It was in the Speed Queen that I met my first lover, the only man who ever really understood me and my wild ways. Probably I fell for his enormous nose, which somehow instinctively I knew to be a sign of virility, jutting from his face like a challenge, an easy target for bums and gentlemen alike. The Speed Queen was on M Street, which was just down from where I lived in a cold yellow room over a record store, where punks hung out and sometimes managed, by breaking the lock on a door labeled `Private,' to get up to my place and spray paint and beat on my door. I lived just outside Georgetown, down the street from the brick shopping gallerie, and even I sometimes felt like a rat in a mansion, a little carrier of filth and disease.
My first lover was quite mad and not very clean, but he managed to survive by sleeping under the bridge and by always keeping a thick knife where he could easily reach it (this knife was also a symbol of virility, which I must admit I prize, though a bit less these days, now that my metabolism has slowed and I have come to despise most everyone I meet).
He came to the Speed Queen to get warm and clean himself up a little, which he did by stripping to the waist and plunging his arms into a washing machine that was in the wash cycle. His timing had to be perfect so that no one guarding their clothing would catch him--the germ-encrusted arms of a wild-eyed man are undesirable--and stop him.
On this particular day I had slid for a moment into the coffee shop next door to buy hot chocolate and a donut from the huge woman behind the counter. The place was called `D.C. Eats,' or something. The chocolate in the hot chocolate never dissolved, but stuck in a thick ooze of grainy sweetness at the bottom of the styrofoam cup. (I don't even like donuts but I ordered them for the pleasure of watching her fingers, each of them the size and seeming consistency of candles which are left out in the sun too long, twitter above the donuts, then grab one with the speed of a frog's tongue.) I think she hated me, that donut woman, because my hair was a strange dead blonde color, spattered by orange in places and just beginning to heap into dreadlocks (the spatters weren't on purpose, I'd got into a fight with the woman in the flat above me, and she'd booby-trapped my front door, so actually quite a lot of my body was orange as well). But anyway, about Joe.
I walked back into the Speed Queen just as he was doing the deed--up to his shoulders in my belching and sudsing machine (his hair too--the soap stuck like lace on the tattered ends)--and I said, with a greasy wad of dough in my mouth, "What the fuck are you doing, mister," and he said, "Well, honey, your machine seems to be on the blink, you see this long tie-dyed garment has wrapped its way around the agitator and made a horrible noise and being the manager here I felt it was my duty to intercede." And then I said, "Bullshit," and he said, "Will you marry me," to which I replied, "No, but if you get your arms out of my laundry I will crawl with you behind the dryers and fuck you until you bleed." "I am already bleeding," he said, raising his arms for inspection, and indeed, beneath his right ribcage the blood surged out. "But you are most kind," he said. And so he closed the lid of the machine and we crawled into the space behind the dryers; and it was there that I came to understand that the ways of love are best pursued in rage--which is why I call him my first lover because the two before him were more like brother puppies, to nuzzle for warmth. With Joe I felt the kind of molten heat from which life is formed. And, though it may just have been insanity, the nursing of purple-blue bruises was thrilling to me: I was more of an animal then and could lose myself in the glory of rut.
When we finished, the washing machine was done as well. I told him to come back to my room with me where we would continue if he would help me carry my clothes (seeing as they were wet and I had no money to use the dryers) and not drop any. He came with me, and we hung the clothes on the hooks on the walls or over furniture. He told me I ought never to put my clothes away since they made the place look bright and almost cheery. I opened a can of stewed tomatoes, in preparation of eating them, and said, "What is your name, mister."
"Joseph Cavanaugh Wrigley the Third and what are you doing with those tomatoes?"
"I need vitamin C," I said, and dropped a whole one in my mouth, like the wraith of a jawbreaker.
"I am the son of the largest canned vegetable baron in the country and if you let me eat those with you I will tell you my story."
"Save it for later, mister," I said. "Come take a shower with me and we'll screw on the tiles, but hurry because Kenneth will be here soon and we don't want to make him angry--besides, I thought you said you are the manager of the Speed Queen."
"And who is Kenneth," he asked, stripping once more to the waist and swinging his long hair around to swish heavy over his spine. "Oh, it's not important, only take off your pants please and oh, my you do have a large nose, don't you."
"Take off your clothes," he said.
When we got into the bathroom I said, "It's thrilling and all, but do you really need to keep that knife slung around your waist the whole time," and he said, "Yes. This knife is my woman. I keep her with me always, wrapping her arms around me." And I said sarcastically, "Yeah, what's her name, Betty?" He said nothing, grabbed my hair (which was like a carpet) and dragged me to the shower, turned the water on and pulled me inside. I wasn't nervous at all, only excited and in love.
Jammed against the wall, I heard myself growl, "Kill me, kill me." And he almost did when I grabbed at his knife for the hell of it because I was jealous of the fucker. Joe, water rivulets of grime running down his torso, looked into my eyes and drawled, "Don't you ever, ever, my lamb." Just to prove he meant it, he pulled the blade out and before I could think, flicked me on my hip. I screamed and jumped but the water ran red down my leg. Thinking my scalp would be ripped off, I grabbed for his knees; his other hand was still jammed in my hair.
"You are a fucking maniac," I shrieked, my arms flailing. I sunk my teeth into his thigh, which tasted of hair and water and dirt and soap and a little of blood because he nicked himself too.
