“Barbed wire around the arm.”

“Tribal anything.”

“Screaming skulls with snakes coming out of the sockets.”

It’s about a week before Christmas and we’re all bundled, from head to toe. I’m eating bread wrapped in tin foil, stolen from the kitchen at work. It tastes salty, and the crumbs are sticking to my green skirt.

“Dolphins jumping over waves.”

“Those orangey sun things, like on the sublime album cover.”

“Britney Spears’ face.”

My stomach feels gummy, still working over the too-sweet cocktail my manager had given me in the coatroom. It was pink, and had three different kinds of fruit in it. It came in a special glass. He stood and watched me drink it – good, huh? – and I nodded, set it down and cracked my knuckles. He asked if I wanted another, and I said no, thanks, I’ll be useless ha ha, and he laughs back and says oh don’t worry, you’re just the coat check girl, ha ha.

“Your college mascot.”

“Chinese symbols you don’t understand.”

“Stars.”

“I have stars.”

“But yours are different. I mean other stars.”

“Oh.”

I gave him back the glass. He tipped it back, and the maraschino cherry disappeared into his mouth. What’s that? he said, taking my left hand and turning it over. Is that a tattoo? I said yes, sat with my limp hand in his, and waited. Huh. Didn’t think you were the type. I shrugged, returned the offending hand to my lap. My head buzzed with dream tattoos, full-sleeve tattoos, blue and yellow and green tattoos spilling over my shoulders in bewildering permanence. I wanted something undeniable, bold and obvious and screaming out loud, crawling out from under the cuff.

“Anything that makes people ask, ‘What does it mean?’”

I finish the bread and cover my hands with mittens. I hate where I am working in a way that makes me tired and listless. I think about Ward Cleaver coming home to a dry martini. The snow is falling steadily, and we make complete stops as we drive down Randolph, looking both ways.

“The words ‘Beta Max Forever’.”

“Lyrics to a My Chemical Romance song.”

“’Freebird’.”

We are trying to outdo each other, getting louder, shouting as we come up with still more ideas. We drive for a long time, warming, loosening scarves and removing gloves. Soft strings of white lights break snowflakes into a thousand pieces of the same unique dew, and we are laughing. It is so easy.

Once I got into tattoos a few years back, it seemed natural that I’d get a Chicago skyline. Or a Chicago flag. Maybe a combination of the two:

Stretching from the lower left part of my stomach around my side, and to the lower left part of my back, I wanted the skyline of Chicago as viewed from Lake Michigan. I wanted the lake to be the sort of blue that looks like a cross between blue, purple, and nothingness. Then the skyline in the thinnest black line possible. I wanted the buildings filled in with the pattern of Chicago’s flag, light blue and white striped with red stars, as if the skyline had been cut out from it. I wanted the Sears tower to run parallel with my forearm, so that when I hung my arms at my side, the tendons in my veins would mirror a pinnacle of human achievement. I wanted the Northern side of the city wrapping around my backside, the rich areas stabbing into my bloodstream from the behind. I wanted the Southern side stretched across my abs, the side of the tracks that my father worked his way out of, muscling every inch of the way.

I had the money saved. Then I got into another school. Realized that I’d be moving to New York. It was quite possibly the only other city in America that convinced people to have its outline permanently engraved into their bodies.

So the plan was off. Postponed at least. I’d be living in New York City soon, and couldn’t afford to go throwing money around like that. I went. I lived. It’s expensive here. Tattoos were off for a while.

It’s ten months later and now I have the money again. I’ve fallen in love with this city. Now I’m revising the plan for future ink. It’s not so much the fact that I live in a city foreign to the rest of my family that’s keeping me from simply revising the design. I love living in Brooklyn. I’ve given a lot of thought to something a lot like the Chicago tattoo. The viewpoint of Manhattan from the Williamsburg bridge that I ride my bike over every day. The skyline painted between the brick arches of the Brooklyn bridge. Even the outlines of the five boroughs, if properly placed, would be an impressing sight every morning for my remaining years.

