I really liked kissing you tonight. I need more kissing in my life.

J. is about to set sail so I will have to say goodbye to my hippie. I feel like I could spend every day kissing new people and never get tired of it.

Enough of that.

The Whole World is Watching

I find the role of Legal Observer at protests one that is familiar—standing on the outskirts of action, making mental notes, scanning the crowd for that detail that seems out of place. So it’s the first day after the bombing of Iraq started—the second gulf war—and there are college kids, Quakers and ex-hippies gathered around the Federal Building in Philadelphia to make some noise, sing protest songs and perform acts of civil disobedience. Janet, my legal observer buddy, and I have been circling the perimeter… not much is happening. The Haverford group is intertwining the US flag with the Iraqi flag, in some sort of esoteric symbolic gesture. Another group is dressed in trash bags with duct tape over their mouths. Which is just as well because it’s raining. By 10:00 I’m soaked and I need to get to City Hall to watch the city council table a resolution on the USA Patriot Act.

What if every week were this intense. What if we were always this actively involved in the process of politics?

I understand political action, even though I know this type of protest doesn’t usually accomplish anything but getting a small amount of media coverage and having college kids dragged off by cops. I understand what we’re up against as leftists, as free-thinkers and as people who love what the Constitution of the United States stands for. There is a sense of anguish, anxiety and dread that I feel every time I hear Bush address the public. I feel that he is driving our country into a large brick wall.

There is something primal and necessary about protest. Thomas Jefferson said both “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and “every generation needs its own revolution.” I watched kids get dragged away by US Marshals in some deeply felt sense of necessity. I watched high school kids march through the streets of Philly for hours in a disorganized but energetic mob of rage and hormones. This feels like the beginning of our generation’s revolution. I wonder what shape it will take…

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
Issued in London, 9 July 1955
"In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the Governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them."

She is cruel,
my lover,
pulls me
downward,
flesh hanging
from bones--
hugs me into
her crushing mass
when I want
weightlessness,
and then
retracts into
indifference
when I seek
solace.

Nobody gives you a chance or a dollar in this old town
The T-Bird lost it on the shoulder of I-85 3 miles outside of Winston-Salem, NC. Angie and I were strung out on Ritalin crushed up, snorted with the little bit of coke we had left. It was a humid August day but we'd cranked the heater in order to divert the hot air from the engine. Instead it blew on our faces. I had gone through an entire two liter of water in under an hour. I needed to piss.
Angela wore a thin white tank top that was soaked through on her back and in between her tits and army pants torn up to the thigh. he had a tattoo of a naked woman holding a pentagram on her left shoulder. Her bleached hair was damp with sweat, pulled back tied up in pigtails on either side of her head. She wore white sunglasses with heavily mirrored lenses.
"Fucken piece of shit," she said, kicking the front bumper with her DM.
The radiator had overheated and poured smoke through the hood. The milk jug filled with water wouldn't cut it. The engine reeked of wet metal. I got out of the car and circled around to the front where she was staring, disbelievingly, under the hood.
"We should leave it, hitch a ride into town, get some more water," she suggested. "Rat bastard."
She left the hood open and went back to the driver’s side. Picked up the flannel shirt she had on the floor and mopped her forehead with it. Flung herself back against the hard vinyl seat and closed her eyes.
Angela was pretty good with cars, for a girl, as they say. She used to work with her father on his trucks-- he had three, lifted up on cinderblocks out in their back yard. You could see her red DMs and his thick black work boots poking out from underneath his rusty blue Ford. Her t-shirt and jeans would end up covered in an inch of grease. But she was as happy as a pig in shit, her mother used to say. Her hair would be tied away from her face in a bandana-- despite all of the grease, she had perfect skin.
"What the fuck you teaching her that for?" her mother had asked her father, throwing a can of Genuine Draft at him over a lunch of arroz con pollo and habeneros negros. She made the best black beans this side of Cuba.
"She wants to learn, babe. She's a natural,” he opened it and drank it.
"She should be studying her English or something. You're gonna turn her into a redneck just like you. And a dyke to boot."
"Nah, she's fine. Aren't you Angie. Besides, her English is good."
Angie's dad would disappear for weeks at a time without warning -- when they were supposed to be working together, and she would sit outside, on the bed of the Ford smoking cigarettes. Sometimes I'd hang out there with her, studying for my tests. She would just watch me, smoke after smoke.
"What's it about?"
"Well she's his nanny. Feels like too ugly to get his attention, like he prefers the younger, prettier, stupid girls. Sketches his face from memory in her book until he finds it. They have the most passionate love affair of all times. Even death can't keep them away from each other."
She looked at me dubiously, "sounds like a load of romantic bullshit."
"It's love"
"What do you know about that?" she asked.
"Nothing, I guess." I would tell Angie about the books we were supposed to read for English class and then she would ace the tests. Angie didn’t need to study, her brain retained information with little or no effort.
Her mom had waitressed day shifts at the bar and grille by the college. She hated it. She would come home at night and cry, drinking her red wine and reading Angie's vocab books and English grammar books. Aside from her mother’s scurrilous night reading, the books wouldn’t have been cracked all year. The only interest Ange had in school was drama club and even that wasn’t enough to get her there by first bell.
Her mama wanted to go to college to become an English teacher. Unfortunately, her husband couldn't support the three of them on what he made when he worked, let alone with his scattered wages as an alcoholic who couldn't hold a job. He was a genius mechanic. Top notch, loved working on Volkswagens. He could finish puzzles in seconds, his hands and mind worked very cleverly together, knowing always where the pieces went or how to solve something other people found impossible. Even so, nobody wanted to keep a mechanic who didn’t show up for work for weeks at a time.
She had kept the beast happy since she got it for herself on her birthday, in what would have been her junior year of high school. She was lying about her age and working as a waitress at the Miami Beach Hooters. The guys loved her, her breasts pushing through the fabric of the tight t-shirts they had to wear. Well if you've got it, use it, she said. I was breaking pencil points over bullshit precalc tests and she was pushing her tits in men’s faces and making more money than both of her parents.
Now, seven years later, it was ready to go to its grave. Much to her denial, the white '77 Thunderbird, souped-up with red racing stripes, couldn't make the journey North.
She didn't want to part with her beast. She loved listening to the engine rev-- hauling ass on the interstate, New York Dolls blasting, windows rolled down. It was her manhood, and no one was going to tell her it was screwed, despite the sinking sensation that it was. The car had been slipping out of gear since the GA/NC state line, wheezing up the hilly terrain and stalling at red lights.

