“Where, then!”
“Anywhere but in front of him. He’s innocent of everything.”
He let her go and backed away.
“I did nothin, Horace,” she whispered. “I give you my word, I did nothin.” The baby screamed, and she went to him and took him in her arms.
Horace sat down in the same chair he had been in.
“I would not do this to you, Horace.”
He looked at her and at the baby, who could not take his eyes off Horace, even through his tears.
One of the baby’s cries seemed to get stuck in his throat, and to release it the baby raised a fist and punched the air, and finally the cry came free. How does a man start over with nothing? Horace thought. Elaine came near him, and the baby still watched him as his crying lessened. How does a man start from scratch?
He leaned down and picked up a few of the broken albums from the floor and read the labels. “I would not hurt you for anything in the world, Horace,” Elaine said. Okeh Phonograph Corporation. Domino Record Co. RCA Victor. Darnell Jr.’s crying stopped, but he continued to look down at the top of Horace’s head. Cameo Record Corporation, N.Y. “You been too good to me for me to hurt you like this, Horace.” He dropped the records one at a time: “It Takes an Irishman to Make Love.” “I’m Gonna Pin a Medal on the Girl I Left Behind.” “Ragtime Soldier Man.” “Whose Little Heart Are You Breaking Now.” “The Syncopated Walk.”
WONDERWALL
BY ELIZABETH HAND
Hyattsville, MD
(Originally published in 2004)
A long time ago, nearly thirty years now, I had a friend who was waiting to be discovered. His name was David Baldanders; we lived with two other friends in one of the most disgusting places I’ve ever seen, and certainly the worst that involved me signing a lease.
Our apartment was a two-bedroom third-floor walkup in Queenstown, a grim brick enclave just over the District line in Hyattsville, Maryland. Queenstown Apartments were inhabited mostly by drug dealers and bikers who met their two-hundred-dollars-a-month leases by processing speed and bad acid in their basement rooms; the upper floors were given over to wasted welfare mothers from P.G. County and students from the University of Maryland, Howard, and the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine.
The Divine, as students called it, was where I’d come three years earlier to study acting. I wasn’t actually expelled until the end of my junior year, but midway through that term my roommate Marcella and I were kicked out of our campus dormitory, precipitating the move to Queenstown. Even for the mid-1970s our behavior was excessive; I was only surprised the university officials waited so long before getting rid of us. Our parents were assessed for damages to our dorm room, which were extensive; among other things, I’d painted one wall floor-to-ceiling with the image from the cover of Transformer, above which I scrawled, Je suis damne par l’arc-en-ciel, in foot-high letters. Decades later, someone who’d lived in the room after I left told me that, year after year, Rimbaud’s words would bleed through each successive layer of new paint. No one ever understood what they meant.
Our new apartment was at first an improvement on the dorm room, and Queenstown itself was an efficient example of a closed ecosystem. The bikers manufactured Black Beauties, which they sold to the students and welfare mothers upstairs, who would zigzag a few hundred feet across a wasteland of shattered glass and broken concrete to the Queenstown Restaurant, where I worked making pizzas that they would then cart back to their apartments. The pizza boxes piled up in the halls, drawing armies of roaches. My friend Oscar lived in the next building; whenever he visited our flat he’d push open the door, pause, then look over his shoulder dramatically.
“Listen—!” he’d whisper.
He’d stamp his foot, just once, and hold up his hand to command silence. Immediately we heard what sounded like surf washing over a gravel beach. In fact it was the susurrus of hundreds of cockroaches clittering across the warped parquet floors in retreat.
There were better places to await discovery.
David Baldanders was my age, nineteen. He wasn’t much taller than me, with long, thick black hair and a soft-featured face: round cheeks, full red lips between a downy black beard and mustache, slightly crooked teeth much yellowed from nicotine, small well-shaped hands. He wore an earring and a bandana that he tied, pirate-style, over his head; filthy jeans, flannel shirts, filthy black Converse high-tops that flapped when he walked. His eyes were beautiful—indigo, black-lashed, soulful. When he laughed, people stopped in their tracks—he sounded like Herman Munster, that deep, goofy, foghorn voice at odds with his fey appearance.
