Prologue...
My daddy wanted me to jump.
I had smoked enough heroin that my blue black hair no longer spoke the sing-song Spanglish of the Puerto Rican woman above us. Each curl played its own tune of cosmic love. I had just turned 13 and it was my first time doped up.
Ma didn't want me to jump and told my father that.
She picked up my turtle crawling on my tights and leotard dangerously close to the roach. I'd heard that reusing your roach gave you a better high. I was a scientist. I read somewhere that Marie Curie had conducted her first experiment at 14 and my plan was to one-up her.
Ma, don't touch my goddamned turtle!
She kept to the edge of my room and we avoided eye contact after she stared at me like I was an alien. Maybe I was.
Angel, I won't have you speak to your mother that way. Now Angel, don't you trust me? I miss and you may haunt me for all of eternity.
My father was a con artist, thief, smuggler, bigamist, an IRA gunrunner. Not that I knew that at 13. At 13 I was a dog, full of intuitive feelings. His love for me, like his love for all his kids, was finite.
I was too pissed at Ma for the fight we had earlier. She threatened to call my father. Oh gawwwdd, I mocked. Call your husband. Do ya even have his number? I snorted.
When he finally did show up I climbed out on the ledge trying to look cool and unaffected. But the sun was pulling orange cotton over the skyline and the street was coming alive the way I loved with its fighters and the lovers. I started laughing. How's Algeria, Da?
My father really had gone to Algeria and to Burma and Cuba. At thirteen it was a bitch having a father who led a more interesting life than you. I'd outgrown the cigars and shrunken heads. I wanted pearls. I wasn't afraid of muggings.
When he didn't bring back pearls or rubies I sulked until a friend of Tim's offered me heroin behind Tim's back. I had seen the junkies all along sixth street. They didn't scare me. They were like feral cats. Yawning and scratching themselves. Heroin was as magical as Gene told me it would be. I felt cool and grown up.
Ma's voice didn't sound like her. Like in a speaker at a drive-thru her voice sounded far away.
I threw my face back and laughed. I was an unrepentant brat. Why do I need to come inside? I'm just talking to my father.
Ma put her lipstick on. It was important to look good no matter the circumstances.
I couldn't find my eyeshadow or blush and found out Persian Melon lipstick works in a jam. I had an eye for style.
Ma! Get your goddamn hands off Kerouac !
My parents would dangle me over the tiger's cage at feeding time if I spoke to them like that.
Ma was a circus performer, a trapeze artist. Like me, she had a real flair for the dramatic.
I whipped around to face her with my pink eyelids and pink cheeks and roared. I wanted to be a tiger. I always loved the tigers the most in the zoo, it was their eyes.
I swear to God Ma I'm jumping off this fucking ledge. I was too stubborn to take it back. I didn't want to hurt myself, at least not in a way that would hurt. My father caught loot bigger than me and was standing below ready to catch me. This might be the only chance I have to jump from a building without being on fire…
Morons prattle about drugs being cowardly, but fear had left my body, and I felt very light.
I floated like an eyelash disemboweled from growling guts.
At least that's how I remember it.
Ma swears it never happened like that. The sky didn't erupt in spastic displays of lavender and yellow, my intestines didn't become jungle vines, my coagulated blood didn't turn into rubies, my body didn't break into one-thousand shards of crystal.
But she had no damn imagination.
That's it Angela, I'm calling Bellevue! Let them deal with you! I'd ask them to perform a lobotomy on you but there's NOTHING UP THERE!
Ma's voice splattered all across the Lower East Side. She spilled out a torrent of curses at my father. My brothers swore they could hear her from miles away.
My father shrugged his shoulders and winked at me. His teeth were very very white, like an alabaster. His eyes sparkled. He was a sailor and he was always leaving.
Down came my comforter and my pillow. I shrieked and cussed. THAT'S FORM ANGELA! Ma's teeth gritted like she was birthing a porcupine. I had lousy form, she told me That's Ma for you. About certain things she was a perfectionist. Her lipstick too was flawless.
Ma didn't send me to the nut house. In the end she took us back to Tulsa.
We were driving a sedan and there was still blood on the instrument panel. There was a dead teen in the front seat before they turned the car into a warning about the danger of teen drinking.