But none of that feels completely right. It’s not any of the bridges, the skyline, the view, the success of living in a place where I know nothing. The Chicago tattoo felt right because, in those times, I never saw myself permanently moving anywhere else. I’d talk about it, sure, but it was never a reality. I’m much more malleable now. I was always running within Chicago. Now I’m running all over the country. Maybe the world would be a better picture of permanence.

There’s a weird ticking sensation you get when you’re being tattooed. It’s not completely painful, though you know it must be hurting. I won’t go and tell you that it’s more akin to pleasure, though there is some sort of release in the vibration of those machines. More than any of that, it’s awakening. You become alert, alive, aware of what is going on while you’re under the needle. Whatever is being drawn, it results in a feeling of permanence. The ink flows and runs through the needle tip and is forcefully shoved under your epidermis. It’s a scar that results in an art. Even joke tattoos that might be of our favorite Star Wars characters carry with them an element of seriousness, almost of piety (who doesn’t love Yoda?). We wish for even the comical to remain with us forever, even if we have to force the running ink to stop dead in our own coagulation.

I think that’s why I won’t ever get a skyline of any sort drawn on me. There is no longer any permanence. I can up and move. I can flow. I can adapt. I knew Chicago well. Now I have no clue about it. I know New York all right, but I could learn London just as easily. None of these places have any meaning in the way that home once did.

I’d like to be the ink. I feel as if I’m in the needle now. I do not belong below it. I’m more adept at flowing, at marking, at running than standing in place. I think of getting tattoos of cities or exact locales, of reality-based identifying factors now and my hands shake. My fingers glisten with the urge to open a map and run to anywhere other than lying prone on a table, white-knuckled, waiting for someone to be finish marking me for identification.

too much.

greg’s muxtape

greg shamelessly abandoned chicago for new york, where he makes documentaries about senegalese pop singers & my very favorite mixtapes.

Gaper’s Block

without them, i’d never leave my apartment. or get to feed sharks.

jenna’s model life

elyse ain’t got NOTHIN on her. & as you get to know the girl, you’ll find that neither do most of your college professors.

Macaframa

A group of San Franciscan Track Bike riders who do things right and make everything pretty. The movies are especially notable.

be quiet or be killed.

This girl and her friends take pictures that make me want to forget the world and run to the mountains. Or to the outskirts of Seattle.

Heave Media

Chicago-based music and culture website. Great reviews, honest articles, and a crackpot team that even puts out a VodCast. You might even find something by me.

I didn’t get into grad school today, which is another way of saying that I won’t get into grad school tomorrow, or for the rest of March, or April, or May, when my lease is up and, for the last time, I wake up to a fire escape and silver skyline and piles of headless fish on the front walk.
My brother had just driven me back from our parents’ home, loaded down with candy-colored eggs and my dad’s supposedly ‘ruined’ cheesecake (some old men turn to tramp-stamps and sports cars in their times of middle-life; my father turned to pastries). I’d paused in my building’s foyer to check the mail and stopped breathing as soon as I saw the envelope sticking out of the box.
“Fuck.”
My brother asked what was wrong. I snatched up the pathetically slim envelope. I shook it in my hand, the way you shake a Polaroid picture before the image has developed.
“Fuuuuuckkk. Fuck. Fuck.”
We hauled the goods up to my floor, me muttering obscenities the whole way along.
I dropped everything in the front room, not even bothering to open my bedroom door, and sank into my roommate’s rolling desk chair that, of course, transformed my dramatic ‘lady-with-tha-vapors’ descent into a mad scramble to keep my ass someplace more respectable than the dog-haired floor.
They were polite, with Emily-Post-perfect articulation of balanced rejection Which, of course they would be; this was an MFA program, after all, one of the best in the nation – you could practically smell the cuffs of their tweed jackets brushing against the paper as they signed their just-legible names across the bottom. I held the [rejection] letter in my hand and sank back in the chair. My brother coughed.
“So, you want me to take out the trash?”
I stared at the ceiling for a moment. The tiles were sagged, mildewed slightly where they met at the chandelier. My brother shifted his weight, removing the blue pouch of Bugler tobacco from his right jean pocket and squeezing it in his hand. I swirled around in the chair.
“Yeah,” I said. I stood. “Hold on, we’ll need a key.”
We moved the groceries to the kitchen and he pulled the trash from one of the bins. I lifted a box of empty bottles and we went down the back stairwell. My brother sang, mumbling, and I rested the box on my hip as I unlocked the gate. We tossed the trash into the proper dumpsters and my brother pulled out his Buglers, rolling up. I dug my hands into my pockets and shivered. Chicago is four days into spring.
My brother exhaled, then spit on the ground.
“Sucks,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He inhaled again.
“It’ll get better.”
I nodded, and thumbed the key in my pocket. A car drove through the alley, so we stepped back towards the gate, letting them pass slowly with their headlights on. My brother finished his smoke, and we exchanged comments on the view, watching the cloud sulk across the city skyline.

