Moonwalker, Chapter 8

About Providence. As in:

1. looking to, or preparation for the future, provision; as in
2. skill or wisdom in management, prudence; as in
3. a. the care or benevolent guidance of God or nature
b. an instance of this; as in
4. God as the guiding power of the universe.

Although I thought it was a cliché used by authors who couldn’t think of anything better, I wasn’t tired of it. I was fascinated by all the definitions one word can contain, so I looked up Providence in The Merriam-Webster, who, if Providence was meant to be truly
relevant to this narrative of my life, must be leaving some definitions out because:

1. I didn’t believe in planning for the future
2. thus my poor skills and wisdom in management which could be said to contribute to my imprudent lifestyle.
3. While I might agree that nature with all its bounty (all those coconuts in Florida) could be benevolent, there was still the issue of hurricanes, and of course, in the northeast, winter, so these instances weren’t infallible.
4. a. Needless to say I had serious doubts in God as the guiding power of my universe.
b. Even more needless to say was my serious doubt in the existence of God.
c. After a few drinks I had serious doubts about the universe, which hadn’t changed since I’d gotten sober.

So it was kind of a mystery how I ended up living here after all these years pretending I was a gypsy. Real gypsies don’t ever give up the road. They die on the backs of their ponies, their untamed souls straining to be free from their bodies like the sound of the devil’s violin solo. I tried telling myself I was following in the footsteps of Roger Williams, who’d bailed on The Massachusetts Bay Colony on a horse strapped down with books in the name of religious tolerance, but if I couldn’t fool myself with this excuse, I knew I wouldn’t be successful with anyone else.

Providence was really just the easiest place to go that was close to Block Island where I figured I could get a job and create some kind of more stable life for myself. I didn’t want to end up working in a coffeehouse, but I didn’t get one call back for a job interview based on the resumés I sent to Brown and RISD, various non-profits and private schools, an importer of exotic foods, a travel agent, a company that prepped rich kids for the SATS (I know I didn’t graduate from college, but my scores were stellar. I had a lot of promise in the beginning), a film production company (everyone kept saying the film industry in Providence was going to blow up soon), and an underwater salvage rescue crew. I figured they were my best shot because I was really good at snorkeling, even though they were looking for someone who was certified in SCUBA. They were the only ones who actually did call me in for an interview, but when I told them I thought SCUBA gave divers an unfair advantage over the fish they looked at me strangely and suggested maybe I apply for a job at Butler. I looked it up later and discovered it was the local mental hospital. When I sent in my resumé I got a phone call from admissions asking if I needed help.
When not even my last hope, Wholefoods, would take me (I had been told everyone who worked there was an artist, plus they had health insurance, which would have made my parents so, so happy), I knew I was in trouble and contemplated jumping back on that Greyhound that had taken me to Florida all those years ago.

Wholefoods was honest at least. They told me they didn’t think I’d stick around long enough to make it worth training me, which was probably right, but I was disappointed because everyone there did seem like they were having a good time even though all they were doing was stocking shelves and ringing people up on a register. And I had kind of wanted those health benefits. I hadn’t been to a dentist in 15 years and my mom told me I really should get a mammogram now that I was-one more time, probably not the last--40 years old, even though the thought of having my breasts squeezed by some metal machine terrified me more than the thought of getting cancer. Call me twisted, I'm aware my priorities are skewed.

Providence, Oh, Providence. I wanted the bounty of God or nature to help me plan for my future, but it just wasn’t working out until one day I wandered down from Fox Point to Wickenden Street, thinking to get a coffee at Café Chaos and there it was, the sign I’d been looking for: HELP WANTED.

I’d tried to promise myself I wouldn’t end up working in a coffeehouse, but I must not have really meant it. In any case, I was good at the job and was soon promoted to shift supervisor, which meant I got to boss Zoe around and take the fall if the creamers weren’t full.

I also tried to like the city (I knew love was beyond me), but despite Buddy’s efforts to make it more glamorous, Providence was dingy and drab as a dockside whore, not that there were any in the city. Oh, there were plenty of hookers, but they weren’t anything romantic like that. They were just plain old hookers who smoked crack, shot heroin, and generally went about leading as dismal a life as possible in this dismal city.

The East Side had some nice buildings if you were into brick. That’s where the Brown and RISD campuses were, but I wasn’t. Bricks made me think of ballast stones, of people moaning in the holds of cramped ships, of slaves chained to each other, dying in misery before being tossed by the feet to the sharks. Also, objects to throw through windows. If the revolution the anarchists said was coming soon ever made it to Providence there’d be plenty of ammunition for the overthrow.

“Actually, that’s not what we’re about,” said one I met out back of Chaos when I was hefting a bag of coffee grounds into the dumpster. “We don’t believe in no rules, we just want to make our own. Most of us are actually quite peaceful,” she said while grabbing the bag out of my hands. “Hey, don’t throw those away. We’ll use them for compost.” She was gone before I had a chance to ask her if I could be one too.

After that I just left the bags out back to disappear, feeling virtuous and with a little more hope about humanity, although the last time we came across each other in the alley she promised me she’d bring me some vegetables from their community garden which I have yet to see.

Also, I have a thing about trees. I hate to see them cut down. I mean, I really feel their pain. I don’t know what else we should build our houses with, but it shouldn’t be trees, which is a problem in Providence, because besides bricks, there’s a lot of fine, old Colonial wooden houses and churches being written up as treasures in guidebooks. When you look at them you can see how much older the trees were back then before they were harvested because the clapboards are so wide. I took a tour of the John Brown House once and had to leave, I got so sad from counting the rings on the floor. According to my count, some of those trees had been a thousand years old before they’d been chopped down so we didn’t have to step on the ground anymore.
Providence used to be one big forest. Impossible to believe now, especially on my block which barely had a weed growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

If I could stage a revolution it would be an uprising of trees. They’d push their way up with their roots through all the pavement of the world until we all fell to our knees and apologized for the ugliness we’d created, which you could really see when you left the East Side and ventured out into the rest of the city. Ugly lime green or beige aluminum siding and chain link fences seemed to be the preferred décor, although preferred would be pushing it as most people didn’t notice how anything looked because they didn’t care enough about anything. Poverty does that. And I’m not talking about the genteel kind that I lived in where I had the option to compare myself to starving artists like Van Gogh and Picasso because I knew who they were in the first place.

I don’t know where I got the idea that beauty is a virtue. Maybe it was Providence itself. I loved how the early settlers of New England were named after abstract virtues, as if being named Chastity or Prudence could summon those qualities to one’s self. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise by years of dedicated debauchery, I had deep Puritanical roots. I knew there was something severe about me that stopped me from fitting in completely with the truly debauched barflies I surrounded myself with in my heyday--some of them quite sophisticated—for those twenty years I chased the sun up and down the east coast.

I used to debate this with one of my bosses (in a coffeehouse, of course). He was the tannest person I knew without wrinkles. “I rub coconut oil into my skin every night,” he said when I commented on his youthful appearance. He never even bothered going north anymore and seemed genuinely happy. I tried rubbing coconut oil all over myself for a week to see if it would work its magic on me but just ended up with greasy hair and acne, and oil-stained sheets I had to throw out because they started to smell rancid.

“Don’t you think sybaritic is a better word to describe our lives than debauched?” asked that well-lubricated former boss of mine. And if you’re wondering what sybaritic means, you’d be amazed at how many really smart people sling coffee.

I knew. Sybaritic means pleasure—anointing yourself with oil and lolling luxuriously on a tropical beach. I knew all about this way of life, but I’d never truly enjoyed it. In the back of my mind I was always thinking about what I had to do, not to survive, but to make my mark on the world.
I knew I wasn’t truly sybaritic because I even drank with ambition. Almost every night I got drunk to get drunk, not because I enjoyed the taste of alcohol--and I was a connoisseur of drink specials, not of fine wines or exotic tequilas. I only drank top shelf if someone else was buying, otherwise it was whatever cheep vodka was in the well. At least I’d graduated from the Piels Light and Fuzzy Navels from my high school days is what I told myself whenever I started to feel bad about myself.

“Life’s too short to feel bad about yourself,” said my wise, Confucian boss. This was in the stage where he grew a Fu Manchu beard, pinned his long hair up with chopsticks like a geisha and served coffee in a kimono. We were living in Key West, so this mélange of genders didn’t seem weird at all. It was part of the daily pleasure of living in a place where you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. If there were no limits, wouldn’t you create the most fantastical, fun-filled life for yourself?

I tried to apply his sage advice to my flailing life for awhile, but I couldn’t talk myself out of the idea that I was wasting my time on earth. Twenty years of serving coffee, scraping paint, pulling weeds, and cleaning houses while analyzing my employers from a Marxist feminist perspective and wondering when I was ever going to get to reading Daniel Deronda had worn me down.
One day I looked in the mirror and saw, I was a shabby boat in need of a good detailing. My teak was chipped and peeling, my surfaces no longer smooth to the touch and shining in the tropical sun. I was working in a boatyard restoring trim at the time in exchange for a place to sleep, if you’re wondering where this metaphor came from.

Ferociously sweaty, I looked at the dull trim I’d been scraping for hours and saw the truth: my allure was gone. Even more surprising was the revelation that came with it: so was the allure of the sun. My bloodshot eyes longed for the balm of clouds, low and gray, blocking the horizon.
There’s something I kind of need to admit at this point--a confession that betrays those Puritan roots I hinted at earlier. Despite what I told Zoe and Cally, I did actually go to college. I didn’t like to talk about it because it’s one of the few things in my life I can’t spin as ironic.

I dropped out before I graduated--but it was Yale I went to. I’d dreamed of going there since I was a kid, and I got a full scholarship to study English Literature with a focus on Critical Theory, which was all the rage in the late 80s.

I was ok for the first year. I went to all my classes religiously, had a 4.0 GPA and was the darling of all my professors who all assured me I was going to have a brilliant career following in their footsteps. But something happened my sophomore year that was beyond anything I’d read about in books, aside from fairy tales, which I only knew how to analyze for what they said about the culture they came from. I had no clue what to do when I actually started living one.

