Where I end and you begin

i wanna get sweet valley high with you.


That’s right, sometimes I walk the street with the last two fingers on my right hand curled into my palm, pretending I’m Sterling Fassbinder. I’ll start swinging my arms in my usual style, but then I remember how she keeps the hand in question jammed in her pocket, and I do the same. Immediately, my gait changes into her lurching stagger.

The hackneyed, hunched James Dean wounded animal thing that gets her all that LES pussy.

Sometimes, late at night, when the sky turns nuclear pollutant purple and the puddles spin with stars, I hold my hand over my face and imagine how it would look if two of the five fingers were missing.

I remember when I visited her in the hospital on her sixteenth birthday.

She avoided looking at her bandaged hand draped lifelessly across the pea green sheets.

“That’s not my hand,” she said.

“I know,” I said. I remember the hysterical chirping of birds in the trees outside. A plane cut a high arc above our heads. Somewhere a sprinkler was spurting jaggedly.

My eyes zoomed out like a camera. As always I was desperately trying to take in the whole thing, to memorize the details and stash them away for future use. There was her bleached blonde hair. At that time it was cut and gelled down in a Caesar. She shifted to one side and stared at the blinds. Her face was pale against the sheets. There was blue pen ink smeared on her cheek.

Everyone thought she was crazy, that the nuttiness of her bible thumping parents had finally cooked her noodle. They thought that explained why she took drugs and dressed like a boy and cut her own fingers off on a classroom paper cutter.

“It’s the acid,” they whispered, “It’s her father who beats her ass with a pipe.”

She’d been let down, beat-up, lied-to, hated on and now she was going to be kicked out and locked-up in a mental hospital.

I was sixteen myself. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do but sit around with my hands folded. By way of saying a prayer (something I’ve tried but can never actually bring myself to do) I instead wished for sudden, supernatural powers. Wing’d feet, laser shooting fingertips, bullet reflecting wristbands—that sort of thing. Or I would have been fine with a gang of berretta toting goodfellas. We’d line up shades on and guns blazing. I’d free Sterling and leave them all in a sea of blood.

surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away

If I could have had only one power it would have been the ability to go back in time. That way I could switch places with her as a little kid so that she could be me and I could be her.