I hope he had his fun. I hope he wasn't trying to 'drown his sorrows' or whatever people do in Oklahoma to turn themselves into a fire and brimstone on their way to becoming a lyric of a sad sack of country-western song.
Having enjoyed holy communion with liquor bottles myself, I was feeling a psychic connection with him and decided his name was Frank.
I didn't tell Curly, but I felt Frank's spirit was still with us. Draped in the backseat, in a prone position, watching the horizon through the window held together by duct tape and wire hangers.
Frank's car did its rounds at Rogers and Central and Hale. I don't know if it made its way to Booker T. It was weird going from NYC to a place that forced kids into segregated schools and that most white people I knew had no problem with it. Our abrupt move from NYC to Tulsa made me feel like I was an alien dropped from one planet to another racist planet.
Before it went to the impound lot my brother paid $100.00 for the car.
No, he didn't mind the blood, Curly said.
He now had a whiskey bottle between his legs and he pulled it up and offered me the bottle. He liked mixing his liquor with pills. He was prudent that way. The alcohol after jacking it up seemed to then even out his electrical wiring, the same way it did for mine.
I'm pregnant, fuck face, I reminded him. I had quit drugs and alcohol. I felt like a goddamned martyr. The thought of having a baby with fins for legs and no brain was interesting but not as enticing as having a baby without fins for legs and with a brain.
Ma was a circus performer so for me normal people were freaks. There were three husbands, four if you count the common-law one, and six kids in twenty years. The first three kids were more or less normal and did things like study to be a nurse, get married and pop out a bunch of babies, and work in construction and pay taxes.
Their averageness tasted like an undercooked hot dog. I couldn't imagine being that dull. I would have to kill myself in a real ho-hum way like slitting my wrists or an overdose of pills while clouds float above like boxcars carrying dull eyed cattle to the slaughterhouse.
The only thing mildly interesting about Ma's three oldest was that our oldest sister, the nurse, was a lesbian. I had desperately tried to become a bisexual but despite my best efforts kissing and petting with my best girl friend Donna Mathews, that pony just wasn't in the saddle for me.
Luckily for our mother her youngest three made up for the mind-crushing boredom of her first three.
I was a married and pregnant drop out in kohl and ratty monkey fur. Big deal. School bored me. We never read anything of interest. The teachers were ugly and lobotomized. To deal, Donna and I popped bennies like candy. We colonized the hallways in our spike heels, short skirts and winged eyeliner. We got suspended on a regular basis. We were your typical east side sluts - that's not how we saw ourselves. In our spikes we broke through the Bardo to become new women. The air was crisper up there.
One day in Algebra I looked out the window. I fiddled with my ring with its huge rock, watched a bluebird and lit a cigarette. The teacher was a misogynist pig who once said girls didn't have a brain for math. He probably read Freud to get a hard-on. He told me to put it out. I refused. He pounced over my desk. I felt like a baby chick in the clutches of a ruddy faced farmer with a Gestapo kink.
Fuck you, I took out that cigarette on the floor and put out the flame with my heel. There were so many scuff marks on the floor nobody would notice the burn marks in a few hours. There was all sorts of commotion. I was used to making a scene. Being a performer was in my blood.
You owe me new shoes, and not no second hand crap either, and next time use Listerine not pig muck for mouth wash, ya pig. Having perfected my B-movie dialogue I threw the heels and walked out of there. I was glad to be rid of those shoes. I looked hot, but they gave me bunions.
I vowed to still live my life on my own terms. Fuck anyone who stood in my way. I repeated this until I sounded like a moron fighting over the last pudding cup at a mental hospital. I went back to reading poetry about dying and sadness or took off in Ted's Camaro and thought about wrapping his car around a tree. But I never did. I didn't want to die.
I wanted to be an egg and go through an escape hatch.
Maybe I looked suicidal or homicidal because Curly almost knocked the Jones' mailbox over and told me to hop in. He was grinning like a maniac. We're getting the hell out of this shithole.
My hair hadn't fully grown back since Mark and Bryon held me down and chopped it off while I was blacked out drunk. It was all things considered a quant assault. They didn't even have the courtesy to offer me LSD. I had supplied my own booze.
We stopped at home first. Curly was the only one still living at home when he wasn't spending the night at County or an extended stay in reform school. Me and Curly were the original inspiration for Hansel and Gretel. Everybody wants their fifteen minutes of fame but our infamy stretches over centuries like a port wine stain.