In my case I guess it was Sleeping Beauty, except for the beauty part, although I did have raven colored hair, ruby-red lips, and skin white as snow like the princesses always did in fairy tales.
Anyway, right after daylight savings time in late October, as the days grew shorter, I stopped getting out of bed, meaning I slept all day as well as all night, meaning I also stopped reading books and writing papers, meaning I failed all my classes and would have been kicked out of Yale if I hadn’t quit. The last paper I wrote was on Daniel Deronda and was a total failure since I hadn’t read the book.

Deep in the winter of my discontent, it came to me—what I had to do to wake up. On an afternoon where I cracked my eyes open to find myself in a dark-paneled, Gothic dorm room drowning in musty light I heard the words that saved me: “This life doesn’t belong to you,” wafted into the delicate spirals of my ears by the wings of a butterfly who had slipped through the heating ducts, radiant with the promise of secrets revealed if I was brave enough to follow it.
I closed my eyes once, then again, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it was there every time I opened them, my eyelids fluttering like its jewel-toned wings, kaleidoscopic with color that lured me away with the ultimate fool’s gold—the promise that I could really be rescued.

Of course at the time I didn’t really realize this. I just wanted to escape somewhere besides sleep. I managed to get out of bed to go home for Christmas break, but when it was time to go back to classes I got on a Greyhound instead and rode it all the way to Key West, where I started my new classes in debauchery and bacchanalia, sometimes drunk enough to try to excuse my behavior by declaring I was a devotee to Dionysus to people who saw triple on a regular basis.

When summer rolled around I headed back North, to Block Island, this tiny seven mile island off the coast of Rhode Island that most Rhode Islanders hadn’t even been to. It was also full of professional drinkers, though they were less sybaritic than their Key West counterparts since this was New England we’re talking about, but I didn’t mind because the money was good, the beaches glorious, and nobody judged me for not doing something with my life because none of them were either. Well, some of the people we served did, but we just made fun of them for selling their souls for money when we, who cleaned their houses and bussed their tables littered with lobster shells, were free, our souls untainted by corruption, though we started the day with a Bloody Mary so our hands wouldn’t shake in front of the customers.

Back and forth I went, year after year, listening to my parents say “you’re not getting any younger, you know,” but I didn’t believe them because I knew exactly when it was time to go. I left when the butterflies came.

They arrived on the first cool breeze from the north that drifted toward the island from Canada sometime around the end of September when the goldenrod was in full bloom. If you stood at the edge of the clay bluffs on the south side of the island and looked out over the open ocean toward Portugal you might be the first to see one. After that, you couldn’t miss them. They were everywhere—drafting on the breeze kicked up by the ferry, fluttering around the heads of the last holdouts drinking frozen drinks on porch bars; clinging to screen doors and windshield wipers; and of course, they had all the flowers covered, especially the goldenrod, which if you looked closely was where they slept, napping on the stems in the sunlight, wings tucked close to camouflage their flame color.

Monarch butterflies--flocks of them drifting on the arctic air to a legendary pine forest high in the mountains of Mexico. Well, a legend to me at least. One of these days I was going to make it there myself.

It was my favorite time of the year—that time between staying and going. That time was like the moment before you catch what you know is going to be a wave that will bring you all the way to shore. You see it out beyond a couple of waves you know could give you a decent ride and wait, turning into it and paddling head down in complete trust that it will take you. When it comes, you know it’s what you’ve been waiting for your whole life. You hear a voice that says, “Look up! Look up!” and you are no longer lonely, for there right next to you is one unbelievably, delicate butterfly, catching the wave on gilded wings that flash against the sea spume.

Some of them do drown. The wrack is littered with their waterlogged bodies, tangled up in dried rockweed, picked over by seagulls, jumping with sand fleas.

I tried not to think about that sight, but that night, after Zoe and Cally left, I couldn’t get the image of all those crumpled antennae and waterlogged wings out of my mind.

I hadn’t told them, but as well as being the anniversary of the Moonwalk, it was also exactly one year ago tonight that I quit drinking, except for that one little slip up with the bartender and his worm, which I couldn’t forget, try as I might. My palms were still scarred from the broken glass I’d gripped when the mirror had cracked underneath my fingers.

Getting “sober” they called it. I should have been at an AA receiving my one year
chip, but I’d dropped out after six months. I just couldn’t say “Hi, I’m Minerva and I’m an alcoholic,” without feeling like a liar. I’ll admit, I was a drunk, but I had too much faith in the power of words to keep labeling myself something I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. Besides, I hadn’t been tempted at all by that shot of zambucca Zoe had wanted to buy me.

It was going to be a long rest of the night, I was thinking, when out of the blue the phone rang. It was my mother, calling to see if I was all right, which she never did, especially at two in the morning. Usually we just chatted about whatever had gone on at our respective jobs or what our friends were doing at our scheduled time every other week, so I was surprised she would ask me a direct question about my life.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again before hanging up.

“I’m fine, Mom. Really. I just can’t sleep.”

“Must be genetic. I can’t either. It gets worse when you get older.”

“Doesn’t everything?”

After we hung up I was left with the ceiling fan and the refrigerator who didn’t seem possessed by magical bees or demons or whatever I’d convinced myself was out to get me. They were just regular electrical appliances draining the life out of the planet.

Did you know there’s no sound on the moon? It’s a vacuum. No sound, no wind, no erosion. Ghosts could speak and throw bricks around and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you saw where they landed. They could terrify people by howling like banshees, warning them of their impending deaths.

The astronauts said they found no signs of life when they’d landed there forty years ago, but they could have been lying. They could have fallen under its spell. Or it could mean they just couldn’t see the life that was there because there senses were too dull. I know this is sounding pretty out there for a self-proclaimed, jaded cynic, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just beyond the edge of my eyes the astronauts had missed, something silent that was trying to speak but couldn’t because it was trapped in a vacuum. Something that was trying to suck me into its hungry mouth, growing fat on my suppressed sadness, while I grew brittle and sharp as a sickle.

I walked over to the stack of milk crates where I kept my record collection to see if there was anything that would snap me out of this mood. I must really be freaking people out if my mom is calling me in the middle of the night. Zoe’s whole Sylvia Plath thing had me kind of freaked out about myself.

When I was a kid I loved collecting things—shells, stamps, feathers, stones. I threw them all away the summer I was sixteen, except the stamps which I stuck on postcards and envelopes for the next ten years in odd combinations that must have either puzzled or delighted whoever received them. I didn’t know. I sent them to people I found in the phone book. I felt kind of bad when I thought about them now. I hoped the shells, with the sound of the sea inside them, were still sighing wherever they’d ended up, that the stones hadn’t been crushed into gravel, and that the feathers had managed to drift out of the landfill and fly back to the clouds. Part of the reason behind my new collection was to make up for what I’d done to the first. I figured if I forced myself to collect what I was most scared of those things I’d thrown away might find a little rest and leave me alone.

I was hoping that listening to songs about my greatest fear would help me exorcise it, or at least understand the hold it had on me. I was also convinced this could only happen if I heard the songs on vinyl. There was something about the scratch of the needle when I dropped it in its groove, something about that moment before the song started where I came so close to understanding my fear I could feel it shiver through my bones that could never be replaced by a cold, slick laser that was also used to slice into eyes and other delicate organs.

It was a decent way to pass the night. I might even have done it now and then if I was normal and not an insomniac who had to find ways to pass the time besides agonizing about her own personal apocalypse and the state of the world. I learned so much about the moon from those records you might have said I was an expert on her moods. Sometimes she was benevolent like Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” sometimes cruel like “The Killing Moon” of Echo & The Bunnymen. I learned about moon shadows from Cat Stevens and how to moondance from Van Morrison, and how to walk on the moon from The Police. I learned what a little moonlight can do from Billie Holiday and how moonlight in Vermont looked shining on the sycamores, and how sad it was when your love proved untrue and left you blue under a blue moon of Kentucky.
I saw you standing alone there under a blue moon, too. You were even sadder than me, though not as frightened of being alone; though Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the saddest of all, drowning in that melancholy moonriver.

When I got to this song I always broke down, feeling the weight of my unlived life—you’re off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see, Holly strummed on her guitar on the fire escape, still fooling us she believed she could have it all. But we knew. We knew there was a Bad Moon Rising and we’d never see her again. Not unless we surrendered to The Dark Side of the Moon. I still had a couple I hadn’t even played yet. “Sister Moon” by Sting and REM’s “Man on the Moon,” but I was done fooling myself and there was no one to convince otherwise. I couldn’t even make it back to the sofa. I lay down on the hard, painted floor. A weight settled on my chest, pressing all the air from my lungs. My ribs cracked, bells splintered the humid night, ice-cold. My blood would stop flowing soon.

The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is on the grass. Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs. Got to keep the loonies on the path. The lunatic is in the hall. The lunatics are in my hall. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more. And if the dam breaks open many years too soon And if there is no room upon the hill And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. The lunatic is in my head. The lunatic is in my head You raise the blade, you make the change You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane. You lock the door And throw away the key There's someone in my head but it's not me. And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear You shout and no one seems to hear. And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

You know what seemed really strange to me now, but which seemed normal when it was happening, was that I knew who Michael Jackson was talking about without him actually saying the name out loud. When he asked me if I knew who he was, he wasn’t asking me if I knew who Michael Jackson was. And when he asked me to save him he wasn’t pleading with me to save him from the overdose that had killed him, like maybe a ghost would have. I knew who he was talking about because I’d been waiting for him for forty years to finally catch up with me.
The Man in the Moon. The thunder in my ear. The someone in my head that wasn’t me.

He’d let me off the hook that first time--why, I didn’t know. He could have crept back in through the slats of the shades when my mom finally pulled me from her breast and left me squirming in my cradle. Now I saw I’d been spared for a reason. Now it was time for me to pay back the boon granted me forty years ago. The only thing I couldn’t remember was what would happen if I didn’t, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to find out.

Moonwalker, Chap. 7 (a short one)

“Sooooo,” Zoe and Cally said as one.

We were back in my apartment in Fox Point. I was stretched out on my beloved sofa, they were snuggled together in the love seat my mother had given me, probably in the hopes I’d finally settle down and “find somebody” now that I had actually signed a lease.

I didn’t answer. It was so quiet in the apartment the hum of the refrigerator sounded like a freight train and the ceiling fan like a hive of swarming bees. These weren’t very interesting metaphors, but I was tired and past the point of trying to come up with something clever or useful. I was too shocked at what had just happened, although I think I’d blathered on about what had happened in the Accord on the way home, so by now they must both think I was a lunatic, which would be quite an accomplishment considering their standards.

