When my parents got divorced me, my mom and my sister moved in with my grandparents, in their green house with no back yard and a chaotic, thorny rose bush in the front. The roses were tea roses, small and pale and they smelled so good. It didn’t matter that there was no back yard, because my grandparents lived right across the street from the cemetery, which was better than any back yard in Chelsea. It was green and full of trees and knocked-down tomb stones. The mausoleums cut into the hillside had long been broken into, the doors were gone, they were just these scary holes cut into the earth and part of the fun was freaking yourself out about them. They had held at least drunken alcoholic people on drugs, if not ghosts or actual murderers. The cemetery was also better than the park, because parks in Chelsea were full of casual gangs of children looking to kick ass, and I was an easy target, radiating as I did, a low-key earnest weirdness plus a desperation for friendship that sometimes made other kids want to kill me. Of course you were not technically (legally) allowed to be in the cemetery. All gates were locked, it wasn’t like a regular cemetery where contemporary dead people were housed. The people in this place had all died long ago, some of them from the plague, even, which causeed a bit of a scare when some drunken alcoholic people on drugs dug up some graves and left skulls gaping jauntily on the iron spikes of the gate. Would we all get the plague now?
We lived at my grandmother’s house during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Riding a bike in the cemetery - not my bike, Mandy’s bike, a tough little red-headed butch dyke, about 11 - I coasted down a hill, feeling free, then hit a rock or something and flipped off, fracturing my wrist. Another time that summer me and my sister were walking to Spritzie’s, a very old-world corner store nearby. Spritzie’s sold pickles in wooden barrels and also the very, very best Italian Ice - slush - I have ever had, slush, that I have dreamed about, both when I was young and even now as an adult. It is lodged in my psyche as a sacred food, perfectly icy and saturated with flavor. It came in a small, fluted paper cup, a pristine dome with a little ring of icy fluff, and I would eat it and eat it, and the paper cup would get soggier and soggier and eventually you would have to pull it wide open, collapse it into a wet circle and just lick the last little bit of slush away. We were on our way to this experience, my sister and I, and we were walking by the cemetery, alongside it’s tall, spiked gate, and there were parts of the fencing where the bars were wrenched open and that’s how everyone slipped inside. Atop a toppled tombstone was a bone. I stopped my sister - look. It was long, like a leg bone, maybe. This was much more important than our slush, which would now have to wait as we rose to the occasion of this grisly emergency. Were drunken alcoholic people on drugs digging up graves again? Very exciting! We ran home and actually called the actual police, then ran back to the spot and waited for them. As we lingered, a guy slipped inside with a German Shepard on a leash. The dog of course sniffed the yellowy bone on the knocked over tombstone. Me and my sister held our breath. We watched enough cartoons to know about dogs and bones. But, the dog moved on. We sighed. The cop showed up, a little defensive, like maybe we were pranking him. We pointed to the bone on the tombstone. He looked down at it, stared, nodded his head. Okay, thank you, you can leave now. We’ll never know what happened, where that bone came from. We’ll never taste a perfectly icy lemon slush from Spritzie’s ever again. I’ve thought about those slushes so much, I’ve wondered if I could make some sort of writing project from it, could I track down the Spritzie family, could I find the recipe, could I re-make it, could I turn back time?
I had my first real French kiss in the cemetery, meaning, it was a kiss I was wholly un-ambivalent about, a kiss I very much wanted, had dreamed of. This would be years after we left my grandparent’s house, were living in a whole other part of Chelsea, but Chris lived over there, in that neighborhood near the cemetery. In the 80s there was a store in Boston called Stairway to Heaven. It was in the basement of an old office building on hmmmm one of those cobbled side-streets that connects Downtown Crossing to Park Street and the Boston Common. On the top floor of this amazing building was a psychic tea room run by old women; on the bottom, Stairway to Heavem, which was long glass cases filled with concert photos. Can you imagine? A store whose top items were just, like, pictures of Kevin DuBrow in full-body spandex holding a microphone stand sideways, looking out at the audience with his head cocked and a little smile, like the whole audience is probably chanting Cum on feel the noize, gurls rock your boys, and he’s like, wow, this is my life. Sometimes there would be a Billy Idol photo there and it would make me anxious and sweaty and urgent-feeling. Unlike the pictures in magazine, these photos were, like, photos, and they made these icons more real. They were actual people. Someone snapped an picture of them. Not on flimsy magazine paper, but heavy photo paper. All these photos, arranged beneath the glass like jewelry.
There were concert shirts hanging on the walls behind the glass cases. The wall across from the cases held a rack of posters. Some of them were so huge, you know, those huge Siouxsie posters, I nevr had any of those really giant ones, I didn’t even dare to want one, they just seemed too decadent. A little room off to the side had a smaller glass case not of photos but of weird punk jewelry. Everyone who worked there was an icon and I was obsessed with them all. When I garduated eight grade and snuck into Boston I found my deadbeat dad working at the post office there and he guiltily handed me twenty dollars, which I took right to Stairway, and I bought two pairs of earrings - giant, black, plastic question marks with neon orange dots, and a pair that were clumps of long, hot pink chains. I dyed my hair hot pink too, or I tried to. I didn’t know how to do it, so I took some graduation money to Newbury Street and kept bouncing into hair salons asking if they could dye my hair pink until one said yes. She pulled my hair through a cap, which killed, and then she basically gave me highlights and then dyed the highlights a very weak pink. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was something. Soon enough I would meet my people and they would have so much information - the address of Boston Beauty Supply, what volume peroxide to get, the importance of toner, Manic Panic vs Crazy Color. I have a tub of Manic Panic waiting for me in my bathroom right now. Hot pink. Do you think I will regret it?
