Of Our Own Device

what ravages of spirit conjured this temptuous rage — created you a monster broken by the rules of love? and fate has led you through it, you do what you have to do


I love this feeling. The first drink, when the heady alcohol tickles your unready throat like a hungry hand sliding up a quivering virgin thigh. You giggle like a child, anxious yet excited, wanting more, begging for more, electric with anticipation. Rather than being quenched, your thirst is increased by the second drink, and the third, until your whole body, every inch of your skin, is alive and singing. You feel so light that you are certain you could fly, if you really wanted to. Maybe you can't really walk straight, but who cares? You can fly. Suddenly you realize that there are really only three things of any significance in the world: blood, sex, and sleep. You desperately desire all three, and would welcome each with equal enthusiasm. Work, love, hope, morality — you suddenly discover that you have spent your life convinced of the grandiose importance of things which do not even exist. Work is just the fear of sleep. Love? Love is in a glass, in a shot, in the fuzzy feeling in your brain that reminds you the whole universe loves you, and you don't even have to care. Hope is gone, because hope is for the future, and the future has been swallowed up in liquid fire. And morality — well, that's just another word for fear of pleasure. Pleasure consumes you now. Everything, everything, everything is pleasure, whether you destroy it or make love to it or lose your mind trying to remember its name. Pleasure is all that has ever been real, and the rest of the world was an illusion. The illusion vanishes in a puff of logic, in a wisp of freezing, flaming cloud. Blood, sex, and sleep. Nothing else matters. Nothing else even is. Except maybe oyster crackers...


I laugh the next day, reading the words; I always laugh. I rarely even try to write without a rocks glass sweating coolly in one hand; it's pointless. When I'm wasted, any syllables I happen to string together are sure to sound witty and amusing the next day. It's like magic. Sobriety is so overrated.

I say that a little tongue-in-cheek; I don't mean to make it sound as if all the meetings — and that damnable serenity prayer, repeating itself mantra-like in my head, boring little holes through my quiet thoughts — have made no impact. Certainly they did, and I have no intention of throwing away eight years and twelve steps of hard work. But my sponsor is dead now, and I like writing well, and on top of that I cannot just ignore the fact that every really good thing in my life has happened when I was at least a little bit drunk.

My parents finally deciding to get divorced, for instance. I remember when they were fighting that night, screaming so loud the support beams in the attic ceiling shook. I sat up there patiently waiting out the storm in a tie-dye beanbag chair, an Eagles tape in my Walkman in one hand and a bottle of Midori stolen from my uncle's liquor cabinet in the other. He never locked that thing. Over about six months' time I had dragged probably half the furniture from my bedroom and the adjoining guest room (which was a waste of space since no one ever visited) up to the attic. I liked it better up there; it was quieter than my room, and darker. My room was almost never dark. The neighbors' porch was opposite my bedroom window, and the only times their glaringly bright porch light ever went out were once in a while when some neighborhood kid hit it with a rock. I was guilty of that particular form of vandalism more than a few times. Still, if I wanted real, pitch dark, the attic was my best bet. And I could furnish it however I wanted, without my mom complaining that the decor was tacky or inappropriate or disturbing. It was, of course, all three. I was a bit too enamored of the occult at the time; I papered the walls with dead rock stars and star charts, and littered the floor with incense, tarot cards and, of course, empty bottles.

Anyway, it was with no little effort that I dragged myself downstairs, when their hoarse voices rang to me across the sudden silence, saying they had finally had enough; they were done, this time for good. "You've got to be kidding," I mumbled aloud. When they said they were not, I nearly cried with relief. Finally, I kept thinking. Thank God, finally.

The first time I kissed a girl. When I lost my virginity I was sober as a grave — I should have taken that as a hint — but the first time I kissed a girl I was sloshed. I think that was how I knew it was for real.

Susanna was her name. Susanna Quinn, and naturally they all called her Susie Q. She was an acid trip, a walking metaphor. She was a living, breathing porcelain doll. Her skin was alabaster white that glowed richly from silver to gold like the harvest moon through a haze of lilac; I always imagined she must smell of gardenia and seashells. She had the faraway violet look of one who understands the scent of a seashell, or a morning, or a memory.