“So?” Zoe finally asked again in one syllable, letting me know she was really worried.

“Minnie?” I knew she was sincere since she didn’t call me Minerva. “What’s with all the owls around here?”

“Non-sequitur. Stick to the point,” Cally reprimanded her.

“Like you ever do, Miss Mad Scientist. No, I’m really curious. How can you stand being around something you’ve told me you don’t like? Why don’t you just get rid of them?”

“It was my mom’s idea. House-warming party. My head is killing me. Did I do something I’m going to regret?

“You don’t remember?” Zoe said with a little too much eagerness in her voice.

“Remember what?”

“Falling into the moon like William Blake,” Cally informed me. “Or at least that’s what you said when you came to. It just looked like you passed out in the confetti to me.”

“Falling into the moon…” I remembered. I was just hoping they’d forgotten. “What else do you want to know about me and my owls?” I asked, hoping to lead them away from the gathering evidence of my insanity. “The housewarming party was really for my mom. She was so excited I finally got my own apartment she convinced me to have one. It was supposed to be kind of like a wedding shower where you get everything you’ll need for the rest of your life, only all of her friends couldn’t figure out what I needed. I think they’d all grown so used to thinking me of as impractical they couldn’t imagine I’d need a blender and a toaster. I ended up with a bunch of figurines.”

“Well here’s a potholder at least,” Cally said, holding up one my mom’s friend Mrs. Finkelstein crocheted herself.

Cally was really pretty, I thought, watching her put my dishes away from across the room. She’d make a good wife. Except she was a physicist. She knew way more than me about the nature of the universe. I’d have to ask her some questions when I woke up from this dream. Zoe was sleeping with a genius. I wondered if they were better or worse in bed than the dodos I’d been in love with.

She and Zoe always debated which last name they were going to take when they got married. Zoe wanted it to be hers because then Cally would have to go by Cally McCallister, which she thought was really funny. I know McCallister is a strange name for a Chinese family, but they’d adopted it when they moved to the States. It had been the name of their foster family assigned to them by the Catholic Church. To this day, St. Patrick’s Day was Zoe’s favorite holiday, she insisted. “Chinese New Year’s too loud. The fireworks burst my eardrums once.” Cally didn’t think it sounded very professional. “What happens when I win the Nobel Prize? It’s going to sound so ridiculous everyone will think it’s a joke and I’ll show up at the awards ceremony and they won’t let me in because nobody named Cally McCallister could possibly be a genius.”

“Well our other choice isn’t so great either,” Zoe sighed.

“You mean you don’t like Weiner?”

“We’re lesbians! We can’t be named after the tool of the oppressor!”

“But you like dildos.”

“That’s because they’re not attached to a male body.”

“Marriage is so bourgeois,” I sneered from the luxury of my couch.

“You must be feeling better,” Cally joked.

“Except for the bruises on my throat,” I said, touching the hollow where Michael’s fingers had choked me.

“Bruises? Let me see. You didn’t tell the cop that. Zoe, come look at this. She’s not making it up. Those are finger marks on her throat. Unbelievable.”

“So you didn’t believe me?”

“Well, Zoe told me you’ve been kind of depressed lately.”

“So I staged my own abduction and passed out in Kennedy Plaza in the confetti snowdrifts? You’ve got a high opinion of me. I didn’t know.”

“Sometimes depressed people act out. You know, do things to get attention.”

“Funny, I thought we just lay around on our couches.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You ever been to Madagascar, Cally?”

“What does that have to do with all of this?”

“That’s where the dodo bird was from.”

“Aren’t those the birds that were so tame they walked right up to the sailors who beat them over the heads with clubs?” said Zoe. Sometimes she surprised me.

“Tame or stupid?” I asked them both.

“What do you think?” They sort of answered.

“All I’m gonna say, is the dodo is extinct.” I walked them to the door and we hugged—a group hug, all three of us shoulder to shoulder, foreheads touching. They didn’t ruin it by saying “This is how the Maori kiss.”

Zoe turned back halfway down the stairs. I was still standing there, behind the closed door, but I didn’t answer when she asked, “How are you going to do it?” I wanted to tell her about the blue butterfly I’d seen traveling across the moon when I’d looked up and met his hollow, drugged-out eyes, but I knew if I did she might get sucked in too. All I had to do was follow it. I didn’t want her to follow me. It would be extinct soon.

“It was forty years ago today,” Michael Jackson’s falsetto blew through my burned out skull. “Forty years ago they first walked on the moon.” They were gone. Once again, I was talking to myself.

Forty years ago today, probably right about now, my mother was running down the hall toward me, her breasts leaking a trail of milk across my universe I was still following.

I fell asleep crying, wondering where the tin soldier wearing one sequined glove had ridden off to, where I would ever find enough flowers to satisfy the butterflies now that they were all gone.

Moonwalker, Chapter 6

Waterfire is supposed to be a spectacle in the grand sense of the word, Providence’s own version of Carnevale in Venice, when masked revelers roamed the streets in thrall to the Lord of Misrule who encouraged them to trade their morals for licentious encounters in torch-lit, slippery alleys lining the murky canals. It didn’t quite translate. Even though Providence was a mob city, it was still New England. Not even the goombahs who supposedly kissed the “Pope’s” ring in secret, back-room ceremonies on The Hill (that’s Federal Hill, the epicenter of Italian epicurean delight which welcomed visitors with a neon golden pineapple at the beginning of Atwell’s Avenue), could maintain the illusion for too long. Eventually it became obvious that the mysterious masked courtesans were really strippers at The Foxy Lady pulling in a little cash before their next shift at the “Legs and Eggs” brunch. A couple of guys I’d known from my past life as a barfly clued me in, only because I promised not to tell anyone about what went on in the back of that limo they shared with a prominent city official who shall remain unnamed. I may scoff at the urban legends of what went on in those backrooms on Federal Hill, but even I had a healthy respect for the Pope.

Everybody at Chaos was always going on about how “magical” it was, but I knew it wasn’t really magic. The fires were gas and came out of metal burners that ran through the river like a giant stove.

Supposedly there were musicians and acrobats and all sorts of performers to entertain the masses, but I didn’t really know since I’d never gone, which means I just made all of the above up. I have a fertile imagination, don’t I? Zoe tells me I’m not a liar, I just spend too much time alone. “You have a special gift for storytelling.”

As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times already, I rarely venture out of my apartment once the sun’s gone down. I guess that would make me the opposite of a vampire, except I don’t sleep all night in a coffin. I lie awake on my sofa wondering if the bunny in the moon is going to nibble off my ears and toes.

The whole thing was the brainchild of the city’s disgraced mayor Buddy Cianci, who’d gone to jail twice (so far.) The first time for paying someone to burn the man who’d cuckolded him (isn’t that the greatest word?), as in put the horns on (where did that come from?) with cigarettes, the second for some kind of racketeering, which was pretty crazy because everybody knew that it was pretty much socially acceptable in Rhode Island to be financially corrupt.

Anyway, the city loved Buddy and Buddy loved the city so he came up with ideas like converting the old, abandoned mills from when the textile industry had been huge here into lofts for artists so the RISD students would stick around after graduation and make Providence into an “arts destination,” which had kind of worked. Zoe was here, and there were lots of students who stayed now instead of moving to poseur-filled, expensive New York City, although I had the sneaking suspicion that the reason was because they couldn’t make it there. You know how that song goes so I won’t inflict the grotesqueness of Frank Sinatra on you. Talk about the male gaze. The Rat Pack blows.

“I’d rather stay here where I can be the only one with Japanese kites painted all over my Accord.” Zoe had decided to turn her car into a moveable art project.

There were also lots of punks and anarchists burrowed into warehouses all over the city. They came and dumpster-dived behind the coffeehouse. I liked them and decided I wanted to be just like them when I grew up. My parents were going to be thrilled.

As I was saying, Buddy loved a good party. They say he didn’t stay home one night the entire time he was mayor. If he wasn’t invited to a party, he made one happen, and Waterfire was the crowning jewel on his tiramisu.

I’ll admit, it was better than something really lame like the Superbowl. I was glad Buddy hadn’t pushed for a major sports franchise in the city. Providence didn’t even have one team of its own. The closest thing we had was the Pawsox, the farm team for the Boston Red Sox in Pawtucket, the next dump over. And to give him credit--it wasn’t so easy to set the river on fire since almost everybody had forgotten about it in the first place.

Some progressive soul had gotten the idea at some point in the recent past before people cared about view sheds and quality of life, let alone the health of our planet’s water, to pave it over. Actually, I think it was when they built I-95 right through the city, forever destroying the downtown skyline and dooming its citizens to face a fire-breathing dragon who choked their dreams with exhaust fumes.

Buddy ripped the pavement off and freed the river. Too bad the “Free Buddy” campaign to have him released from jail early didn’t work, too. He served out his jail time in New Jersey somewhere, but was back now hosting a radio talk show. The Free Buddy t-shirts were collectors’ items with both hipsters and regular folks. I even had one myself.

There were also lots of Portuguese in Providence. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t really tell the difference between Portuguese and Italians, but that’s what happens when you grow up in Connecticut. Supposedly my neighborhood Fox Point was settled by Portuguese and Cape Verdean fishermen, but I hadn’t seen anyone but a couple of forlorn looking Hmong wandering down toward Narragansett Bay with fishing poles, carrying a bucket between them. Now, they were easy to identify since they were Asian.

I knew they were Hmong because this crazy guy who sleeps on the street told me, but I’ll get to him a little bit later. I still have no clue what a Cape Verdean looks like. If it wasn’t for him I’d probably think they were Thai because there were a couple of really good Thai restaurants in the city I loved to go to for a cheap lunch.

Despite my best intentions, I’ll have to admit that my first reaction to the whole scene when Zoe and I finally found a parking space and joined the throngs on the sidewalk was that it was kind of romantic.

Well-groomed couples strolled with their arms around each others’ waists, some trailing delighted children behind them slurping Del’s Lemonade, the Rhode Island version of a smoothie that rotted your teeth and gave you brain freeze, but you didn’t care because it tasted so good. Clam cakes were like that, too. They sunk in your gut like lead tied to a fishing pole, but you didn’t care because you knew all the grease they were fried in would give you the runs.

