I had a complicated relationship to these cool-club rich kids (“rich” to me meaning anyone who didn’t receive financial aid). I wanted in, to some degree—I certainly didn’t want to be pegged as an outsider—and so I studied their habits carefully. I filed away the derisive comments, and used them to sharpen my sense of myself for years. But I also used them to blur my own origins. At my twentieth college reunion, when an undergraduate acquaintance told me that he’d always thought I was one of those people who attended Saint Ann’s, a private high school in Brooklyn that bequeathed to Oberlin many a sartorially impressive art major, I felt, to my chagrin, as if I had won some kind of lifetime achievement award. But the victory was hollow, because I never wanted to be a daughter of the privileged set, exactly, or even to be seen as one. Despite my awe at my sophisticated peers and what had been accessible to them, I also maintained my own streak of separateness and superiority. Money itself did not impress me, and in my view it could hamper the ability to accrue what did: the accretion of gritty experience and the recognition of unvarnished truths about what life was really like—probably tough, messy, twisted. Though my college friends might have been to Paris and hung out in Washington Square Park, they were low on street cred. Not only was I convinced that I had some, but I believed that I, more than many of them, was primed to get more.
PHILADELPHIA WAS ALL ABOUT street cred. Although some of the West Philly people had finished college, a greater number had slipped away from homes made tumultuous by drug or alcohol abuse, by enraged or disengaged or dogmatically Christian moms, or by lecherous stepdads. Most of them earned what money they did off the grid, making armor or low-budget gay porn, selling plasma, renting themselves out to medical studies, dumpster diving to reduce the need to buy things. A few of the girls worked as strippers or prostitutes, and just as I arrived more young women were taking up that beat, getting on the roster to dance at the Bounce Babe Lounge, a little dive in Center City that had a low barrier to entry. Newbies often worked the day shift, and in my first few weeks in Philly I adopted a routine that included making the rounds of restaurants accepting applications, stopping by the ice cream parlor where Reba was scooping cones for minimum wage, and then heading a few blocks north to have a drink at the Bounce Babe.
Reba’s brand new girlfriend Catanine, a butch dyke even younger than I who carried a staff, was a regular at the ice cream parlor and the Bounce Babe, too, but she and I didn’t hang. She never sat at either place, and never partook of the free scoops or beer; she stood at one end of the freezer case or by the wall close to the door at the club, hands resting together on her carved stick, keeping an eye out. There was a coolness between us: I was miffed that she’d horned in, and she’d made no conciliatory gesture. She and Reba had gotten together on my very first night in town, laser-beamed into each other’s eyes so deep that they must have teleported up the three flights of stairs into Reba’s bed; I sure didn’t see them leave from the front porch where a group of us had been sitting.
The woman whose room in the house I’d be subletting was not leaving until the next day, and the only place I had to sleep was on a mattress tucked in the rafters of the attic where Reba lived. Hours after the lovers disappeared, realizing that Reba was not coming back to escort me, I made my way up there, literally crawling on the floor to find my bed in a pitch black garret alive with sex sounds: the click of mucous membranes, the bedspring groan of bodies shifting, the paired and labored breathing. I finally slept, and when I woke, they were at it again, or still. I watched them. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. I recognized that waking in this attic to this sight was the type of vérite I’d craved, and I chalked up a tally, but the inevitability of loneliness settled into me. I would have to face this new environment alone.
I made my way to the kitchen, where I sat on a bench that ran along one side of the long table with my book in front of me, but with my eyes swiveling everywhere else. There was so much to see. Flyers for protests and political meetings and punk shoes were tacked on a bulletin board and layered on the refrigerator. Surfaces were crowded with stacks of paperbacks, cassette tapes with handmade covers, jelly jars filled with spices, dirty dishes, and canisters of bulk grains and legumes. And there was so much to smell. The parlor of the house acted as a bike room and erstwhile repair shop, and the stink of grease and tires permeated the whole first floor, laid just beneath the sweetening bananas in the hand-thrown bowl on the table, last night’s curry, this morning’s coffee, and the aroma of a warmed stovetop that was crusted and buckled like asphalt. I’d been in punk pads before—in Pittsburgh, in Philly, in State College—but this house was far richer, steeped deep in every countercultural trend of the last thirty years until it smelled of them all.
And the people! A constant flow in and out, they emanated exotic oils and their own B.O., and they were beautiful to me. Hair dread-locked or Manic Panicked or shaved off, clothes ripped and rejiggered and worn with élan, and among the male residents were a few who were men to my eyes, so clearly different from the student boys with whom I’d been cavorting—towering over them, for one, was there something in the bananas?—that it was hard to believe they shared a Y chromosome. At Oberlin, a school then known for the lax hygiene of its crunchy granolas, I was still on the grungy side of average, but here, I felt squeaky clean, a square, a completely uninteresting summering college student who could not possibly register on anyone’s radar.
On anyone’s radar, that is, except those looking for a potential sex partner. Which, okay, was the status of a not insignificant number. So while “the real me” felt invisible, another me felt on display, on the shelf at a market. And, to be fair, I had put myself there. If my advocate at this house had abandoned me, I was going to need another one, because, hey, this was where I wanted to be—absolutely, without a doubt. And while my belief that gaining the sexual interest of the right person was the shortest route to belonging might have been complicated by my declaration of a women’s studies minor earlier that year, it had not been supplanted. Especially when my best friend was busy fucking someone else and the guys were this hot.
“I’m Reba’s friend,” I’d offer when acknowledged. “I’m going to be renting Secil’s room.” I was alone, out on plank dangling over something new and unknown. I found I liked the feeling.
Which was good. Because did Reba and Catanine never have to pee? Did they never have to eat?
“I’m still waiting for Reba to come down,” I said to one of the very tall men the second time he came through the kitchen and raised his heavy eyebrows at me.
“She’s leaving you sitting here a long time.” His eyes traveled down and up before locking on mine. I felt condescended to, and shamed, and seen. My nipples and clitoris buzzed.
“Yep.”
“I’m going into Center City to check out a festival later. If she isn’t down by then, you can come if you want.”
Here we go here we go here we go, I thought. But I tried to act blasé.
CARL LOOKED LIKE a young Marlon Brando, stretched thinner but with shoulders as wide in his black leather jacket and a temperament as broody, and he was worldly wise at the ripe old age of twenty-four to my just-turned twenty, taller than I was by almost a foot. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had been released a couple months previous, and Chuck D’s insistence and the steady squeal of “Don’t Believe the Hype” unfurled from cars into the street that afternoon as it would the whole hot summer, rattling mufflers and internal organs before receding again from the ears of pedestrians, the thump-thump-thump the last to be heard, the lyrics still ringing in my head—“but some they never had it”—until another pair of chromed hubcaps would appear and externalize the track again. It was a long walk to the festival, which had something to do with Africa, or Black Pride, and when we got there the scent of sandalwood incense was heavy in the air.
When we’d exhausted what the fair had to offer us—spectacle, mostly, the feeling of being other together—we went to a bar where