The mountains are familiar, Breckenridge,
Family vacation, 1998
When my brain was tainted
Before I wiped it clean and white with grass and chemical swirls.
No blood.

I stand outside in the cold
Flicking a lighter at a gas station,
Filling up the tank under flurries of powdered sugar.
Brett laughs,
Jeremy laughs.
A man in coveralls asks me why the long face?
I show him the soft side of my hand where I’ve tried to give myself an ink injection with a Bic.
No blood.

He’d come stumbling back into our rented condo,
My mother asleep and sister in the shower
He reeked of what I’d thought was fuel,
Intoxicating stench.
Said he’d used a bag of oranges so that I wouldn’t bruise, no marks,
No blood.

As they funnel back into the car they still laugh and I finish my smoke.
The coveralls tell me to “take care of that” glancing at me over his shoulder as he walks away,
Like I have something on my face.
Brett passes a six-pack of beer into the back seat and I ask if we can stay here for a few minutes.
The metal edge of the cap pulls a layer of skin from my palm but
No blood.

My sister had asked what had happened to my eye
“Don’t worry,” I’d smiled, “No blood!”

Jeremy becks, “Come on, let’s get out of this shithole.”
I finish the bottle off and throw it across the street
Listen for the inescapable shatter.
“No blood,” I say, shutting the door,
“Drive.”

The night security guard at work believes the following:
1. I am named Jeanie.
2. I am a direct descendant of Eastern-Europeans or, as he puts it, Good peoples, the best sorts of peoples.
3. Friends + Cheers = Americans
When he asks me where I am from, I tell him the Ukrainian Village. He interprets this as The Ukraine, which delights him to no end.
Your parents, he says, they strong peoples. Restraint. They are not in everyone’s beds, needing to relaaax and then, morning! Bye byes!
He motions with his hips as he says this. I am speechless, horrified/amazed by his depictions of my mother & father (Swedish & Irish, respectively).
He tells me that I look like his first wife, who died just after they were married, who was a song bird & angel, a tree climber & cook, wonderfully blonde & the love of his life.
I bring you picture. You see.
Around 1:30am, he brings me a Coca-Cola & a biscuit, which he tells me his wife (his new wife) made. I have no idea what the biscuit is, exactly, but I find it delicious &, when I tell him so, he brings me two more.
See Jeanie? I take care of you. You see. All will be good. You see

I’ve only been that vulnerable in front of her once before then and I don’t think it counts. You can’t really help but be vulnerable when you are four months old and a strange girl in her late teens is swinging sharpened blades around your head snipping here there and your father is sitting next to you both looking around here there and up and down her here there. But I can only assume. I was four months old.

