The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(102)

Story goes: she’d moved far away from her home to start school. And one night two teenagers started to mug her and, unwilling to have this new safe city taken from her, she started screaming at the top of her lungs, flailing her arms, swearing and kicking at them, and, fearing a sick animal, they fled. She couldn’t stop shaking. I’ve never felt safe again, she said.

She can’t work a regular job, she says, but she’s gotten really good at Dance Dance Revolution and she has been practicing her bally talking all off-season. What she really wants, though, is to be filled up with a baby.

“Tommy!” she calls to him often. “Please, just put a little baby right in here,” pointing to her stomach and winking at him.

*

Three days after the bite, H-Town Hank—so named because as far as they could remember, nobody had seen him, in his thirty-five years in the business, not nodding off from heroin—appears at my side on the midway toward closing time. He and Cassie are friends.

“I heard you’re crazy, lady,” he says, laughing his deep, wet laugh, laughing hard, almost hysterically. He pats me on the shoulder. “I hear you’re not one to mess with,” he says, then is suddenly quiet. He raises his well-plucked eyebrows at me and walks away. I wish I could feel proud and tough, like I’d finally made a name for myself here as a person who shouldn’t be screwed with. But the only thing I feel is shame.

*

There is no great moment of clarity arriving, by the way. No good answer to why or how it would be okay that I did this. When I think of her, of betraying her trust, of the days and then weeks afterward, sharing a bunk with her when she wouldn’t make eye contact with me, of how sad that made me, and then mad, and then embarrassed, I want to barf. Who am I? Who am I? I had a chance to de-escalate the situation, and I rejected it. Went, instead, for blood. Couldn’t make blood happen. Just tooth marks.

I couldn’t hack it.

*

A few days after the bite, in the van, Rash and I are alone while the rest of the crew runs a late-night errand. He turns to me from where he sits on the seat in front of me, still in full clown makeup, wearing his spiky dog-collar choker and big dirty matted red wig.

“The way you handled Cassie,” he says, and the blood drains from my whole body. “That’s how you get respect here. It was necessary. And great. You were being a pussy before. A pushover. Now you have asserted yourself. They’ll respect you more.”

“She hates me,” I say.

“Maybe, but at least she notices you now. Before you were nobody. Now you are somebody. You pushed back.”

“I hate me.”

“Fine by me,” he says, turning back around. “But I don’t think you’re so bad. Just needed some balls, that’s all.”

I cover my face with both hands, bury it against the seat.

“Sorry. Ovaries. You just needed stronger ovaries.”





INVISIBILIA

Two years and eleven months after the stroke

Day 51 of The Trip

September 2013

I stumbled onto a place which was invisible. It was a space where there seemed to be no space, Davy wrote from Italy. It was a story I’d heard before, a story he’d tell when he wanted to explain the pleasure of secret places, and his absolute devotion to the idea of traveling narrow and deep, as opposed to wide and quick.

I mean it was there, of course, but one’s attention was taken elsewhere as you passed by.

My parents are in Rome. They’ve rented a little apartment and are staying for a few weeks. My brother and I get a few lines about the Vatican, a few about the fountain of Trevi. In one e-mail, the featured photo is a close-up on a Nutella and crepes advertisement, with a short paragraph about how deeply Davy loves Nutella, how he could eat a jar with a spoon without pausing for breath, how it takes all his restraint not to dive naked into a fountain of Nutella. Sorry, he writes. I’m sure that’s not an image you want in your head.

This update begins with some photographs of the Spanish Steps, then quickly moves elsewhere.

45 years ago, Davy writes, in 1968, my family visited Rome and in the evenings I would sometimes wander off from the hotel to do a little explor ing. One night while strolling above the Spanish Steps, he found a place where two roads diverged, leaving a little wedge of land in between. I followed the wall back to the street which headed down the hill. I found myself under some arches with vines or something hanging down.

There, he writes, he lit up a joint and sat in the shadows, watching the city pass by. Nobody could see him. Being in a swirl of people and not being seen. I always remembered that little place. It was my secret in an ancient city.

There’s a photograph of my mom, hand shielding her eyes as she looks down a little strip of grassy land flanked by old, crumbling bricks and a few flaking pillars. She’s in Bubbles, the wheelchair with the off-roading tires, and in the next photograph she’s beside an old, dried fountain, assessing the ruin. Bulges of stone protrude from the fountain’s central pillar. After forty-five years, Davy had not only remembered this place, but was able to recall where it was, and how to get there. He’d been talking about it as they were planning their trip because he wanted to share his secret place with his wife.

Why was this fountain here? Davy writes. Had it played an important role in someone’s life? Who designed it? Was he coerced into building it? What were those growths on the side of the fountain?