We met in the Divine’s drama department, and immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Neither attractive nor talented enough to be in the center of the golden circle of aspiring actors that included most of our friends, we made ourselves indispensable by virtue of being flamboyant, unapologetic fuck-ups. People laughed when they saw us coming. They laughed even louder when we left. But David and I always made a point of laughing loudest of all.
“Can you fucking believe that?” A morning, it could have been any morning: I stood in the hall and stared in disbelief at the department’s sitting area. White walls, a few plastic chairs and tables overseen by the glass windows of the secretarial office. This was where the other students chain-smoked and waited, day after day, for news: casting announcements for department plays; cattle calls for commercials, trade shows, summer reps. Above all else, the department prided itself on graduating “working actors”—a really successful student might get called back for a walk-on on Days of Our Lives. My voice rose loud enough that heads turned. “It looks like a fucking dentist’s office.”
“Yeah, well, Roddy just got cast in a Trident commercial,” David said, and we both fell against the wall, howling.
Rejection fed our disdain, but it was more than that. Within weeks of arriving at the the Divine, I felt betrayed. I wanted—hungered for, thirsted for, craved like drink or drugs—High Art. So did David. We’d come to the Divine expecting Paris in the 1920s, Swinging London, Summer of Love in the Haight.
We were misinformed.
What we got was elocution taught by the department head’s wife; tryouts where tone-deaf students warbled numbers from The Magic Show; Advanced Speech classes where, week after week, the beefy department head would declaim Macduff’s speech—All my pretty ones? Did you say all?—never failing to move himself to tears.
And there was that sitting area. Just looking at it made me want to take a sledgehammer to the walls: all those smug faces above issues of Variety and Theater Arts, all those sheets of white paper neatly taped to white cinder block with lists of names beneath: callbacks, cast lists, passing exam results. My name was never there. Nor was David’s.
We never had a chance. We had no choice.
We took the sledgehammer to our heads.
Weekends my suitemate visited her parents, and while she was gone David and I would break into her dorm room. We drank her vodka and listened to her copy of David Live, playing “Diamond Dogs” over and over as we clung to each other, smoking, dancing cheek to cheek. After midnight we’d cadge a ride down to Southwest, where abandoned warehouses had been turned into gay discos—the Lost and Found, Grand Central Station, Washington Square, Half Street. A solitary neon pentacle glowed atop the old Washington Star printing plant; we heard gunshots, sirens, the faint bass throb from funk bands at the Washington Coliseum, the ceaseless boom and echo of trains uncoupling in the railyards that extended from Union Station.
I wasn’t a looker. My scalp was covered with henna-stiffened orange stubble that had been cut over three successive nights by a dozen friends. Marcella had pierced my ear with a cork and a needle and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. David usually favored one long drop earring, and sometimes I’d wear its mate. Other times I’d shove a safety pin through my ear, then run a dog leash from it around my neck. I had two-inch-long black-varnished fingernails that ca
ught fire when I lit my cigarettes. I kohled my eyes and lips, used Marcella’s Chloe perfume, shoved myself into Marcella’s expensive jeans even though they were too small for me.
But mostly I wore a white poet’s blouse or frayed striped boatneck shirt, droopy black wool trousers, red sneakers, a red velvet beret my mother had given me for Christmas when I was seventeen. I chain-smoked Marlboros, three packs a day when I could afford them. For a while I smoked clay pipes and Borkum Riff tobacco. The pipes cost a dollar apiece at the tobacconist’s in Georgetown. They broke easily, and club owners invariably hassled me, thinking I was getting high right under their noses. I was, but not from Borkum Riff. Occasionally I’d forgo makeup and wear army khakis and a boiled-wool navy shirt I’d fished from a dumpster. I used a mascara wand on my upper lip and wore my bashed-up old cowboy boots to make me look taller.
This fooled no one, but that didn’t matter. In Southwest I was invisible, or nearly so. I was a girl, white, not pretty enough to be either desirable or threatening. The burly leather-clad guys who stood guard over the entrances to the L&F were always nice to me, though there was a scary dyke bouncer whom I had to bribe, sometimes with cash, sometimes with rough foreplay behind the door.