Anyway, the point is, I met Chris at Stairway. He had hair like I didn’t think boys actually had, like it ws an MTV fantasy, I couldn’t believe I was actually meeting someone with fully spiked hair, and also an earring, and he wore a purple Converse on one foot and a pink Converse on the other and my mind was fully blown and I was in love also. How did we start talking. We both liked Billy Idol, but Chris’ favorite was U2, who I also liked. I liked Ratt, and Motley Crue, which Chris made fun of me for, and told me I only liked them because I thought the singers were cute, their music sucked. I was unsure. I really did like their music, but it was true that I was stirred to a sort of mania by how hot they were.
The wildest thing about Chris was that he lived in Chelsea, my city. It seemed like he would get his ass kicked looking the way he did, but he had an easy, Italian confidence and didn’t seem scared. He had an older sister who has also tough and Italian, a little weird, had turned Chris on to U2. That day we took the bus home together and it was magic. We must have exchanged phone numbers, but how? Was I carrying a pen? Maybe I dialled 411. Maybe I remembered his address and showed up on his doorstep the next time I visted my grandmother. And then we went to hang out in the cemetery. What else was there to do? I sat on a grave stone and Chris came over and kissed me. I would call the radio stations and dedicate love songs to ‘Chris with the pink and purple sneakers.’ I would write Michelle loves Chris all over Chelsea with magic marker, on the side of people’s houses like a real hoodlum. Michelle (<3’s) Chris.
I invited him to my eight grade graduation dance, which was sort of outrageous and also a flex, because Chris was older, he was in High School at the Voke, a junior, and he looked so wild, and it validated me in this way, because I had begun to look wild, too, spiking my hair and cutting it short on the sides and wearing eyeliner I got in trouble for every single day and wearing a hot pink and black striped sweatsuit on gym days that Scott Conly laught at and called me punk, and I was like, yeah, duh, and I could feel my classmates, twenty-four kids I had spent the last seven years with, whoc I was about to fly free from forever, I could feel them hovering between, is she maybe cool? and is she maybe a freak? and should we be nice about it, she’s our friend? and should we make her life miserable as it is our duty as Massholes to make miserable the lives of every person who seems a little off? I lived in this friction that year, and then I brought Chris to the dance and it was a real Cinderella moment. An older boy was just mad cred, period, and though Chris was weird, he was older and weird, so he must, like, know something, and also, weird or not, he was legit cute with all that hair and a little mustache. Eat shit, Our Ldy of Assumption.
That summer I tried to hang out with Chris and he was sort of sick at home, not terrible just a little under the weather, and he was like, why don’t you come over and be my nurse, and I was like, cool. His house was empty and we laid on his couch and made out while some nature show about whales played on the TV. Then he said, let’s go in my room, and obviously, duh, I knew I was getting into something, letting him lead me into his bedroom, shuffling with his sick blanket wrapped around him like a burrito. I knew it, but the making out was so deliriously incredible, the very best thing, probably there would be more of that, and I’d sort the rest as it happened. The game is, whoever makes each other cum first, wins, Chris said. I, like, didn’t even know what he was talking about. He thought my body was going to do something it like was definatly not going to do - the thought of having that experience with another person, just, like, no. It was too private. I was too full of the moment, my nerves and excitement, to conjure that type of focus. Chris’ hand scribbled between my legs until I moved it. He pulled down the lip of his sweats, and there it was, no underwear or anything. He put my hand on it. It was warm, a new kind of skin to feel. I touched it for a moment, and Chris’ hands came onto my shoulders and he pushed me closer. Oh my god he wanted me to do that. No way. I steeled my shoulders. It was an unspoken power struggle, wordless. He pushed again, I pushed back. I laid back on the bed, my hand off his dick. He sighed. I should take a nap, he said. I’m still sort of sick.
Years later Chris apologized to me on the phone. I guess we still spoke sometimes, as I progressed through high school, looking wilder and wilder, wilder than he ever looked and listening to music way more obscure that U2 who, let’s face it, were becoming more and more mainstream every day. Even racist Irish assholes from Southie loved them now because of Irish pride or whatever. Chris mentioned the day in his room, That wasn’t cool. It had been weird, maybe, but hadn’t struck me as bad, per se, or like he had done anything wrong, I guess. It had been exciting in a way, to be so close to sex, to be in it, sort of, yet not, successfully resisiting it, yet able to tell my best friends, MaryAnn and Kerri, that I’d touched it, and they shrieked and squealed and told me I was disgusting and that they couldn’t believe I’d touched them with a hand that had touched a penis and had I even washed my hand ew, ew, ew, I would be gross forever, and I laughed and told them it was days ago and of course I’d washed my hand, but it didn’t matter, I was contaminated, they insisted, and I let them, because I had something they didn’t, and it made me smug, made their shrieks and squeals roll right off me. It’s Okay, I said to him, on the phone. Thanks For Apologizing.
Well. I had not meant for this to be all about Chris, not at all. It was going to be more of a montage of boys kissed around this era of life, but, alas, I got really swept away. I don’t care if you think Chris is a creep or not, that wasn’t the point. I don’t know what I think anyway. There were boys who acted a lot worse and never would think to apologize. Men as well. I googled him and, weirdly, an Italian review for a U2 album popped up, as well as an article in Italian about the Rocky Horror Picture Show which, how could I forget, he took me to for the very first time, making sure that I packed a loaf of toast as well as a squirt bottle, rice, newspaper, and toilet paper. When the cast asked if there were any virgins in the audience, he led them to me. Riff Raff pulled me to the front and the whole audience shrieked, Virgin!!!! and I laughed and laughed. I didn’t care. I was having an adventure.
Thanks everyone. All I can see are the TYPOS lolz
So beautiful it hurts, as always. "It's not easy having a good time, even smiling makes my face ache."