Girls with big hair and high heels from Warwick who clearly hadn’t realized the 80s went out of style, well--in the 80s, promenaded to impress the boys with gel-slicked hair and collared shirts, no sneakers. That was the dress code in the hottest club downtown where they had go-go girls dancing in stage in giant birdcages. At least that’s what Zoe had told me. “I went down and filmed them one night with my friend for an installation he was working on. They did it for free. They all said they loved the gold body paint. ‘Gilded Cage,’ was the name of the installation.”

“How original.”

“He got an A. The professor loved it.

“Man?"

“Yup. Talk about the male gaze, right?”

As we strolled down the sidewalk I wondered if everyone thought we were lesbians. I kind of hoped so, as long as we didn’t get harassed or beat up or that some friend of my parents would see me and phone my mother, who was convinced I was one anyway. Just last week she’d asked me again if I had something to tell her, and I knew she wasn’t asking if I was pregnant, which was the big worry way back in high school. Now that it looked like she’d never get grandchildren out of me, I bet she wished I had gotten knocked up in 11th grade.

“Want a coffee milk?” I asked my adorable date. I needed a distraction from mulling over my failed life and coffee milk was one of my favorites. I shepherded Zoe into the corner diner we were just passing, famous for its Rhode Island culinary delicacies.

Coffee milk, also known as a cabinet, was something you either loved like mother’s milk or loathed. I have no idea why it’s also known as a cabinet, so don’t ask me. Sometimes it’s best just to surrender to the mystery, also applicable to clam cakes. It was best not to wonder just where the clams were in all that dough, especially best not to contemplate when they’d last changed the fryalator grease.

Whenever I drank that first sickly sweet sip I felt complete. After that I felt sick and usually threw the rest away, trying not to think about what my mother would say. She was a big one for making sure I finished everything on my plate. Not because it was a waste, but because it was good discipline, a remnant of her time in the army. After awhile, punishment and reward felt the same, which meant I had some pretty major food issues as well as being an alcoholic. See, I said it. Just don’t tell the doomsayers at AA. “Once an addict, always an addict,” was not going to apply to me. Future tense noted.

“Yuck,” was her gracious answer. “I can’t believe you drink that swill. It probably has high fructose corn syrup in it.” Zoe was a coffee snob and health freak, which kind of seemed like an oxymoron to me. I guess, working in a coffee shop, I was supposed to be one too, but there were some things in life I couldn’t give up or get over, whatever the case may be.

“Wouldn’t you rather stop somewhere with a little atmosphere and have an espresso with a shot of zambucca?”

“I don’t drink. Remember?”

“Oh--right.” She got that worried look on her face that said I forget sometimes how crazy you are. I knew she was thinking about that one time I had got drunk with her. I’d never told her what happened when I’d told her to go. I would make my own way home. “Well, you could just have the espresso and we could pretend we’re in Italy.”

I had to admit, if you squinted, or didn’t wear your glasses if you wore them in the first place, that the river at that moment did look a little like a Venetian canal. There were even gondolas plying its glowing surface, ferrying “lovers” up and down. I think some of them might have been actors, but some might have been real people out on a first date or having a special anniversary. There was even an old couple who looked especially romantic. They must have been actors, because nobody that had been married that long could possibly sit through a boat ride down the whole river without getting in a fight. The wife obligingly proved us right by whacking her mate over the head with her fan. “Hands off!” she shrieked.

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,” Zoe sang. Sometimes her whole “life is a cabaret” routine was pretty amusing.

For a moment I wished I had someone to go for a boat ride with besides Zoe, who wasn’t even single. Her girlfriend Cally was supposed to meet us at the Moonwalk exhibition. She was some kind of grad student at Brown. I wasn’t sure what she studied because I felt so pathetic listening to her career plans that I never asked, or just tuned her out whenever she started talking about whatever she studied, or developed, or whatever fabulous thing she was doing to make the world a better place for all humanity, which wasn’t to say I didn’t like her. As one of my two friends, I thought she was great.

“We are the World. We are the children,” hummed Zoe. “Hey, remember when his hair caught fire?”

“Who?”

“Michael Jackson! I mean honestly, Minerva.”

“Minnie.”

“I’ll only call you that if you trade clothes with me.”

“Not happening.”

“I wouldn’t want to walk around in that uniform you wear anyway.”

She was right. I kind of did wear the same thing everyday, depending on the season. Right now in summer it was a black tank top and dark gray “yogini” pants with a pair of Reefs. I may have moved to the city, but I still couldn’t give up the flip-flops I’d worn for the past twenty years on the beach, and I doubted if any real yoginis wore sustainable fiber drawstring capri-length pants, I think they practiced in saris, which I wanted to tell the pushy clerk in pursuit of a commission, but sometimes even I got tired of questioning every little thing. I justified the seventy-five bucks I’d shelled out for them by wearing them everyday, but I didn’t namaste her back on my way out. She came in the coffeehouse. She was a bad tipper.

“And we really should do something about your hair, too--maybe some layers or something.”

All of a sudden my long, black, one-length hair I’d flipped and let fall over my eyes, that boys had gripped and sniffed and run their fingers through, felt like the heaviest burden in the world. I must look like a crow, or maybe even worse, a vulture. No wonder I couldn’t get a date, although the idea of dating horrified me. I’d always been the kind to fall in love at first sight and move in with the guy the next day.

“Hey! Watch out!” Zoe exclaimed, grabbing me by the elbow and pulling me off the curb into the street. “What a jackass! He almost set your hair on fire!”

I had been trying to get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the windows of the bar we’d been strolling past to see if I really did look as bad as I felt and had almost stumbled right into a fire dancer.

“It’s not his fault,” I said, stepping back up onto the sidewalk.

“Yeah, it was. He came right at you. It looked like on purpose to me.” Both of us walked to the corner and looked in both directions, but the fire dancer was gone.

“You almost caught on fire, just like M.J.!” Now that I actually hadn’t gone up in flames, Zoe couldn’t have sounded more delighted at what had almost happened.

“When did that happen again?”

“Back in the 80s. You don’t remember? You were in your prime then, girl.”

“I beg your pardon.” I said. Not that I didn’t think she was right. Well, maybe 1991 was the year I peaked.

“Do I remind you of a crow? I had to ask.

“Where did that come from? I thought you were into owls?”

“How many times do I have to tell you I can’t stand them?”

“Not enough, I guess. I’ll have to return the salt & pepper shakers I got you for your birthday.”

“My birthday’s not until December.”

“I like to plan ahead.”

“Yeah, right. Me too. And someday we’ll both have 401ks and health insurance.” We both laughed at that and kept on walking with the crowd down toward Kennedy Plaza where the Moonwalkers were supposed to converge for the big dance-athon.

“Ok, so I know I was the one who was in my prime in the 80s, but could you fill me in on this whole Michael Jackson thing?”

“I can’t believe you weren’t into Michael. Didn’t you even like The Jackson Five? Remember “ABC, Easy as 1,2,3?” How could any kid resist. We used to dance to it in gym class to help us learn our alphabet.”

“You went to a city school. In the suburbs we did the Hustle. There weren’t a whole lot of words. Anyway, I was more into The Partridge Family. I wanted to be a hippie. I refused to feather my hair like Farrah Fawcett and everybody made fun of me.”

“Wow, she’s dead, too, sounds like we’ve got some synchronicity flowing here.”

“Dream on. It’s all coincidence. Nothing means anything. And I promise I’ll cut my hair but you have to come to the salon with me and make sure I don’t end up with bangs above my eyebrows. None of that hipster shit for me.”

“Oh, yeah—so Michael was filming this commercial for Pepsi. It was the first time a celebrity endorsed a product like that on TV,” she continued like a newscaster back from a commercial break, “when his hair just exploded in flames. He was so into his dancing that he didn’t even notice until some other dancers or crewmembers, I don’t know, came running and started beating it out.”

“Is that where he came up with the idea for ‘Beat It’?”

“Omigod. That is so sick, besides being totally ignorant. Michael didn’t become The King of Pop until after Thriller and everybody knows “Beat It” is on Thriller. You really don’t know anything, do you!

“I know you secretly suspect me of not missing an episode of Entertaiment Tonight for the past twenty years, but I’ve actually been really busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading People Magazine.”

“That’s awesome.”

“So you believe me when I say I don’t have a clue about Michael Jackson?”

“No, but that’s ok because I like telling this story.”

“How many times have you told it this week?”

“Well Cally’s getting a little sick of it, so I guess that would probably mean about thirty.”

“She must have a high tolerance for pain.”

“You don’t even know.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Are you sure about that?” She and Cally were convinced all my troubles would fade away if I would only become a lesbian. They liked to freak me out with tales of lesbian escapades like fisting. They were probably right. It must be nice not to have to worry that some guy wasn’t going to tell you the reason he couldn’t keep it up was because your pussy was too loose. Sorry, sometimes I just couldn’t help the flashbacks from my life in a bottle.

“Well, a long time ago this beautiful black boy was born who could sing like an angel. He was proud of his heritage and grew his hair into an afro. His name was Michael Jackson and the world loved him so much they would do whatever he wanted, so these evil corporate demons who wanted to rule the world paid him a lot of money so he could build a place called Neverland where he could live and never grow up if he would dance and sing like Mr. Bojangles and convince the world that they didn’t really like Coke better, they liked Pepsi!”

“Amazing,” was all I could say. She was really getting into it now. She’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and people had to step around us. “Keep going.”

“Well he secretly blamed his afro for catching fire and burning his scalp and causing him so much pain. If it had been shorter and silkier instead of as wiry as a brillo pad that could scrape catfish skin of a grill maybe it wouldn’t have burned so crazy and he might have noticed it sooner before he had to get beaten on the head by a bunch of backup dancers. As he lay in the hospital drugged on painkillers, he decided he didn’t want to be black anymore so he started wearing silky wigs and weaves, he bleached his skin ever whiter year after year, and had cosmetic surgery on his nose and lips so he could look just like his soulmate Diana Ross.”

“I thought Elizabeth Taylor was his soulmate.”

“Aha! I knew you really did read People!”

“Well, maybe I’ve glanced at it a few times. Was it Elizabeth Taylor or not?”

“No, everybody thinks that but it was really that chimpanzee that he brought to the Academy Awards. What was its name?”

“Bubbles.”