Once inside all that fell away. David and I stumbled to the bar and traded our drink tickets for vodka and orange juice. We drank fast, pushing upstairs through the crowd until we reached a vantage point above the dance floor. David would look around for someone he knew, someone he fancied, someone who might discover him. He’d give me a wet kiss, then stagger off; and I would stand, and drink, and watch.
The first time it happened David and I were tripping. We were at the L&F, or maybe Washington Square. He’d gone into the men’s room. I sat slumped just outside the door, trying to bore a hole through my hand with my eyes. A few people stepped on me; no one apologized, but no one swore at me, either. After a while I stumbled to my feet, lurched a few steps down the hallway, and turned.
The door to the men’s room was painted gold. A shining film covered it, glistening with smeared rainbows, like oil-scummed tarmac. The door opened with difficulty because of the number of people crammed inside. I had to keep moving so they could pass in and out. I leaned against the wall and stared at the floor for a few more minutes, then looked up again.
Across from me, the wall was gone. I could see men pissing, talking, kneeling, crowding stalls, humping over urinals, cupping brown glass vials beneath their faces. I could see David in a crowd by the sinks. He stood with his back to me, in front of a long mirror framed with small round lightbulbs. His head was bowed. He was scooping water from the faucet and drinking it, so that his beard glittered red and silver. As I watched, he slowly lifted his face, until he was staring into the mirror. His reflected image stared back at me. I could see his pupils expand like drops of black ink in a glass of water, and his mouth fall open in pure panic.
“David,” I murmured.
Beside him a lanky boy with dirty-blond hair turned. He too was staring at me, but not with fear. His mouth split into a grin. He raised his hand and pointed at me, laughing.
“Poseur!”
“Shit—shit …” I looked up and David stood there in the hall. He fumbled for a cigarette, his hand shaking, then sank onto the floor beside me. “Shit, you, you saw—you—”
I started to laugh. In a moment David did too. We fell into each other’s arms, shrieking, our faces slick with tears and dirt. I didn’t even notice that his cigarette scorched a hole in my favorite shirt till later, or feel where it burned into my right palm, a penny-sized wound that got infected and took weeks to heal. I bear the scar even now, the shape of an eye, shiny white tissue with a crimson pupil that seems to wink when I crease my hand.
* * *
It was about a month after this happened that we moved to Queenstown. Me, David, Marcy, a sweet spacy girl named Bunny Flitchins, all signed the lease. Two hundred bucks a month gave us a small living room, a bathroom, two small bedrooms, a kitchen squeezed into a corner overlooking a parking lot filled with busted Buicks and shock-shot Impalas. The place smelled of new paint and dry-cleaning fluid. The first time we opened the freezer, we found several plastic Ziploc bags filled with sheets of white paper. When we removed the paper and held it up to the light, we saw where rows of droplets had dried to faint gray smudges.
“Blotter acid,” I said.
We discussed taking a hit. Marcy demurred. Bunny giggled, shaking her head. She didn’t do drugs, and I would never have allowed her to: It would be like giving acid to your puppy.
“Give it to me,” said David. He sat on the windowsill, smoking and dropping his ashes to the dirt three floors below. “I’ll try it. Then we can cut them into tabs and sell them.”
“That would be a lot of money,” said Bunny delightedly. A tab of blotter went for a dollar back then, but you could sell them for a lot more at concerts, up to ten bucks a hit. She fanned out the sheets from one of the plastic bags. “We could make thousands and thousands of dollars!”
“Millions,” said Marcy.
I shook my head. “It could be poison. Strychnine. I wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?” David scowled. “You do all kinds of shit.”
“I wouldn’t do it cause it’s from here.”
“Good point,” said Bunny.
I grabbed the rest of the sheets from her, lit one of the gas jets on the stove, and held the paper above it. David cursed and yanked the bandana from his head.
“What are you doing?”
But he quickly moved aside as I lunged to the window and tossed out the flaming pages. We watched them fall, delicate spirals of red and orange like tiger lilies corroding into black ash then gray then smoke.