We weren't lost but that didn't stop Curly from flicking clay beads down the cracked sidewalk. They were the kind of clay beads hippies wore. Despite my image as a vapid girl I was a vapid girl with a soft spot for hippies. I admired their free spirit, free sex and free drugs. I admired them because they drove the rednecks crazy.
Curly took a different approach. In the fall Curly mugged a hippie kid. Kids get mugged in New York all the time. Sometimes by people, sometimes by rats. Sometimes by cockroaches who hardened their hearts and honed their survival skills over the millennia. But this kid was a pal of Bryon's. Curly said it was his fault Bryon went after me. He was really upset. That was dumb. Men and boys think everything is always about them.
I wasn't interested in how Curly acquired the beads. I had more important things on my mind.
I thought I was supposed to get tits, I complained to Ma. I had projectile vomited my boobs and hips off my body. I was a skeleton in jeans. I was so skinny that when I applied my winged eyeliner I flew a few cm off the ground. It made my morning sickness worse but my eyes still looked glamorous – in a 19th century death pose sort of way. I was a martyr damnit!
Maybe I should try to stop bitching. That was Ma's sage advice. She walked the wires 8 months pregnant with Luna.
Fine, I huffed at Ma, take me out to a telephone wire. No wait, you should go first Ma. I'll be there with a bucket of water.
Curly knows telephone wires ya'll can walk, Darry said from under the sink.
My real problem, at least one of them, according to Ma, was my short hair. Ditch the jeans and wear mini skirts. Ma never went out a full face of makeup even in the house. She hated Bryon Douglas with the burn of 10,000 suns because he thought she was my grandmother. Show some leg, you'll look better and feel better honey.
Despite memories of being abandoned in the woods to die, despite being nearly cooked and eaten, despite our fights and our tempers, Ma and I were kindred spirits.
I think I ought to hook up with women. What do you think of that Ma?
You'd never take a chance with anyone prettier than you, Ma snorted, clearly tranquilized.
Nobody's prettier than me, I pouted and felt stupid and offended. Ma nudged Curly. Curly bit his lip and stared straight down. Darry snorted from under the sink. I moved my hand to flip my curls back. There was just air.
I bet you wish Ted was more like Cole. Cole was Mona's husband, he was a Korean War vet and almost played pro football. He looked like a blonde, balding John Wayne. For the longest time I thought he was a pig farmer.
Curly couldn't stand our brother-in-law. Fat ass fucker. He mumbled.
Ma looked at me like I was stupid, why in the hell would I want that? One bald son-in-law is enough.
We stopped in Chicago. We'd planned on driving straight through but I had to pee too much. I turned the empty liquor bottle into a piss poor genie's lamp. It kept on getting darker and darker. I bitched at Curly and I was tired.
I squatted in the weeds near an overpass and peed some more. Curly was holding the liquor bottle of piss leaning over looking for the perfect car to baptize when a voice slurred at Curly for the bottle. Red puffy marks spread across his face like electricity but underneath everything was empty. It was like looking at Curly and me in 20 years.
He wanted his damn drink.
Sick, Curly laughed. He grinned at me and since we're twins it was like reading my face in a mirror turned upside down in a darkened tunnel.
It's piss, I shouted to the man. Then I remember reading about this widow in the Civil War who ran a tavern for convalescing soldiers and when she ran out of all of the ingredients for hillbilly mash she mixed her pee in the drinks and none of the soldiers ever knew the difference. I think there's some plaque dedicated to her in Maryland.
My thoughts were interrupted by snarling. The bum threatened to string me up by my intestines. He sounded like a goat stuck inside a tin can. I laughed and he wasn't a fan of laughter.
He whipped out a buck knife that missed me by centimeters.
In a flash worthy of a 'Time for Heroes' segment on KOTV Curly jumped in front of me, drew his own switchblade, kicked the knife out of the bum's hand, kicked his face with his boot causing a waterfall of blood to gush from his nose and mouth. The bottle flew away with a thud. I grabbed the buck knife for myself.
You okay Angel?
I smiled like Miss. America with a buck knife. C'mon let's beat it, I got this fucker's knife.
Curly kicked him in his ribs, ran to the Sedan yelling at me to come with.