She says out loud, “The first time you can drive yourself here, and you stumble in looking like that?” I am sixteen with messy hair and two casts on. I am a wreck. There is no way for me to be more awkward.

I follow her to the back. As if the clientele isn’t giving me enough strange looks, the normally friendly girl who does nails looks at me like I’m going to split apart any second. I tried that once. That’s how this cast is on this arm. That’s why I haven’t been able to have my hair cut, the stitches had to heal. A two-story drop will hurt you just enough to make you look like you will split apart at any second. I guess the girl filing the woman’s nails is right. I ignore her. I can’t stand the noise that the file makes.

Lisa sits me down to wash my hair. I don’t say a word and neither does she, her long fingers gently pulling the tangles apart, I can feel the milky whiteness of the lacquer on her nails. Her belt buckle, cold and hard, digs into the unbroken arm and I welcome the opportunity to be that close. She washes and conditions gently, pausing only when she feels the scar tissue where the stitches were. She doesn’t say a word.

I sit up when she’s done rinsing and she swings a purple towel around my neck; one of the ones in all salons that has been washed and dried too many times and absorbs plenty of water but offers none of the warmth one expects from a towel. Nonetheless, she is just in time, scooping droplets of water from my neck before they can descend past my collar and cause discomfort for the remainder of the appointment.

I stand and jump on one foot twenty feet over to the chair that I’ve always sat in when I get my hair cut. Lisa puts her hands on my shoulders, leans down, begins lifting my hair from its soaking wet resting place, mussing it up again, and asks, “So what are we doing with it today? Just a trim? Want to do something daring?” She is smiling and buoyant. I still can’t figure out if she always was smiling or if this was one of those traits people attain at their workplace, something they don’t even notice, but it’s proper for the job, so they do it. Like principals and being more firm than necessary, like doctors and appearing in control.

“It keeps getting in my eyes. I don’t want to deal with it in my eyes. I’m okay with having to ‘do’ it in the morning, too.” I’m shrugging, knowing she’ll have more fun if she can be creative with my head. “Yeah… just go nuts. Let’s see what happens.”

Lisa gets to work, an expert behind the scissors and combs. She darts about, spritzing more water, snipping here, lopping off there. It’s only been thirty seconds and she’s moved completely around me twice, already tangled herself in the cord that connects the clippers in her right hand to the outlet in the wall.

“You mind me asking what happened to your leg and arm?” She’s broken it down. There was that wall, that comfortable feeling you have with someone you’ve known all your life that will, because of circumstances like being your hair dresser, never lead to judgment. Never will you suffer any ill because of what comes out of your mouth. She will not leave you disfigured because of anything you could say. You will not receive a phone call from your hair dresser at four in the morning, voices yelling, “what the hell are you doing with yourselfare you crazy you could have fuckingdiedareyoutryingtotearthisfamilyapart!?”

Lisa will not do these things no matter what I say.

“I drank a bunch of vodka. I took the rest of my dad’s meds and then jumped out of my window. It was dumb. The bushes broke my fall. Then I dumped my girlfriend yesterday. I had no reason to. I just don’t care.” I know my throat should be dry. It is warm, wet, and I want to keep going. I stop.

Lisa comes back from the back room. It’s been about ten minutes. I really don’t know for sure. It could have been an hour, I guess. I had just sat there looking at myself, hair soaked, one ear showing through freshly cropped fringes, the other completely covered by a matted nest of hair.

Her eyes are red and she sniffles once or twice. “Okay,” She pauses and I hold my breath, “Well… let’s get you fixed up.” She goes to work. Smiles. The whole time. We talk about cars.

My hair looks amazing. I leave Lisa an extra large tip. My hair is short and pomped and I look grown up and amazing and I radiate with energy as I crutch my way through the door even though another of the clientele has let it slam on my shoulder. I hobble through the parking lot and smile back at where I think Lisa is sweeping my head’s remains from the floor.