It was her eyes, her unfathomable eyes, that drew me in. Indoors, they were the shocking green of electric lime nail polish or an exit sign on the freeway. But outside, under the gilded lemon drop that licks the summer sky with chartreuse flame, they were a rain forest. In sunlight, those eyes were a tropical Eden of jungle green tones so deep they nearly looked black, so rich they nearly reflected crimson, or purple, depending on the time of day. A dreamer, a soul traveler, could search and follow them like stars, but an ordinary person would need a chart and compass to navigate their depths. The merest breath of a glance would lose me in those eyes.

Susanna was her name, and she was of a substance far more ethereal than flesh — of air, or vapor, or flame. (I never quite decided which.) At times I thought she was composed entirely of grace, like a perfect sonnet or the fleet-footed spirit of a gazelle. She was all bright eyes and hair like honey, reflecting the ocean (if not the sky), and flowing limbs, glossy like spun sugar, possessed of the peculiar and exquisite delicacy of aspen branches shivering at the faintest of breezes.

Susie Q, they called her. I called her Willow.

I never knew why she invited me to her sweet sixteen pool party; I was never even sure why she knew my name. I had idolized her for months, with adoration no mortal girl is fit to receive (she was not mortal, I knew with certainty), but we had never spoken. Privately I knew that I would sell my soul to possess the hundredth part of the beauty I saw in her, but I would never have made so bold as to think myself worthy of her kindness or friendship. I was content to worship her from afar. Some people had actresses or athletes or rock stars; I had Susanna Quinn, and I was happy.

Then the stars collided, and my quiet world crashed violently into the crystal sphere of my goddess. I suppose everyone eventually smashes headlong into the object of their reverence, or else the object of their fear. I felt eyes on me as I lay weightless on my back in the deep end of the pool, as I tried to shut out the cacophony of laughter that surrounded and alienated me like some forgotten insect sleeping on the surface of a endless sea. I felt eyes on me, but I never dreamed they were hers. Later, as the twilight of the party wound itself into inevitable silence, Willow asked me to stay. She called my mother to ask if I could sleep over, and I laughed in my head, thinking she likely would not care if I ever came back. (She would have; I know that now, but then I would not have believed it.) Willow gave me popcorn and a crystal glass filled with ice and a bitter concoction she called a fallen angel. I had never had hard liquor before, and I almost choked on that first drink. But she refilled it three times, and each time the alcohol went down more smoothly, coating my throat and my brain with the numbness of new pleasures too naive to yet be called sins.

We watched a movie in her basement, which was fully furnished, with red shag carpet and two overstuffed black sofas. Her parents were out of town, and her older sister Delilah was upstairs getting stoned with her boyfriend. There was no music or anything playing, and when the movie ended and Willow turned off the television, the silence was like death. Then she started talking, and the words all sort of flowed together in a psychedelic melody, creating swirly shapes and patterns on the ceiling, which was bright electric white in the glow of the blacklight. (How seventies of her.) I had no idea that I was drunk, with no prior experience to compare to. But I did become aware of the sensation of floating, floating so high I feared my head would burst, helpless to come back down to solid ground. I missed most of her actual words, but her voice never left me. Willow's voice was the beat of a many-colored drum throbbing vividly just below my skin, slicing through my consciousness with the burning ache of quiet desperation. I had no idea that I wanted her, with no prior imagination of that kind of desire, to help me recognize it.

I heard her say that she had watched me in the pool, enthralled by the golden halo of liquid tranquility which enveloped my passive scarlet body like a lotus blossom in a goblet of white wine. She was fascinated by me, she confessed, by the metaphysical way I seemed displaced from my own time, or maybe from time altogether. I smiled, and she said my teeth were like lupine fangs, bleached brilliant by the blacklight. I would not have taken her for a poet, but a poet she certainly was, and her poetry was like honey — no, more like ketchup than honey. When I was little, my mom could put ketchup on anything and I would eat it. Willow's poetry was like that: I knew I would willingly swallow absolutely anything, if she coated it with enough of those tangy-sweet words.