“No comment. Or maybe Emmanuelle Lewis. That little guy who used to sit on Michael’s lap when he was like fourteen.”

“You mean Webster?”

“We’re gonna get in trouble!” Zoe laughed. “I think we better stop going there before someone overhears us and beats us down. Come on. I want to see the Moonwalkers. I bet they started already.”

I linked my arm in hers and we flowed back into the crowd flooding into Kennedy Plaza.

“You know, nothing’s ever hopeless,” Zoe mused as we strolled along. “As long as our imaginations are free we can create whatever we want. I think that’s what Michael was always trying to say.”

“He was?” Maybe I should have paid more attention to him. I’d kind of tuned out after “Beat It” and the misogynistic “Billie Jean,” but come to think of it, Paul McCartney had been friends with him and I loved The Beatles. They’d done that song together—“Ebony and Ivory.” Oh wait--that was Steview Wonder. Screw that theory. Anyway, I liked that song. I wanted to live in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard. Who didn’t, besides skinheads and Republicans. Oh Lord, why can’t we? I thought, suddenly looking forward to seeing the Moonwalkers. Maybe there was some magic afoot tonight.

Well, Zoe and I were feeling it at least, arm in arm as we walked down the first level of stairs into the plaza. Even though we were there to celebrate a dead guy, the mood of the crowd was upbeat. Cally stepped out of the ring of people and skipped over to us. She may have been a grad student at Brown, but not even she could resist being twee. She was tall and blonde, but somehow it worked for her, too. Both my new friends knew that being cute would get them much farther in life than being gloomy like me.

“Look at all The Michaels!” Callie crowed in delight. How come when she crowed it sounded cute instead of the croak that came out of me?

She and Zoe were always so happy to see each other, even when they’d only been apart a few hours. They had this annoyingly endearing habit of standing forehead to forehead and rubbing noses. “This is how the Maori kiss!” They’d say in unison. People just melted when they saw them, even homophobic ones I bet. They were very non-threatening lesbians. Of course, if I crossed over to their side I would end up with a bull-leather-dyke as a girlfriend who would terrify everyone so even less people would talk to me. I’m not even going to go into the boys that I’ve dated over the years. Notice, though I’m 40, I don’t say men, because I’m pretty sure I’ve never dated anyone in that category.

“Come on. They’re just about to start.”

Zoe and Cally and all their cuteness weaseled a way right up to the front of the crowd. I tried to follow, but ended up stuck in the middle where I couldn’t see anything. Annoyed with myself, I decided to assert my right to see the Moonwalk and began to elbow my way toward the front.

“Excuse me,” I pushed, glaring at anyone who tried to protest. “Hey, Lady!” said one guy with a trophy girlfriend dangling off his arm.


“Hey what?” I challenged him back like I was saying something really threatening. To my surprise he let me pass. It hurt when he called me lady, but I told myself the sting was going to be worth it when I got to the front and had the best view in the crowd when he couldn’t even see past his girlfriend’s fake boobs. I don’t know why women wear high heels. They’re ruined your feet and you end up towering over your shrimp of a boyfriend. Then again, maybe I should reconsider, but if my feet were ruined, I wouldn’t be able to run away.

I’ll have to admit, like those few moments when I’d watched the gondoliers on the river and thought I was in Venice, that the whole scene we’d just entered was a little wondrous. There were big white globes on all the street lights with cutouts of the moon’s face and they’d passed out sparkly silver confetti that everyone was tossing in the air. There was so much it looked like it was snowing and already the ground was covered in swirls of silver. Some kids and even a few grown-ups had lain down and were making snow angels.

In the center of the circle we’d formed, were all varieties of Michael Jacksons. Male, female, short, tall, young, old. A guy in a wheelchair. A fat lady with an afro. Hipsters in leisure suits from Savers who knew that Off The Wall was by far the best of his records. Little kid Michaels (black and white, another good M.J. tune), even a girl dressed up like The Scarecrow from The Wiz. Her boyfriend was Diana Ross as Dorothy. She even had a fluffy little dog under her arm playing the part of Toto. I laughed when I recognized one of my customers from Chaos under a wig, face painted kabuki-white, eyes lined in black, lips in scarlet, with that five-o’clock shadow Michael sometimes had that was so confusing. He was wearing one of those military jackets with the gold epaulets Michael wore at his peak, and of course the one glove. Lots of people with one glove. I kind of wished I had one. Of course, being America, there was a guy selling them, but I wasn’t going to spend my hard earned money on something as frivolous as sequins, even if I was feeling a little dizzy with delight.

As I watched them all start to dance--some of them pretty decent, most of them not-- it came over me, remembering those videos in high school—yes, despite what I told Zoe, I did watch MTV— Michael Jackson could really groove. I mean, he was an amazing dancer, almost right up there with Fred Astaire, though I don’t think Michael could dance on the ceiling like Fred in “Royal Wedding.” Neither could Lionel Richie, who was the favorite entertainer of that high school boyfriend I mentioned earlier who got me to do whatever he wanted by bribing me with fuzzy navels. Not to say that I could dance on the ceiling, but I did hang from a fan the night he serenaded me with “Stuck on You.” He wanted to see just how stuck he could get to a certain part of my anatomy. It might have worked better if he hadn’t been standing on a waterbed that remarkably didn’t pop when we both went flying. Besides, videos were all special effects. Fred had real magic, we had bong hits, booze, and sometimes cocaine we snorted from mirrors in the locked room at parties which nobody mentioned, but everyone wanted to get into.

It was almost like Michael wasn’t really here on earth--like he was just floating over the surface--and I saw suddenly, that that was what the Moonwalk was all about. He was showing us his soul when he did that dance, just a few backwards sliding steps that showed the world that even though he was stuck in a body like us, he could escape whenever he wanted.

Well, maybe not quite. Or maybe he just forgot when he left the stage.

He wouldn’t have needed all those painkillers if he’d remembered. I thought about that zambucca with espresso Zoe wanted me to drink with her earlier and wondered if it would have kept me up all night or put me to sleep, if it really would have been Ok to have just one shot.
I also saw, watching the little kids dance around, that there was no way he was a child molester. Peter Pan would never have allowed that to happen in Neverland. He and Wendy would have vanquished any molesters before they messed with Tinkerbelle just like the way they threw Captain Hook to the crocodiles. It was ok not to want to grow up. The earth made no sense at all, while everything in Neverland did. In Neverland the butterflies had an infinite supply of flowers to eat and Peter and Wendy never looked at each other with the longing I had seen on my own face for so many years now I closed my eyes when I looked in the mirror. I was never going to fall in love again--at least until I learned how to Moonwalk and could truly escape.

As the crowd grooved along with the Moonwalkers, I found I couldn’t hold still myself. I actually forgot where I was for a few moments until I looked up and there was this guy trying to dance with me. He seemed really familiar, but I couldn’t place him. It was hard to get a look at his face because his hat was pulled down over his eyes. He’d cut out two holes for his eyes which sparked at me before shooting away across the plaza. Before I could figure out who he was he was gone and I was trying to scream, but nothing came out of my mouth but dried moth wing’s and moondust.

Someone was dragging me down the stone stairs that led toward the bus stop that took people to the airport. Elbows pinned to my back, wrists held in one hand, the other on the back of my neck. I stumbled, head down. “Minerva,” a voice said. My name fluttered in the air between us then dropped to the ground where it disintegrated.

“You know who I am, right?”

I nodded.

“You know it’s your job to save me?”

I nodded.

“You know what will happen if you don’t?”

I nodded.

“One small step for man, one giant step for mankind. They never think about who they’re stepping on, do they?”

And then I dropped, too. Falling into the mouth of the moon like William Blake.

BLAKE: Pray, Mr Taylor, did you ever find yourself, as it were, standing close beside
the vast and luminous moon?

TAYLOR: Not that I remember. Mr Blake: did you ever?

BLAKE: Yes, frequently; and I have felt an almost irresistible desire to throw myself
into it headlong.

TAYLOR: I think, Mr Blake, you had better not: for if you were to do so, you most
probably would never come out of it again.

When I woke up Zoe and Cally were explaining to the police that I hadn’t had anything to drink. “I did try to get her to have an espresso with zambucca, but she’s not a boozer.” Zoe was rambling on, charming the cop with the old-fashioned word for drunk, “All she wanted was coffee milk.”

“A cabinet,” Cally added as if to assure the officer of her credibility.

“Where did you say you work again?” the cop asked, checking their IDs. I couldn’t blame him because it seemed hard to believe one of them worked at Brown, though who knows what he made of Zoe. Most of the locals thought RISD students were rich, spoiled brats, but she was pretty hard to resist, especially when she talked in her squeaky voice. “Brown University, physics department,” Cally answered, which answered my question as to what she studied, which I remember thinking I needed to remember because I really liked her and it wasn’t pc to be jealous of intelligent blondes as I drifted back to sleep in the confetti that had now formed deep drifts in Kennedy Plaza.

“Well, you girls just take her home now and let her sleep it off,” the cop said, releasing us. I’m sure we were entertaining, but there must have been real criminals out there for him to catch, like the man who had almost scared me to death. The man who sat side by side at the piano keyboard with Paul McCartney, who must have been wearing a wig because his hair had burned, who lined his eyes and wore lipstick that highlighted his five-o’clock shadow. The man with epaulets on his shoulders, who had pinned my arms with one hand, demanding I save him with his other on my windpipe, crushing the air from my throat until I passed out. He left behind one sequin-studded glove to remind me: Don’t try to escape. I’ll be looking down.

Moonwalker, Chap. 5

“Boy am I glad you answered, Minerva. I was just about to send the firemen over to break down the door of your apartment.”

“You could just climb up the fire escape and come in through the window.”

“I know, but I get nervous I’ll find you with your head in the oven like Sylvia Plath. You’ve been in such a bad mood, lately.”

“Wow. That’s either an over-exaggeration or an understatement. I guess I better start practicing mood control."

I just couldn’t get off the sofa. It was the first one I’d actually owned in my life and as I mentioned before, I was forty. I even slept on it because I didn’t have a bed yet, just a blow-up mattress on the floor in the “bedroom,” whose quotation marks reproached me every time I said the word. My life was pathetic, especially to a twenty-two year old who had her whole future before her. I wasn’t sure why Zoe wanted to hang out with me so much, especially since I hadn’t said yes once to one of her invitations. I just thought most art was either bullshit or disheartening and had enough of both in my life. I even told Zoe what I thought, but she was convinced she was going to convert me into a hipster.