So the girl called me last night. She wanted to know why I’d broken up with her so long ago. I’d done it on the phone; she hadn’t seen me. She’d just hung up the phone and I didn’t even have to give her a reason. She didn’t even know about the fall or anything. Now she was crying. Sobbing about how her life as a teacher wasn’t making her happy, that she was sad all the time, that the prescription wasn’t helping anymore, that she felt guilty because she had a great life and was still sad.

It’s my turn. I act like nothing is wrong. I tell her she’s fine. That we’re all fine. That it’s normal. That I’ve been through things like that, feelings like that, and I’m fine. That she’ll work through it and that I have faith in her. In my head I can see her mouth twisting up into a smile as she lays on her bed staring at her ceiling while my drunken voice at 4 a.m. tells her that she has nothing to worry about.

Thank you, Lisa. I wouldn’t have had the heart to tell her that nothing will be okay. That the worst is about to happen. That she will never be the same and it will drive her crazy. Cutting hair is much easier.

Thank you, Lisa.

oh, this charming city…

Library of Congress, Call Number POS - WPA - ILL .01 .C545, no. 1 (B size) [P&P]
dated june 15, 1938

This was found in SoHo. If you know what the area is like these days, you’ll agree that more people should be looking for this.

Original Photo.

Sorry, Bob, I’m afraid I still don’t know.

He asks if I had a knife on me and, oddly enough, I do, and oblige him by cutting the twine from his stack of fresh newspapers. He thanks me, and I tell him to keep the knife, I’ve got another at home, I’ve no real need for it anyway,
“What’s a little thing like you doin’ up this time of day?”
I start the car, and the engine pauses, a sound like swallowing in reverse, before starting, sick and reluctant. There is a nod as he walks back to his truck, a goodbye, thank you very much. I wave. My hands are mittened, but the steering wheel is still too cold to cling to so I settle myself into the seat, watching the delivery man’s tail lights fade off into brighter parts of the city, listening to the tape deck click click click struggle its way back to life. I’d sat in the street last night, waiting for the reel to run out on the cassette before turning off the ignition. The car had exhaled as I turned the key, sighed hissed I may not start again and I sat, buckled, in the driver’s seat with my hat pulled low on my face, the wool knitting into my brows, that hideous hat my aunt had made that could double as a tea cozy if necessary.
Yesterday in this driver’s seat, I predicted our moves, saw everything unfold: me stepping from the vehicle, approaching the door and you letting me in. There would be the viola on my shoulder and my starboard lilt; the bloody bead where your chin cleft and the razor had grown clumsy; the coconut sweet of your just washed hair.
“Why were you sitting in the car like that?”
I saw myself shrug, set the viola down, allow you to kiss my cheek take my hand rub it against your face while you cooed “smooth.”
You undressed again, removed my blouse. I’d say nothing of your premature shower.
I would cook in a beige slip. You’d say it first.
“The lessons are going well.” You are bad at secrets, good at show. I’d shred cheese over pasta, mashing fresh leaves of basil between my palms, massaging them again and again until my hands are stained with their scent.
“I’ve never seen anyone so adept,” you’d continue, “at her age or otherwise.”
“She’s a prodigy.”
“That’s exactly it!” You’ll walk to the front room, where you teach. The basil goes into the pot.
“She left her bow,” you’ll tell me. “I’ll swing by the school and drop it off for her.”
“It’s done.”
After dinner, we’d fuck on the bed. You’d take me from behind and, my face pressing into the mattress, I would think of her panties on the carpet below me, Tuesday embroidered on breathable cloth.
The cassette clucks, clicks, turns over in its dock and churns its way towards sound. It is old and warped, and the warbling voices are discernable only in memory, where the play list had long ago carved its way through the pulpy furrows of my brain. The leather on the steering wheel has warmed enough for me to touch. I remove my mittens and streak my fingers across the window.
I suddenly wish I hadn’t given away my pocket knife, thinking of how handy it really was, how I didn’t use it all the time but I could have, and I would, if only I had it back. The tape warps again, clicks, clicks, and resumes flow. I think of how I paid too much for that mattress, but it was such a nice mattress, giving in all the right places.
I eject the tape, turn off the car. I head towards the house, wondering where I left the other knife.