The guy was howling and bitching. He sounded like one of those baboons on those educational nature shows. That's not an insult. Monkeys are our closest relatives.
Gimme that, he mumbled pointing at nothing. He mumbled something about slitting me like a fish. He was nuts. I still had his knife. Did he think I was going to give it back? He screamed for his bottle.
It's mine and it's piss, I screeched back. He was really pissing me off.
His prick rose like a tiny petunia in winter. It was really pathetic.
C'mon help me get hard you lil' she devil whore, he said pointing to his patty pan prick while he tried to shimmy out of his pants.
He was boring and stupid. He told me to piss on this and something about raping and killing me and you could just tell he'd be bad at either one let alone both. It was hard to understand him with the blood. He couldn't get his pants off fast enough and a puddle spread like Poe's Tell Tale Heart on his crotch.
There was without a doubt at least one dead body stashed in the floorboards of the motel. The problem though was getting a room. Despite the tatty décor and gross looking manager who I guessed was a pimp, we had to be married to share a room.
My first idea was to hold the manager at knife point and blackmail him into a room. Through twin ESP I could tell Curly was on the same wavelength. But that was the dumbest idea on the planet. Nobody famous slept and died here. This wasn't worth getting arrested for.
I had to do something before Curly reached for his knife. (My new knife was bigger and sharper, I had made sure to point this out a few times while we sat in overstuffed lima green chairs waiting for the manager).
I held my hand up. We're married. It's our honeymoon. I flashed my gums.
We were sixteen so we did a good job of pulling off the young, dumb now shotgunned married look. I had on an off-white micro-mini dress that completed the slut-child bride look.
Curly laughed so hard he could hardly stand and sign the register.
I glanced at the name 'Angela Shepard.' I checked Angela's reflection in the mirror. She was still a knockout.
I had a crush on my half-brother's half-brother and I wasn't ashamed. Later we would fuck and I wasn't ashamed of that either. Shame is a useless emotion.
I took the bed and Curly the chair but neither of us could sleep.
It was the first time we had been alone together in a long time.
He wanted to know why I had gone easy on that bum. It disturbed him. You put a hit on Curtis for no reason, GeGe, so I know you ain't a coward.
Curtis was Ponyboy Curtis, our half-brother's half-brother. And it wasn't for no reason. I was madly in love with him. Of course so too was just about everyone. And there are a lot of people, female and male who claim to have fucked him over the years, most of them are lying, it's goes with the territory when you're as good looking and famous as Ponyboy is. But also I didn't care because I actually did fuck him.
I saw Pony as Rimbaud and I was Verlaine in a black skirt so tight it fused into my skin. My heart was the pistol and I poured it out like a black oil well smothered in mascara into love poems. We would run off to Alaska and never sleep.
Ponyboy, at the time, saw it differently.
Under the canopy of sirens, yelling and knocked over trash cans Curly offered to kill Ted. Just give me the word. It wasn't everyday that someone offered to kill for me and meant it. Not even Tim would do that for me. Even though I knew I'd never take him up on it my heart warmed like a fire on a frozen night. It felt like love and more love than Ted could give me.
Nah, I said sweetly, please don't kill my husband. At least not until he gets a record deal. He shrugged like I'd turn down pizza.
You want to kill somebody, kill my father-in-law. When he asked why, I shrugged and walked to the bathroom. Ted's father was always grabbing my ass. I wanted to cut his dick off and feed it to starving squirrels and I didn't think I was overreacting.
When I came back from peeing and washing my face there was Curly still awake, but his eyes closed. His chin was covered in pimples. He looked so much younger than me, yet more jaded and violent. It was like looking in a mirror and expecting to see your reflection but only seeing the back of your head no matter how many times you spin around.
My hair was still too short.
I gave my twin a quick peck on the cheek.
Wait! I said, let's play connect the dots with your zits! Maybe it would spell out a message from the universe?
He threw his finger up at me and told me he'd kick my ass that he didn't care that I was pregnant.
I laughed, I'd like to see you try. I punched him hard on the arm and he punched me hard on the arm. We'd have bruises in the morning. I think it really made us look more like the honeymoon couples the manager was used to seeing.
I climbed into bed and Curly said 'G'night GeGe.
When Curly woke up in the morning his face was covered in an eyeliner of constellations with purple, red and pus filled stars.
A/N: Thank you for reading!