“You just need to loosen up and stop taking everything so seriously,” she informed me.

“But that’s what all these so-called artists do!” I protested.

“See, you have more in common than you thought!”

“Minerva,” she declaimed in her most inspirational oratory tone, “Goddess of Wisdom, I summon you to my side tonight to walk through the sacred fire of Delphi where our futures shall be revealed!”

“I think you’re confusing me with the Pythia, Zoe,” I replied. “She’s a snake goddess. I’m the goddess of wisdom, not some crazy oracle. Owls, not snakes. Hoot, hoot.”

“Sssssorry,” she hissed back. “I just work in a coffee shop,” our favorite inside joke. It came in handy whenever a customer tried to cross the line and ask us what we were going to do when we graduated. When Zoe said it, it was still cute because she had just graduated, although her RISD degree in textiles hadn’t exactly attracted job recruiters to her door. Still, she was a pixie and people were willing to excuse her impertinence. I just got bad tips and indignant looks. It was impossible to be cute at forty, although Zoe assured me I was “ageless,” without saying what we both knew, ageless was another way of saying I could look any age at all. I’ll let you be the guess of which end of the spectrum I fall on.Whatever else could be said of me, I did not look ironic. More like tragic. I had black hair and skin that was so pale it didn’t tan, even though I’d spent my whole life so far in the sun without sunscreen. I was so pale people sometimes called me Snow White and hummed Someday My Prince Will Come when I got that glazed look on my face which made me seem like I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. (I wasn’t) Zoe and I were a regular Magic Kingdom because she looked a lot like Minnie Mouse. Of course she was going for the look, which clearly worked for her. Cute got you a lot farther in than life than tragic.

She wore short little skirts, hand-painted with polka dots and cat-eyed glasses, though she drew the line at ears, which were only for special occasions like sushi dinners and karaoke. Zoe was Chinese, but for some reason she wouldn’t explain, was obsessed with Japanese culture. “I keep telling my parents I must have had a past life as a samurai,” she confided in me the first time I met her, “but they insist I’m just trying to rebel. I tell them it’s about time somebody in our family did. They say quiet, you’ll kill your grandmother, but I figure if she survived Chairman Mao, she’ll survive me. Don’t you think so? I mean, she was a part of a real tragedy. What she went through puts Sylvia Plath’s misery to shame. Sylvia should have been embarrassed to kill herself. What’s a little psychological abuse? Nobody tried to actually kill her.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Sorry.”

“I didn’t say that was a bad thing.”

I hadn’t felt tragic all these years, just slightly unglued. It was like gravity didn’t have the same affect on me that it had on the rest of humanity. I told myself I had gypsy blood, which was a great way to seduce guys to go upstairs with me and get it on in garishly lit bathrooms at parties of people I didn’t know. This pretty much guaranteed that nobody I seduced was going to stick around, which was fine with me. I preferred to travel alone, which meant I wasn’t a real gypsy because they never left the tribe and those shaggy ponies that pulled their carts from town to town. In my solitude, I was more like a pilgrim on a quest, although I had no idea what I was looking for because I had no destination.

What was tragic was the gander I got of myself in the polished chrome reflection of the espresso machine as I steamed and foamed milk for the unapologetically exuberant and youthful students who stumbled down Wickenden each morning before heading off to class. My face was no longer thin, it was gaunt, and worse than that, I had wrinkles. You can call them crow’s feet or smile lines, but after awhile it becomes undeniable: I was old. Fortunately Zoe took orders and rang people up most of the time, so our tips were still pretty good. Providence was a cheap city, but it was still hard to make a decent living getting people high on sugar and foam. I should have been a bartender, but that would have meant going out at night, which as I’d begun to mention, was a problem. Plus, I kind of had a “history” with alcohol I was trying to rewrite, so working in a bar didn’t seem like the greatest life plan at the moment.

“Well then—hoot!” Zoe laughed into the phone. “Don’t you at least want to know the future?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, come on!”

“When you get to be my age you’ll understand why it’s best not to know.”

“That’s your excuse for not having any fun!”

“You call milling around while a bunch of horny, sexist guidos check us out fun? I told you. I’m over being objectified by the male gaze. I just don’t want to deal with that shit anymore.”

“Are you sure you didn’t secretly go to college?” I had spent long hours explaining feminist literary theory to her. She found it hard to believe that I actually read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan without being forced to.

“Remember, you went to art school. They’re not supposed to teach you anything useful. That’s what artists are for—to be useless.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it."

"Why’s that again? I can’t seem to remember anything these days. Must be because I don’t use my brain in any useful ways.”

“Yeah, deconstructing everything that comes out of my mouth definitely isn’t useful.”

“Especially since you don’t give a shit about the male gaze. I wish I’d been born a lesbian and never internalized these stupid cultural expectations in the first place. You’re lucky.”

“Shhhh, don’t say that out loud, my parents might hear you.”

“You still haven’t come out to them yet?”

“Nope. They think Cally is my ‘roommate.’”

“You’re going to have to tell them eventually. Do you really want to live with the pressure of them not knowing? What happens when you get married and have those raisinheads you’re always sentimentalizing?”

“Raisinheads?”

“Because they look so shriveled up and wrinkled when they come out.”

“You’re so cynical! Kids are cute!”

“You obviously didn’t baby sit much growing up. Once you change your first 100 diapers you’ll realize they’re nothing but little, squirming tubes of poop and puke. Are you just not going to invite them to the wedding?”

“Well, considering we still live in a barbaric society where gay marriage isn’t legal I don’t have to worry too much, do I?”

“Yeah, but that’s going to change soon.”

“May wonders never cease. Do I detect a note of optimism in your voice? This calls for a celebration. Waterfire here we come!”

Zoe may have joked, but her parents had scrimped and saved for years to send her to the college of her choice and were none too thrilled with her decision to be a textile designer. I knew the pressure to please them had to affect her because she kept giving them hope by telling them she was going to audition soon for Project Runway.

"They love Heidi Klum,” she told me. “She so tall,” my mother say, “So blonde. Why you not marry blonde American, Zongying?” Zongying was her real name, which, in that great American tradition, had been butchered by the Ellis Island of grade school. Zoe made fun of her mom, but Zongying was dutiful, calling three times a week at the assigned time after her mother’s mah jong tournament, before her father’s evening stroll around the block in the suburb of Detroit where they’d finally bought their dream house after years of living in an inner city apartment.

“One of these days I’ll do the right thing and make her proud of me,” I actually heard her say once beneath the sound of steaming milk. “I wonder why they left China in the first place? Life would have been so much easier. My sister never would have heard The White Stripes and shaved her head and bought me that first dildo. Did I ever tell you it was a rabbit? The ears rub on your clit while you fuck yourself with the body.”“Too much information, Zongying.”“Sorry. I forgot you’re still a virgin. If we’d stayed in China my sister and I could have saved our poverty-stricken parents by becoming Wal-Mart factory slaves because we wouldn’t have known any better. They couldn’t be disappointed in us then.”

“What’s your sister up to these days?"

"She’s a junkie in San Francisco.”

“Are you serious?”

“No,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her.“I wonder if they wish we’d never been born?” she continued. I thought of my own parents probably sitting down to eat dinner in front of Charlie Gibson right now. Once I’d left home they’d stopped eating at the table, which I didn’t miss at all the couple of times a year I visited them, except for Christmas, which was an ordeal I approached with the enthusiasm of a soldier being sent to the front lines. Christmas was a minefield where we all lost a limb every year. Sometimes an eye or an ear, too. It was a wonder we were still walking and talking, but maybe that’s how it goes if you just deny your wounds.

“Minnie, come out with me,” she pleaded. “It’s Waterfire tonight. The fires are really bright and sometimes people light sparklers, and there are even fire-eaters and hot guys spinning poi, not that I care cuz I’m a lesbian thank goddess, which is probably why I don’t care about the stupid male gaze you’re always blathering on about.”

“Not always!”

“Well, just sometimes, but you’re always staying in your apartment when you could be out having a good time meeting someone.”

“I don’t want to meet someone.”

“Whatever. Everybody wants to meet someone. I don’t care what you say. I’m making you get out of that apartment tonight. I mean there’s going to be a special demonstration of Moonwalkers in remembrance of Michael Jackson. How could you miss that? Don’t you want to see people walk on the moon?”

Like probably everyone else on the planet, I was aware that Michael Jackson had died a month ago. Even though I didn’t have a TV I still knew an amazing amount about pop culture from working at Chaos, where pop culture was ironic, therefore cool.

“I can’t stand Michael Jackson.”

“Oh, come on,” she pleaded. “How can you hate Michael?”

“You didn’t have to listen to him in the 80s. I mean “Beat It,” and that stupid “Thriller” video that was on MTV all the time. Anybody cool was into Duran Duran back then.”

“Uh—I find that hard to believe, Minerva.”

“Well, ok, anybody cool in my lame town.” Zoe had been lucky because she had an older sister who was a lesbian first and started a punk rock band. She even gave her her first dildo when she turned “sweet” sixteen. She’d been into The White Stripes, an actually cool band, before anyone outside Detroit knew who they were, which, by the way, was another line I’d heard used countless times to convey hipster credibility. You know. “I saw them back when they played so and so dive before they sold out and got famous.”It was always cooler to be into someone before they hit it big. Anyway, the point of this diatribe is to let you know that even though I hadn’t been a Michael Jackson fan in the 1980s, my love for Duran Duran’s “Reflex” and “Rio” was a clear indicator that I wasn’t ever cool.

“Oh, come on. I know you cried when you first heard ‘We Are the World.’ You told me that one time I managed to drag you out and get you drunk.”

“Is that that song where Bob Dylan lowers himself to singing in the same song with Kenny Loggins?”I had told her that. It was the last time I’d been out of the apartment past dark. Bad idea. I’d been so scared I couldn’t resist the shots of Patron the bartender kept pouring, laughing when I howled at the worm right before I swallowed it. Later that night, fucking me up against the mirror behind the bar, he panted in my ear, loca, loca, as my reflection shattered in my fingers.