He was head over heels. For a moment he thought to himself, “Have I lost control?” but quickly dismissed the idea, knowing from all of the movies and songs that “if it seems so right, and it feels so right, then it has to be right.” It’s gotta be right. He was able to see the night’s sky, stars for the first time in months.
Just a few hours earlier he’d left the valley behind, citing that he had a little extra cash, though his hands were deep in his pockets and held on to nothing. “Of course you can take my bike. Just don’t let anything happen to it,” Chris had said, scratching at the beard that wasn’t so much a beard as well-defined laziness. Daniel pulled at his hair and said, “Thanks, man, thanks a lot. Really,” his foot tapping, looking down at where the motorcycle’s tire touched the cement flooring of Chris’s parents’ garage. Daniel pulled on his hair in front of his face, silently cursed himself for his bad habit, and wobbled over to the bike. “I mean it, man, I won’t put a scratch on her. Don’t worry about it.”
Soft colors surrounded Daniel in every direction. The desert gets shortchanged in the western world’s constant stigmatizing. Sure, it’s hot, dry, sandy, and desolate. But most people won’t ever mention that the desert located west of the Rocky mountains is also one of the most picturesque and awe-inspiring landscapes in the entire beloved United States. While his flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, beat against his chest by the passing 65 mile per hour wind, Daniel took note of the rolling hills, of the mountain ranges soaring up from nothingness in the distance – icecaps topping the peaks in staunch contrast to the cactus dotting Daniel’s current elevation. He flew by bushes every few minutes, tried to remember how lush and green they were in the daytime. With the sun setting behind him, the entire desert was painted in cozy shades of orange and quiet reds. At times, there were patches of pink that got caught on large rocks that stuck out in his vision like tiny hands poking out from the dirt and sand. He throttled the engine and saw every patch of pink waving him on, waving him goodbye, slapping themselves back and forth along the sides of his periphery.
He’d swung with his right hand. Not Daniel. At Daniel. The back of the man’s hand caught Daniel’s cheek from right to left. Daniel felt his cheek grow hot while the rest of his head hit the floor. There was an orange prescription bottle about five feet away, also on the floor, with its contents spilled, little yellow capsules. He focused on it as the toe of his father’s boot made contact with Daniel’s stomach.
A few minutes later his father was sobbing. “Daniel, please understand,” his breath caught like he was a child that had just been scolded, “I just needed help.”
“I’m going to Chris’s,” Daniel said, hand clutching his stomach, he walked away as slowly as possible, turning onto the sidewalk towards the nearer street corner.
Then here were stars. Here were stars and twilight in the still-unsettled American west, in the desert that divided the country so distinctly into two bastard halves. Here was warm sand and dirt and yellows and greens and mountains to create humility in oneself. Here were cacti to avoid that Native peoples had harnessed every ounce of nutrition from out of simple and beautiful necessity. There was the road cutting through it, spotted with rocks and bumps in the asphalt, but still a cool reminder of the prosperity and maturity of man in relation to his environment. Then there, behind him, was the much larger pothole than the rest. There, the sky again, Daniel liked it right here the best. The stars stretched out and made him feel completely alone, unlike the mountains and the roads and the desert colliding. This was solitary confinement at its purest. The motorcycle drifted into the corner of his eyes as his arms flailed about, free for the first time. Then, as quickly as he’d been elated by it all, his body reconnected with the pavement, in the same position as earlier that day. Daniel died instantly.

We are 797 miles apart. The distance hurts. This helps.

We are 797 miles apart. The distance hurts. This helps.