He snarled at me, "You animal, my lamb, come up here, I love you."
I stopped and he lifted me up and our two wounds joined and our two bloods ran twisting together down the drain. Then the bitch upstairs pounded on her floor, my ceiling, in objection to the racket we were making. He held me down and I pushed slowly away and knelt. The water streaming down made it hard to breathe. I put my mouth to his hip and sucked the blood and his hands clenched at my head, wrapped with my hair, and then someone started pounding on the front door.
"That's Kenneth." I stood up.
"Doesn't he have a key," he said, then he kneeled down in the warm torrent and sucked the blood from my hip.
"Of course not, he always forgets it." But he was yelling now, we could hear him as we turned off the water.
"Why don't you stay with me," I said.
"Hey, let me in, I know you're in there!" Kenneth yelled on the other side of the door, or rather, Dove did, as they called him on the streets because of his grey clothes and the way he seemed to fly on his skateboard. I could not call him Dove, though, since he was from the suburbs of Northern Virginia and had a thick hard ass and spiked hair and was staying with me because he got the best drugs.
"Sorry, baby, your time is up," I said, dripping and naked at the door. "This is Joseph Cavanaugh Wrigley the Third and he's my lover now." I slammed the door quickly in his face and locked it, when pranced to the window and threw out some things that fluttered to the street; little grey clothes gently winged down.
Kenneth pounded but eventually went away. In the hush beneath the damp and gaudy clothes of my exile, Joseph told me his story: it wasn't very interesting, and I didn't believe him anyway because of the way his eyes gleamed when he told it. But I loved him like a savage, like a bloody brutal beast, and he loved me that way too, hard and fierce and full of lust. I don't know, I guess I was a true beast then or perhaps we became something altogether different from other animals and people. (There in the room we called the hovel of love and fucking, he would tell me stories I did not believe; and I would twist my hair while watching and listening to him until it was a heap of mangy, floating gauze. Our limbs entwined, I stared in awe of his festering tattoos and of the words that poured from his lips.)
He would never sleep there but had to return to the bridge at night. On the floor, I would writhe and plead and beg, but no, no, grab his ankles, no. I grew thinner and thinner, my bones jutting from the shoulders (he liked to call my feet the fans of famine). My cheekbones stuck out too, and he liked them.
"They're like bows," he would say.
"Please don't leave," I'd reply.
Finally I got used to it, except that I would lie in a ball on my mattress, growling his name over and over, gnawing my own arm. Sometimes in my frenzy I would go out and find some horny little spike-haired boy, but Joe always came back. At first, I was jealous of the knife but he kept it with him and soon I didn't care; I loved it as freely as I loved him.
Then one week he didn't come back. I knew he was dead but I couldn't bear to find out. I felt it like a wire had snapped in my head. Suddenly there was less voltage.
I went down to the bridge around sunset when the hobos gathered. Trying to look tough, I took along a tire iron left over from the days of Kenneth, as if it would protect me. I went up to one of the older, thinner men and said, "Where is Joe?"
"Oh, he got into a fight one night, a bunch of punks came looking for him with pipes and such and they finally drug him off and kicked him into the canal." The scream started to rise in me. I knew it because I felt dead.
"No," I said. "No." It took me over and I screamed. The scream wrenched from my body and hammered echoes off the bridge like the savagery of the two of us exploding in me out of me. I pounded at the hobo and then I went to find Kenneth.
I found him and said, "Honey, come back to me." I kissed the new long scar that ran down his face--it was oozing and hadn't healed. When we got home I found another slice around the back of his shoulder over his thick little rock of a bicep. We never said anything about it. I was filled with death and didn't have the energy for revenge. I stayed with him, quietly drinking in (for a week or so) the smell of his slippery sweat, until one night when he was drunk and passed out on the twisted sheets: Suddenly I hated him with the ugly oily wrath of a snake. I slid my tongue over his body for the last time. I got myself drunk and I dug out the knife from where I knew he'd been hiding it. In the shower, alone, I sliced open my old wound again. The hot water made it run red, and I caught the blood in a cup with the water and drank it.
"Here's to you, my dead lover."
I went back into the room. Kenneth didn't even wake up when I walked out to get a bus to take me back home. I walked up to the front door, one morning, knocked, and said, "Mama, Daddy, I'm home and I'm beat and I need you to take me back."
They sent me to a sanitarium for a few weeks, to sit in the sun and bake and let the flesh grow back on my bones. Then they sent me to a nice college where I studied English literature, which I now teach. But I still keep the knife under my pillow. Whenever a new lover comes and wonders about the knife, I say, "Oh, honey, now never you mind. A girl's got to have some kind of protection." Sometimes I think he didn't really die, my first lover, but instead lives inside me. And I think he did that, jumped inside me, because he knew his days were numbered. So when that feeling gets too big, like he's growing too big in there, I just slit the scar open again, let the blood run out, catch it in a cup, and raise it in a toast. I raise it and drink it, still warm, down, because even though I need to get on with my own life, I just can't stand to lose him. I can't let him go.
Susan Bergman, though described by some as a `manic-depressive,' is really quite docile and, in fact, behaves more like a four year old than a psychopath. Her cooking is not exceptional. She is afraid of heights.
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