We were going to New York. Of course it was a whim, a decision made on an acid-riddled camping trip in the sticks of North Florida. At the height of it all, I had felt the smallness of Gainesville, a shit college town in the north of Florida-- closing in on me like a warm bath and I couldn't bring my head up. It made my chest tight, causing me to panic.
"We've got to get the fuck out of here." I managed
Angela looked at me for what felt like an hour. Her hair glittered like spun gold and caught the edges of my trip. She tilted her head a little, like she was looking into me.
"What?"
"You're so fucking beautiful," she said. "I can't believe how I missed it."
That's what it was like tripping with Angela. She became enamored with you, fascinated, startled. She reached for my hand.
"You wanna leave then?"
"Where would we go?"
As if that was even a valid question. I knew Angela wanted New York like other girls want the bartender at Frank's-- with an almost irrational lust that caused her to go red at the mention of it. Angela had what it takes to be an actress-- that's what everyone thought. I, on the other hand, hated the heat. I loathed the oppressive closeness of my family, and the sense that no matter what I did I could never be anyone but the good girl gone bad, the punk with the scholarship who had blown her mind with hallucinogens.
It was about time. All of the stuff we could fit was piled into the trunk and the back seat.
We can't leave our shit, I said. It's all we have.
Four hundred dollars tucked into her bra, and another six stashed in my bank account. It wasn't much but it was what we had. You stay here, I'll go, she said. There's a knife in the glove compartment if anyone bugs you and if the cops roll by, the registration is right underneath it.
I felt my hands sweat. It could be hours. Listen to tapes. There's half a sandwich in the back. Bring back some water. I checked my cigarette pack.
Get some more smokes, I said. Gave her three and kept the rest. She lit one and walked to the road, stuck her thumb out like a professional. I felt a sense of dread gnaw at my stomach. A. knew how to hitchhike. She had managed to avoid the rapists and killers so far. When a ride tried to cop a feel she gave him a prick with her knife. Psycho-bitch. Tease.
Boy and his girlfriend pulled up about our age. You need a lift. Yeah radiator's fucked. We'll take you to a gas station, you can get some fluids. Angela turned to me.
Stay put, okay?
I wasn't going anywhere. Had my smokes and about twenty mixed tapes piled on the passenger-side floor. I'll be here. She smiled, got into the car.
I looked at the map that had guided us this far. It was wrinkled from being folded up the wrong way and southern California was almost entirely missing. We had made our way up through Atlanta, pushed through the rest of Georgia and most of North Carolina. Only five states stood between us and the city and one of them was Delaware-- if we made it out of North Carolina.
The night before, we had stayed in a motel outside of Atlanta. It was less than $20 a night and not thoroughly infested with cockroaches. Angela checked in and made me crouch in the passenger side so we wouldn't get charged for a double. She pulled the cash out of her bra, and I could see the concierge's eyes widen.

She had parked the T-Bird right up against the motel and I helped carry the bags. At night we draped a blanket over our stuff in the back seat so it wasn't as noticeable.