“All gone,” cried Bunny, and clapped.
We had hardly any furniture. Marcy had a bed and a desk in her room, nice Danish modern stuff. I had a mattress on the other bedroom floor that I shared with David. Bunny slept in the living room. Every few days she’d drag a broken box spring up from the curb. After the fifth one appeared, the living room began to look like the interior of one of those pawnshops down on F Street that sold you an entire roomful of aluminum-tube furniture for fifty bucks, and we yelled at her to stop. Bunny slept on the box springs, a different one every night, but after a while she didn’t stay over much. Her family lived in Northwest, but her father, a professor at the Divine, also had an apartment in Turkey Thicket, and Bunny started staying with him.
Marcy’s family lived nearby as well, in Alexandria. She was a slender Slavic beauty with a waterfall of ice-blond hair and eyes like aqua headlamps, and the only one of us with a glamorous job—she worked as a model and receptionist at the most expensive beauty salon in Georgetown. But by early spring, she had pretty much moved back in with her parents too.
This left me and David. He was still taking classes at the Divine, getting a ride with one of the other students who lived in Queenstown, or else catching a bus in front of Giant Food on Queens Chapel Road. Early in the semester he had switched his coursework: Instead of theater, he now immersed himself in French language and literature.
I gave up all pretense of studying or attending classes. I worked a few shifts behind the counter at the Queenstown Restaurant, making pizzas and ringing up beer. I got most of my meals there, and when my friends came in to buy cases of Heineken I never charged them. I made about sixty dollars a week, barely enough to pay the rent and keep me in cigarettes, but I got by. Bus fare was eighty cents to cross the District line; the newly opened subway was another fifty cents. I didn’t eat much. I lived on popcorn and Reuben sandwiches from the restaurant, and there was a sympathetic waiter at the American Café in Georgetown who fed me ice cream sundaes when I was bumming around in the city. I saved enough for my cover at the discos and for the Atlantis, a club in the basement of a fleabag hotel at 930 F Street that had just started booking punk bands. The rest I spent on booze and Marlboros. Even if I was broke, someone would always spring me a drink and a smo
ke; if I had a full pack of cigarettes, I was ahead of the game. I stayed out all night, eventually staggering into some of the District’s worst neighborhoods with a couple of bucks in my sneaker, if I was lucky. Usually I was broke.
Yet I really was lucky. Somehow I always managed to find my way home. At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. I’d crash into my apartment, alone except for the cockroaches—David would have gone home with a pickup from the bars, and Marcy and Bunny had decamped to the suburbs. I’d be so drunk I stuck to the mattress like a fly mashed against a window. Sometimes I’d sit cross-legged with the typewriter in front of me and write, naked because of the appalling heat, my damp skin gray with cigarette ash. I read Tropic of Cancer, reread Dhalgren and A Fan’s Notes and a copy of Illuminations held together by a rubber band. I played Pere Ubu and Wire at the wrong speed, because I was too wasted to notice, and would finally pass out, only to be ripped awake by the apocalyptic scream of the firehouse siren next door—I’d be standing in the middle of the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, before I realized I was no longer asleep. I saw people in my room, a lanky boy with dark-blond hair and clogs who pointed his finger at me and shouted, “Poseur!” I heard voices. My dreams were of flames, of the walls around me exploding outward so that I could see the ruined city like a freshly tilled garden extending for miles and miles, burning cranes and skeletal buildings rising from the smoke to bloom, black and gold and red, against a topaz sky. I wanted to burn too, tear through the wall that separated me from that other world, the real world, the one I glimpsed in books and music, the world I wanted to claim for myself.
But I didn’t burn. I was just a fucked-up college student, and pretty soon I wasn’t even that. The following spring I flunked out of the Divine. All of my other friends were still in school, getting boyfriends and girlfriends, getting cast in university productions of An Inspector Calls and Arturo Roi. Even David Baldanders managed to get good grades for his paper on Verlaine. Meanwhile, I leaned out my third-floor window and smoked and watched the speed freaks stagger across the parking lot below. If I jumped I could be with them: That was all it would take.