hang out with Miranda in bars on Polk Street, watching her perform with drag queens. I meet a boy at her show, younger than me with a mohawk and a pretty face. He says he’s also a writer, a poet. On the side he does boy burlesque. I think he’s pretty, but if I were into men I would want someone stronger who could take care of me.
It’s Patti Smith night and the queens climb the stage in black wigs and torn jeans. They sing “Ain’t It Strange” and “Gloria,” snarling at the crowd and wondering whose sins Jesus died for. Miranda dances behind them in a short skirt, kicking her long brown legs high in the air while I watch from the crowd, holding her drink.
Miranda’s room is bright yellow with album covers stuck to the wall. Lene Lovich, Kate Bush, The Slits. She lectures me on music. I tell her she’s a snob. We sleep on a small mattress. She insists I sleep naked and I insist she keep her clothes on. She wraps around my back, her arm over my chest.
Her windows face the morning sun and the illegals stand on the corner just below the ledge waiting for someone with a van and a job to stop and put them to work. They stand there every day, in baseball caps, sweatshirts. Waiting. Miranda says they aren’t Mexicans; most of them are from Guatemala and El Salvador. I’ve been showing up at her place more and more often. I call from Valencia Street at the end of the day, just when I think she’s going to sleep.
Hans’ trial won’t start for two more months. I was in court when they scheduled the hearing. It was my second time at the sturdy building in downtown Oakland. Hans wore yellow prison fatigues and stood in the prisoner’s pen, holding two boxes of papers. I noticed his poor posture and thinning hair. He seemed naive, carrying the giant boxes and not understanding that the trial was actually months away.
“Tell me something nice,” I said to Miranda the night after the hearing. I was acting like a child and she wanted desperately to be an adult. “Tell me I’m pretty.”
“You are,” she whispered. “You’re so pretty.”
Our relationship is absurd, infantilizing. I’m eleven years older than her. She’s a vegan. She wears heels and keeps her sex toys on top of a beat-up dresser. She wants to dress me in women’s clothes and I tell her I don’t mind but I don’t really think we’ll get there. The sad thing is how our relationship mirrors all my other romances. Fragmented. Thin. Except that I’m getting worse. In my twenties I would have been too proud to beg a woman to hold me. I didn’t know enough to cry. I wouldn’t dream of pressing my nose against someone’s chest, saying, “I’m so sad. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” And I have less to give.
We don’t have sex. She has a girlfriend. And a boyfriend. She has many lovers. She keeps pictures of them on her desk, tapes their poems near the bed. She’s so beautiful and smooth, like a statue cut from cherry. But for some reason I don’t want to see her naked. Maybe she’s too young, or something else. I’m just lying in bed with her, trying to fit into her stomach and not making it. She gets up to go to work at four in the morning, pulling on her boots while the city is still pitch. I rise with the sound of trucks stopping. On the surface everything seems fine.
In a note Sean says, “You have an opportunity to be a better person than you have been in the past and people are watching to see if you make the right decisions this time.” He no longer wants to sign a contract. He says he isn’t threatening me, but he’s surprised I don’t recognize him from before. “Maybe that’s because you just view people and situations according to how they might or might not best serve your current interest.”
He says he’s having health problems and that he was assaulted as a result of the article Josh wrote about him. Then he disconnects his phone and stops answering his mail. In his notes to me the
I hang out with Miranda in bars on Polk Street, watching her perform with drag queens. I meet a boy at her show, younger than me with a mohawk and a pretty face. He says he’s also a writer, a poet. On the side he does boy burlesque. I think he’s pretty, but if I were into men I would want someone stronger who could take care of me.
It’s Patti Smith night and the queens climb the stage in black wigs and torn jeans. They sing “Ain’t It Strange” and “Gloria,” snarling at the crowd and wondering whose sins Jesus died for. Miranda dances behind them in a short skirt, kicking her long brown legs high in the air while I watch from the crowd, holding her drink.
Miranda’s room is bright yellow with album covers stuck to the wall. Lene Lovich, Kate Bush, The Slits. She lectures me on music. I tell her she’s a snob. We sleep on a small mattress. She insists I sleep naked and I insist she keep her clothes on. She wraps around my back, her arm over my chest.
Her windows face the morning sun and the illegals stand on the corner just below the ledge waiting for someone with a van and a job to stop and put them to work. They stand there every day, in baseball caps, sweatshirts. Waiting. Miranda says they aren’t Mexicans; most of them are from Guatemala and El Salvador. I’ve been showing up at her place more and more often. I call from Valencia Street at the end of the day, just when I think she’s going to sleep.
Hans’ trial won’t start for two more months. I was in court when they scheduled the hearing. It was my second time at the sturdy building in downtown Oakland. Hans wore yellow prison fatigues and stood in the prisoner’s pen, holding two boxes of papers. I noticed his poor posture and thinning hair. He seemed naive, carrying the giant boxes and not understanding that the trial was actually months away.
“Tell me something nice,” I said to Miranda the night after the hearing. I was acting like a child and she wanted desperately to be an adult. “Tell me I’m pretty.”
“You are,” she whispered. “You’re so pretty.”
Our relationship is absurd, infantilizing. I’m eleven years older than her. She’s a vegan. She wears heels and keeps her sex toys on top of a beat-up dresser. She wants to dress me in women’s clothes and I tell her I don’t mind but I don’t really think we’ll get there. The sad thing is how our relationship mirrors all my other romances. Fragmented. Thin. Except that I’m getting worse. In my twenties I would have been too proud to beg a woman to hold me. I didn’t know enough to cry. I wouldn’t dream of pressing my nose against someone’s chest, saying, “I’m so sad. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” And I have less to give.
We don’t have sex. She has a girlfriend. And a boyfriend. She has many lovers. She keeps pictures of them on her desk, tapes their poems near the bed. She’s so beautiful and smooth, like a statue cut from cherry. But for some reason I don’t want to see her naked. Maybe she’s too young, or something else. I’m just lying in bed with her, trying to fit into her stomach and not making it. She gets up to go to work at four in the morning, pulling on her boots while the city is still pitch. I rise with the sound of trucks stopping. On the surface everything seems fine.
In a note Sean says, “You have an opportunity to be a better person than you have been in the past and people are watching to see if you make the right decisions this time.” He no longer wants to sign a contract. He says he isn’t threatening me, but he’s surprised I don’t recognize him from before. “Maybe that’s because you just view people and situations according to how they might or might not best serve your current interest.”
He says he’s having health problems and that he was assaulted as a result of the article Josh wrote about him. Then he disconnects his phone and stops answering his mail. In his notes to me the
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