“We are the World. We Are the Children,” she sang. Loca, Loca. I had to forget or I would be crazy. I had to be crazy to forget. I won’t tell you how the limp worm tasted on my tongue. You either know, or you don’t. Zoe definitely didn’t know. Listen to her, trying to lure me out of the oven, convinced I was as possessed by my demons as Sylvia Plath. If I wasn’t half convinced myself, I’d take it as a compliment.“What’s the next line, Minerva? If you tell me, I’ll let you wear my polka dot skirt.”

“I don’t want to,” I whined.

“Speak up. I no understand English so good.”

“It’s time to make a better world, so let’s start living?” I grumbled. Emphasis on question mark, spoken, not sung. I would have referenced James Bond, but I had a feeling twenty-two year old art school lesbians didn’t know or care squat about martinis or Moonraker.

"Giviiiiinnnng. Not liviiinnnng. One mo time Missy!”

“Can’t you get in trouble with your people for making fun of them like that?”

“What? Speak up! I no understand English so good. We meet on dark side of moon, right?”

That was a definite wrong if I had anything to say about it, which it seemed I didn’t. Zoe sang like a little kid who doesn’t know and couldn’t care less how bad she sounded. “There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives. It’s time to make a better world…”

I couldn’t resist. She was just so damn cute. I opened my mouth and my vocal chords expanded to swallow the rising moon as it came up over the horizon on Narragansett Bay which I couldn’t see from my window—the bay that is—the moon could stalk me anywhere without my knowledge. I expected to die at every moment, which might have been why I let the words pour from my mouth.

"Just you and me!"

Yes, I sang. And I actually felt that exclamation point as it exploded between my lips like the worm I’d said I’d forgotten a month ago.

“Ok, Goddess Minerva. Pick you right up. Wait for me on the street. I can be in Fox Point in ten minutes.”

Moonwalker, Chapter 4

“Minerva?”

“Yes, Mom,” I droned. I knew I should have been more polite but I just didn’t have it in me to hear another lecture about how I needed to get down to Mr. Sleep and check out the mattress and box-spring sale that was about to end soon.

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped sleeping on a futon on the floor?” she asked just about every time we talked on the phone.

“Those sales are always just about to end,” I muttered. I sounded sullen even to myself.

“I just thought you might like to get a comfortable night’s sleep for once,” she said, close to tears.
Shit, I’m an asshole, I thought--my standard reply to myself. My mom knew I had trouble sleeping. I didn’t bother telling her it was the moon that kept me awake. She’d just try to convince my to take Prozac like when I told her that Block Island was going to be flooded by a tsunami and everyone there was going to drown. I’d dreamed it one night when I had actually managed to sleep, so I knew it was true. That was the basic difference between us in a nutshell. I loved that phrase. Whenever I saw it I saw a world just like ours inside a walnut waiting for the right person to crack it open and realize it was just as real as this one right here where I was about to get in another pointless argument with my mother.

“I just want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do.” That’s how all our conversations ended.
“Neither do I,” is how I usually ended the conversation, but today I said, “Mom, I bought a sofa. I’m sleeping a lot better, I promise. It’s really not that bad here.” Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t sleeping and I hated Providence, where I’d finally decided to “settle down,” mostly because I was too depressed to get another job now that the island coffeehouse where I’d worked for the past ten years had been sold to a rabble of Del’s lemonade slurping semi-mobsters who only hired people in “the family.” I wasn’t sure if that meant actual relations, or people in the mob, but wasn’t about to stick around and find out. It may have only been a coffeehouse, but the Providence mob was notorious, at least in reputation. Nobody I asked could tell me anything the mobsters actually did besides go to strip clubs like The Foxy Lady and eat rare steaks and raw oysters on Federal Hill, but if they were anything like the mobsters on TV I thought it was best not to get tangled up with them, even as a peon. Also, I had my standards. I only worked for Bohemians whose focus was on the atmosphere, not the money, though I was always the first one to count the tip jar. I just made sure I looked really casual while doing it and not desperate to pay my rent which was the actual truth. Actually, it was true that I’d bought a sofa, so I wasn’t totally lying to my mother.

I felt bad for my parents. I always had. I remember being a kid and wondering what they’d done to get stuck with me. I may have looked like a typical four year old, but there was something as ancient and patient about my little face upturned to the clouds which cast a shadow on my forehead in the only photo I’ve kept from my childhood. Some kind of unexplainable, earned wrinkles like the ones around the eyes of a Galapagos turtle waiting in the crater of an extinct volcano for Darwin to make it to the top and claim its wisdom as his own without a protest, or even an attempt to defend myself by crawling away to hide behind a stone. Maybe I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t remember. All I know is that when I look at that photo I saw two things--that girl knew things I don’t know now and needed to remember, and that I don’t in even the most remote way feel connected to her at all. I could be looking at some other kid or a baby orangutan, who was probably a lot cuter.

Something had slipped under my shell and sliced it right off, leaving my tenderness exposed. I lay there on Darwin’s ship, flipped on my back, legs wiggling in the salt air on that voyage into the unknown. My tears fell upside down toward the sky, even though they appeared to obey the laws of gravity in which water falls to nourish life on the ground.

So here I a, at 40, trying to settle down, still arguing with my mother about stupid little things that represent the gigantic disappointment I’ve turned out to be, still with no clue who I am and why I’ve been dropped on this planet, wishing I’d be transported off to one where there is no gravity and we are weightless, hovering above the surface without a care in the world. That's the world I want to live in. I bet that's where I’d be able to find myself.

It certainly isn't in the boxes my mom insisted I finally get out of her basement. The one time I opened them I had no recollection of having lettered in field hockey or of winning an Easter Bunny coloring contest sponsored by a toy store in third grade, of starring in a play as King Pythias in fifth, and I had definitely blanked out going to the prom dressed in a silver lamé puff-sleeved gown like an 80s Cinderella.

I definitely didn’t want to remember having sex with my boyfriend in a white tuxedo who posed with his hands on my waist like he owned me, which he did. I did whatever he wanted, fueled by cases of Piels Light and fuzzy navels. He thought it was him I couldn’t resist, but I knew it was the Peachtree Schnapps. I had to tell myself this, or I wouldn’t have survived the dead zone of degradation that spawned me, an eighteen year old existentialist already expert at sliding off a barstool.

Now, looking at the one memory of my childhood I wanted to hold onto—that photo—I see another story. The shadow between my brows that branded me as a seeker, that part of me that couldn’t be caught in time but shifted across my skin which hadn’t yet freckled after years of unprotected sun exposure. The shadow that told the world I would never be satisfied to settle down. The mark of the beast, I laughed to myself when I saw it. I’d been branded from the very beginning.

Not with anything as obvious as the devil’s 666, not with anything harsh or ugly, nothing demonic or even bold like so many of the tattoos my generation had etched into their skin to mark their identities in the world, I bore the weight of wings, both heavy and delicate, traced in light between my eyebrows, rising just above my unfocused eyes, tilted toward the clouds.
I don’t know if I was unaware of the camera or running toward it. All I can see is my longing to take flight and the belief that it was possible.

That’s what I need right now. I need to know if I can fly above the banal mess I’ve made of my life and get away from it all. I have a feeling if I don't, I'm going to wither away into dust the old lady in the apartment below me will sweep up and dump out the window.

And I need you to help me. Help me remember who I am and why I ended up in this apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with the blinds down. I’m inviting you to look into the eyes of my soul etched on my forehead along with sunspots and two lines between my brows. I’m saying look, here’s a butterfly just emerged from its silk cocoon, flapping its wet wings as the light streams down through the gaps in the green glow of the leaves it ate as a caterpillar, before it had wrapped itself in darkness without knowing it would be able to find its way back out.

My eyes, still unfocused sometimes, still shine green as those long-lost leaves. And they know a thing or two about jungles, which surprises me, since I’ve never been south of the equator. How did I learn how to wait in a tree through the day’s heat until the tiny deer whose back legs are longer than its front steps down to the river? How did I learn to puncture its brain with one bite so it died without knowing what I’d done? How did I know where to bury its body so no one else would find it, and to fall asleep in a tree afterwards, letting brilliant, blue butterflies land on my black fur? Who painted eyes on my wings, turning me into a waking dreamer?

In that photo, I am reaching toward a light I don’t remember. What I do remember was the shadow my daisy-clad body cast on the clover behind me, caught in time by the camera. I wish I could remember who snapped that photo so I could ask if that butterfly had been invisible or waiting all these years for me to find it.

If I ever found that person--when, I corrected myself, lying on my couch with the blinds pulled tight against the moon--I would ask for the reason beyond the reason--what broke the light? Where did the flowers go?

Moonwalker, Chapter 3

That uphill ride was good for my imagination. I found it was much easier on the thighs and lungs if I let my mind drift somewhere else. Pedaling downhill was another matter. To begin with, I didn’t pedal, I just coasted, sometimes with my feet off to the sides, other times no-handed. Downhill was when the daredevil side of me came out. Zoe was always amazed when I arrived in one piece. She was usually waiting for me on the porch to let her in because she only lived a block away and actually liked getting up before the sun rose.

“Hello? Earth to Minerva. You’re supposed to be in charge here, remember,” she said to me.

“The creamers are empty again and you forgot to tell me to fill them.”

“Oh, sorry, right.” I came out of my reverie much faster than I wanted to into the jangle of jazz and caffeinated nerves that was Café Chaos, to face a bemused customer, although he may have actually been annoyed that the creamers were yet again empty. Bemused may have been an optimistic assessment on my part, but my expertise at avoidance put him at ease as I filled the creamers myself. I still hadn’t gotten used to being a manager after years of being a peon, but somehow when I’d applied for this lastest in a long string of coffeehouse jobs I’d ended up an authority figure. Granted, my staff consisted of one wholeheartedly bemused twenty-two year old art-school graduate named Zoe, but it was still quite a step up according to some people’s standards, namely my parents who where thrilled at how I was rising up in the world. I’d worked in coffeehouses so long we weren’t called baristas when I started out, we were counter help. Even though I thought the new title was pretentious I didn’t mind since baristas got way more tips.

“Uh, Zoe, can you brew some more Monsoon Malabar?” I told her. Some of the new names were absurd, too, but I had to admit it was more fun than just saying boring old Colombian all day long, although I’m sure Colombians aren’t boring at all. I’d actually heard it was a great country to visit these days now that the crime rate was somewhat down, although I had met a guy who’d told me he’d been stabbed in the back by guerillas with a machete when he was hiking in the jungle. But he’d survived and had the time of his life when he finally made it to Cartagena. Showed me the photos on his digital camera. The glare of the white sand hurt my eyes so much I had to stay out of the sun for a couple of days, which was unusual for me. I’d spent my whole life trying to avoid bad weather, migrating from north to south with the seasons like a brightly colored bird.