Dirty Laundry
Dirty Laundry
C. moved into the apartment right after the holidays, which turned out to be a long, isolated stretch. I was unable to sleep, unable to eat and subsisted almost entirely on cigarettes, grass and daytime television. I had pulled the television into my room from the living room so that I wouldn’t have to move from my bed. I was at the edge of despair, toe over the edge, actually. The feeling of vertigo couldn’t be soothed. It was a desperate situation.
During the day, I dozed off to the incessant stream of image and sound, the formulaic reruns of 80's sitcoms, vehicles for Reaganistic family values, the talkshows, the soap-operas. The days I didn’t work, I spent the killing time until the night and the nights I spent waiting for the sun to rise. My entire paycheck went to grass and cigarettes. I had what seemed to be an unending
I tried to write but failed miserably-- I filled notebooks with indecipherable and unhinged scribbles. My apartment got so dark at night. I had only one small lamp in my room and a space heater. North Florida did not get that cold in the winter, but it was cold enough to burrow like a mole underneath my quilt. I stared at the hole I had burned with a cigarette-- it went right through the fabric. It was a third generation heirloom of a tradition I could never find myself embracing. But it broke my heart to ruin it. I smoked some more grass and masturbated under my quilt to Late Night with Jay Leno.
The coffeeshop was a refuge from my own thoughts, even though the holidays had rendered it a ghost town. My shifts had been cut back, so I was in the apartment more than was healthy. I wore the same black tshirt until it could practically walk itself over to the laundromat. I kept putting off doing my laundry, which by that point, would require a truck to transport it and a forklift to load it.
Going to work was a welcome change, I could listen to Adam and Christine tease each other and scream at each other. For hours I listened to Adam's rant about the government manufacturing crack cocaine and planting it in the ghetto-- about guerrilla regimes in Latin America-- about his obsession with electro-magnetics. Soundtrack: Dead Kennedies. Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.
After shifts, Adam would roll a fat joint, shaped like a cone, Rasta-style. He was very generous with his homegrown, and it was quality stuff. He counted out the drawer, he said the grass helped him concentrate. We would play Hearts (when we could pull together four people) until about five in the morning. The staff room was small and dark, perfect for getting high, perfect for cards-- A. had set up a CD player-- it skipped a lot, but if you piled books on top of it, it was usually okay. I knew the grass was probably not helping my mental state, but I was beyond caring.
"Can we get fucked up?" I asked Adam. He had yet to offer the marijuana, but I wasn't in the mood to wait. "I mean really fucked up?"
He looked at me and raised his eyebrow. It was a gesture so practiced, like most things about him-- careful, cool and practiced.
"Sure," he said. He opened the film container that he stored his drugs in, doled out a liberal amount of the stuff onto the table in front of him.
"Fuck that shit," Christine said, she had been sprawled across the couch, her long legs arched over the back. "I'm really sick of it. All it does is trap you in your own mind. Don't you want out?"
Adam looked at her, bemused. He carefully scooped the grass back into the film container. "What do you propose instead."
Christine pulled a bottle of Jack out from underneath the table with a smirk on her face.
"Hey, why not?" Adam said. We poured the stuff over ice and set up our game.
"So are you going to tell me what's wrong with you?" A asked, arranging the cards in his hands. "You have hardly said a word all week."
He smoked fat cigars as he played, his dreds tied into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. T. was a weird place because people like him only exist there, having reached the peak of coolness in a small town and knowing there is nowhere else for him to go. He was the drummer for Bully, a post-punk garage band that played periodically in venues around the south, he was the manager of the coffeeshop and all the girls wanted to fuck him.
He couldn't take his band or reputation to NY or the west coast because it would be lost in the shuffle of fashion, trends and talk. He was too sensitive for that, too caught up in his iniflated self-image. But I liked him.
"Maybe." I said, sort of taken aback. I didn't think it was that obvious, especially to A. "Not now."
I knew if I told A., he would probably call the cops to intervene and I wasn't ready to deal with that. A. was quick on the draw, and for a pothead conspiracy theorist, he had an irrational fondness for the police, whom we served large mochas with whipped cream, on the house, several times a day.
The nights we stayed that late, A. would drive me to my apartment in his yellow beetle. I would have to climb across the center console, avoiding the gearshift, to get into the passenger seat, because the door didn't work. A. had his entire collection of tapes on the floor of the Beetle and would spend at least fifteen minutes before we left, rummaging through them. That night we listened to Primus, Sailing the Sea of Cheese.
He didn't ask again what was wrong. I sank back into the seat, feeling a bit jittery from the pot, and wishing that something would fall on me or hit me in the head and wake me from the interminable daze of self-loathing that had settled on my shoulders.
When I got home, at five, the sun making the sky a light shade of blue, I knew I wouldn't sleep I sat outside for a little while in the cold, smoking cigarettes. There was a parking lot next to my house, which at night was deserted. I sat on a little ledge from which I had a perfect view of the moon. It would be hours until I was able to doze, even a little bit. I couldn't escape from a sense of watchfulness, an overalertness-- it actually hurt to keep my head up, but it hurt more to put it down.