“Yes, boss,” Zoe said. Not only was she wholeheartedly bemused, she was wholeheartedly ironic, like most of her generation. She was Y to my X. We Generation X-ers had missed out on the bemused part, which I was kind of mad about. I think I would have had a lot easier time if I’d been able to laugh at myself and this entire, ridiculous world. I secretly thought she should be my boss because I could tell I had a lot to learn from her, but the owner had been thrilled when an “adult” had applied for the job. Those quotation marks around “adult” are ironic because even though I’m forty years old, I’m far from grown up. Just ask my mother and father or anyone else who’s watched me flounder through life for the past twenty years.

“You go back to daydreaming. That’s more important than any old monsoon.” Zoe and I had quickly developed a rapport based on obscure associations that nobody else understood unless they’d worked in a twenty-first century coffeehouse.

“Right, good job,” I told her. “I trust you.” That was saying a lot for me. I didn’t trust many people. I drifted back into that bubble where for one whole summer the neighbors’ son and I, separated by age, but somehow closer than anyone else on our oak-shaded block, stretched out on our twin beds listening to green acorns drop, suspended in the sadness spun by those two weary songs he played over and over again on his record player, lifting up the needle with the one finger he had the energy to move.

I thought he was an old man, but he was probably all of nineteen, which now that I’m 40 seems absurdly young. How could he have known all that he did at that age? Or maybe, like me, he was born knowing and had to forget it all.

At the end of the summer he disappeared with my childhood. To everyone else I still looked like a four year old kid running barefoot through clover in my daisy-print party dress, playing red light, green light with the other kids on the front lawns of the neighborhood. I came into bed when my parents called me even though it was still light out. I let them tuck me into bed and kiss me good night, but under the covers where I listened to the crickets chirp and then go suddenly silent, watching the moon move across the empty walls of my room, my childhood was gone. I don’t know how to explain it. One day I was dancing in the sun, the next I was hiding in the shadows, lost on the dark side of the moon.

“Where do you go when you get that look on your face?” Zoe asked me as we took out the trash just before we went home.

“Nowhere,” I answered. I’d been lost so long, I didn’t want to be found.

Moonwalker, Chapter 2

“We didn’t study Vietnam in school. Pretty much all I know is from Life magazine. That picture of the girl on fire running down a dirt road—you must have seen it?”

One of our favorite customers had just left the café, although he wasn’t exactly a paying one. He was bi-polar and basically homeless, smelled to high-heaven like b.o., wet wool, (why did homeless people wear wool in summer? I just couldn’t fathom how they could stand their own smell, let alone how I felt about it) and dread locks, which could smell kind of alluring on hot Rasta-guys, or even hippies who sometimes bathed, or at least doused themselves with patchouli. He sat in the corner all day most days, at the same table, and I let Zoe give him free coffee.

“He’s a Vietnam vet,” she told me. “We should give him free coffee.”

“Did he tell you that?” I’d never heard him speak.

“No. But it’s obvious.” I

wasn’t sure how it was obvious, but I felt sorry for the guy and let him drink free all day. Better here than a bar, I thought. Besides, he had a habit of rearing up like a fire-breathing dragon whenever anyone really snippety approached the counter, someone who you knew was going to hassle us for the attention, those types that viewed anyone who served them as someone they could dump their thwarted anger on. Anyway, Zoe had got me to thinking about Vietnam, which led to my asking her if she knew that picture from Life.

“Never seen it,” she answered, throwing back her thirteenth espresso shot of the day. She always shot for thirteen because that was her lucky number. I wasn’t supposed to let her have more than three a day, but I wasn’t very good at bossing anyone around.

“I keep forgetting you’re only twenty-two, probably because I can’t handle that we have the same job.”

“You’re my boss.”

"When’s the last time I bossed you around?”

“How old are you again?”

“Forty.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. It’s a pretty famous picture. Are you sure you haven’t see it? Just what do they teach you these days in school?”

“I wouldn’t know. I went to art school.”

That was Zoe’s stock excuse for just about everything. I’d only known her a month but I’d heard her use it at least once a day since we’d started working together. It was kind of frustrating, but I had to admit useful. I kept meaning to come up with a stock answer myself for why I was a 40 year old barista, so I wouldn’t seem so sullen whenever someone asked me what I was going to do with my life like serving coffee wasn’t doing something. Since when did you become so concerned with the deeper meaning of life, I wanted to say to them with a sneer. Do you realize that coffee you’re drinking was probably harvested by a child slave and that cup you’re going to throw away when you walk out of here is burying our planet? We supposedly only served organic fair-trade, but I had my suspicions. I didn’t trust anybody. There was no excuse for the disposable cups. The owner kept saying he was going to get biodegradable ones, but I don’t see what difference it would make. It was too late. The world was choking and even if somebody figured out how to the Heimlich maneuver on Planet Earth, we’d just end up polluting space with all the junk we’ve consumed and thrown away.

“My parents were in Vietnam. They met there. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor. Pretty crazy, right? My mom got pregnant with me right after they got married so she could get out of the Army. They made you quit back then when you were pregnant. In the good old, sexist days. Way better than now. Now they make women shoot people in Iraq.”

“I don’t think they make them.”

“Well, let them then. What a way to prove yourself.”

“Come on, those girls are defending our country!”

“No comment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you want us all to be communists?”

“Wasn’t that your government’s plan? That girl in the photo looks a lot like you, you know.” Zoe was Chinese, not Vietnamese, but I thought this would get her attention, loop her back into our storytelling, the only real pleasure I found in working in a coffeehouse. She drifted off easily due to her habit of looking at herself in mirrors she didn’t even pretend to hide. “Look at me. I’m so cute,” she liked to tell herself. My insult didn’t work. She had her earphones in and was on her way out the door.

“Bye,” she said, too loud because she couldn’t hear herself. I flipped the lights off and locked the door, stepping out onto the uneven cobbles of Wickenden Street where I’d locked my bike to a lamppost. Somebody was going to steal it one of these days—I only had a cheap lock that could be snipped with wire cutters, but so far, so good. Nobody would want my bike anyway. It was a clunker—a beach cruiser from my former life covered in stickers from all the bands I’d seen when I was younger and thought it was fun to ride home drunk at three in the morning. Pedaling it uphill to my apartment in Fox Point was brutal.

Despite how little I knew, the war was the shadow I played in as a child, even though it looked like I was just counting clovers under the rhododendron in front of our raised ranch house. My ears pricked up a like a dog’s anytime I heard the word “Vietnam” on the radio, or on the TV, which I was only allowed to watch if I’d cleaned my plate like a good girl of Shake ‘n Bake or Hamburger Helper. An only child enamored with the large Brady Bunch, I developed a hearty appetite for the artificial, and though they thought I was too young to be affected by the images on the CBS Evening News, I knew that when Walter Cronkite came on each night to announce the latest body count, that there was something seriously amok in the world.

And when our next door neighbors’ son came home from “overseas,” not to come out of his bedroom for the rest of my childhood, I knew my parents had secrets they weren’t telling me, secrets that must have been so terrible there wasn’t a manual on how to tell them. Not even the authority figures could figure it out.

My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house. They couldn’t hear his record player like I could through my open window, so they never understood why my favorite songs were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and “One Tin Soldier.”

I’ve retained this taste for melancholy melodies to this day and I still will only listen to music on a record player. I scour thrift shop bins for songs about the moon that I play all night, hoping I’ll figure out what it wants from me so I can finally sleep. I’ve never forgotten those hours when the space between me and the neighbors’ son was filled with lost flowers and a tin soldier riding away from hope. I leaned on the windowsill, looking to his window where the white gauze curtains never moved, even when it was windy. I wished he would open them and look back and tell me we were going to find the flowers, but when he finally did I took my wish back.

His face was so gaunt and pale I thought it was a skeleton at first. He had ripped the curtains off. It lay on the ground beneath his window like an empty ghost. The only prayer I knew was “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” but I knew that wasn’t enough to keep me from the truth I saw in his eyes, ice-blue like a wolf’s, shadowed by black lashes and bruised by an exhaustion that couldn’t be relieved by sleep.

I wouldn’t understand what I saw until I was much older. Snakes and chains, young girls burning; bodies facedown in mud, fertile with organ-blood and brains. A world without singing or music of any kind, shocked into silence, afraid of the sound of its own heartbeat.

Eyes wide open, seeing everything I wasn’t supposed to see. This is what “Vietnam” meant. No wonder my parents kept silent. So did I. I became afraid of the sound of my own heartbeat. I might have disappeared from the world right then if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know why he did it, knowing what he knew—how the stories really ended, but he opened his mouth and a song poured out. It was a song that could be seen, not heard. I saw the notes become images of children clustered around the feet of a storyteller in a village where all the houses were made from gingerbread like in a fairy tale—a beautiful woman whose hair flowed free like a hippie’s to her waist. She wore bells on her ankles, feather earrings, and her long skirts brushed the ground.

She sang:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
“Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.

I didn’t learn any of this in school, I wanted to tell Zoe, but she was already out of sight. She and her girlfriend only lived a block away and said the neighborhood was great. “All our friends from college still live here.” I didn’t have any friends from college, or any from anywhere else really, and I didn’t know my neighbors, who I don’t think wanted to know me. I lived on a block that was so quiet it felt like everyone was hiding from snipers or vampires, although it was probably the police. There were a lot of pit bulls and four-in-the-morning screams followed by silence, that was unnerving, to say the least. I even heard a gunshot last week, but didn’t tell anybody, especially my mother who was so happy I’d finally signed a year-long lease.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after…
One tin soldier rides away.

There had been a soldier next door, but no kings or mountains in my suburban neighborhood, or treasure I was aware of, which didn’t stop me from wondering if there was one buried in the swamp behind our house; and there wasn’t a valley filled with greedy people, just normal Americans trying to make a living. It was just a street of raised ranches in the Connecticut woods, still quiet enough the other side hadn’t yet been developed. I wasn’t allowed to play there, and I didn’t. I was a good girl.