M. had moved out, a little freaked by my apparent nervous breakdown. She had come home to find me, not having really moved for almost a week, the apartment strewn with clothes and reeking of cigarettes. I had lost about 15 pounds in a couple weeks and looked horrible.
"I don't understand you anymore." She said, folding her head scarves into boxes, collecting her colored jars and sorting her clothes. "I think you need to see someone."
I wanted to tell her what had happened to me, but I wasn't really ready to talk about it. I was avoiding the phone, the door. There were 37 messages on the answering machine.
M. was moving in with her boyfriend. She had a fantasy about living with an older guy, caring for his kids, buying groceries, cooking dinner and making pots. More than anyone I had met before, M. was petrified of her talents and her possibilities. She was always giving her power away to her boyfriends, deferring to their creativity. I didn't understand her anymore either.
We were terrible for each other, as roommates go. Both recovering bulemics, we hid from each other when we slipped. Like ex-alcoholics who think they can help save each other, we made each other worse. So as much as I would miss her, I was glad she was moving out.
C. happened to be at the bar when I was looking for a new roommate. I hardly knew him but he exuded charm, even though he was horribly self-effacing and a little bit scary. He brought boxes of things, his cat, his VW camper bus, which he promised we could take on trips. I was glad he was moving in. He helped me clean the apartment.

M. had moved out, a little freaked by my apparent nervous breakdown. She had come home to find me, not having really moved for almost a week, the apartment strewn with clothes and reeking of cigarettes. I had lost about 15 pounds in a couple weeks and looked horrible.

"I don't understand you anymore." She said, folding her head scarves into boxes, collecting her colored jars and sorting her clothes. "I think you need to see someone."

I wanted to tell her what had happened to me, but I wasn't really ready to talk about it. I was avoiding the phone, the door. There were 37 messages on the answering machine.

M. was moving in with her boyfriend. She had a fantasy about living with an older guy, caring for his kids, buying groceries, cooking dinner and making pots. More than anyone I had met before, M. was petrified of her talents and her possibilities. She was always giving her power away to her boyfriends, deferring to their creativity. I didn't understand her anymore either.

We were terrible for each other, as roommates go. Both recovering bulemics, we hid from each other when we slipped. Like ex-alcoholics who think they can help save each other, we made each other worse. So as much as I would miss her, I was glad she was moving out.

C. happened to be at the bar when I was looking for a new roommate. I hardly knew him but he exuded charm, even though he was horribly self-effacing and a little bit scary. He brought boxes of things, his cat, his VW camper bus, which he promised we could take on trips. I was glad he was moving in. He helped me clean the apartment.

white xmas.

The wet ground absorbs the snow and it runs into the gutters. It doesn't mean what it used to. I remember childhood, the tree so tall it bent up against the ceiling and we couldn't put a star on it. The tree that stayed in the backyard turning brown until the middle of spring.

I remember snow forts that we built and wars that we waged against each other. Now I sleep until one. Then I woke up at six, looked under the tree at the presents spilling out.

It was xmas eve when I felt his hard on against my leg. I was in a drunk, drugged up haze and didn't react. He pushed into me.

[Then I went from bed to bed hoping to find something in one of them that I was looking for. I only fucked on my stomach so I wouldn't have to see, buried my face in the pillow so I could be somewhere else, with someone else].

There was no passion, only need. His cock was so small I could hardly feel it. I wanted to expel it but I couldn't. I felt fragmented, fucked up, totaled-- a cunt, an ass, tits-- all the things that make a girl, but nothing inside. I hated him for it. I hated him because I wanted him to be someone else. I hated xmas, drugs, eating fake turkey and wanting to swallow the whole thing.

I called my father. Something I hardly ever did. I heard his voice on the other end of the line and I hung up. I couldn't enter into the exchange of guilt, insults, injuries. I heard her voice in the background, "who is it?" Hello, hello, hello? The next time I called, she answered. "Who is this? I can trace this call you know." I called again and got the answering machine. Her voice, like nails through my feet.

My brain riddled with dope, grass. The smell of it like driving up through Pennsylvania on xmas as a child, being hotboxed in the car with my parents. I always hated that smell. Now I don't mind it so much. Cold, my fingers were cold, my toes cold. I pulled my sleeves over my hands, tears squeezing out of my eyes. I wanted to shut them against the urge. The phone had become my enemy-- I couldn't help but to dial. I ashed out. I hid. The answering machine... "Hey, I haven't seen you in a while. I was just hoping you were okay." "Why don't you give me a call, I could come over and pick you up." The door. Pounding. "Hey, why don't you answer." I smoked more grass and fell asleep.