A little space of silence passed, and then we kissed each other. I never knew who initiated it. (I thought then that it mattered, but I know now it does not.) She knew that I was drunk and she felt terrible, like she was using me, which she swore was never her intent. (I thought then that she was lying, but I know now she was not.) The kiss was one of those which can never be explained, a soul reckoning which needs no description if one has experienced it, and renders all description worthless if one has not. It was everything that every other kiss had tried and failed to be, the eternal moment before which all other moments pale and tremble and fade away. It was nothing more or less than the perfect truth for which I had patiently waited all my life, so unequivocal that every former truth was falsehood by comparison. I can say nothing more about it. I ran.

I fled the presence of my goddess as swiftly as a prayer, but fear was faster. It chased me, snapped at my heels, drove me on, never let me rest. I stopped for breath at a bench in the city park, but did not sleep. All night I watched the stars dance over the sleeping trees, and at daybreak I went home to my bedroom, but did not sleep. For several days and nights I ate rarely, spoke softly, and slept not at all, knowing what phantoms would be borne on the wings of my dreaming. That was when I moved most of my furniture to the attic. It was darker there, and quieter, but still I hardly closed my eyes. Two weeks had elapsed since Willow's party when, on a whim, I called up my ex-boyfriend, and it was in his bed that I finally slept through the night.


Over a year went by that way. I had other boyfriends, to convince myself that I was normal. I smiled, and laughed, and tried to ignore the stinging in my neck and fingertips when they touched me with their dark sandpaper hands and kissed me with their heavy lips set deep in oaken faces. I tried to ignore the melody ringing in my ears, the voice I could never entirely silence, though I refused to remember a face to match the sound. I took for granted that there was no alternative to compliance with social norms. Everyone else was normal, so it had to be right. Over a year went by, and I was normal.

Then one day I was late. Not late like "tardy," but the capital-l Late that stalks the shadows of loose girls, preying on their anxieties and nightmares, waiting to pounce with its poison-tipped claws outstretched. Waiting to afflict them with that ancient Trouble which begins with reckless extravagance and results in a lackluster life of fatigue and government food stamps. Like any wanton adolescent, I had lived more than my share of extravagance; like any foolish child, I was unwilling to pay so dearly for my dissipation.

Amusing myself with the ironic realization that I had not the faintest notion where in the drugstore to look for a pregnancy test, I began to comprehend that in all probability my life was over before I had begun to live. My wings were clipped before I had begun to fly, my dreams were sunk into my sleep in deathlike silent stillness, and for what? For boys I had not liked, for love I had not felt, for lies which I had never been so fortunate as to believe. I found the pregnancy tests on the floor beneath the shelf of condoms; that made me laugh. I marveled at the excessive cautionary warnings to follow the package directions exactly as stated; I wondered how many incorrect ways there might be to urinate on a stick. I wondered why I was going through the motions. I already knew. My almost oracular intuition had always been met by life with a kind of passive resistance — while the universe seemed to resent me a bit for knowing it at least as well as it knew me, it had never really tried to fight back. And so it was now. I did not need a piece of cardboard to turn blue to tell me there was an animated being growing within me; I felt the spark of new life coloring the empty core of myself as distinctly as a streak of crimson on white canvas, a splash of sunrise on grey sky.

Questions shot through me like arrows, snagging and snapping tangled entrails of thought. Will I finish school? Will I be loved? Will I hear words like "licentious" and "wedlock" and know they are meant for me? Will my name be a harlot's curse to enrich the sermons of immaculate hypocrites? Will my name be simply forgotten? Men, foolish men never expected to nurture the spark of a soul, would tell me to escape, to be rid of it, I knew. I saw the whole history of the world laid out before me like a map of man's heart, and all at once it became crystal clear. Men plow us, their fields, and scatter their seeds in abundance, without discretion, for the crops must be many where the laborers are few. Where the ground is rough or thorny or spoiled by rains, they do not wish to return. Flowers brave enough to grow in those unfortunate places are deemed unsightly weeds, in order that forsaking them may be justified. Those flowers are left to choke to death in the stale mist of obscurity, and the broken ground which bore them bears in silence both the shame of their untimely death and the desolation which follows.

One by one the wombs of the world had fallen prey to this desecration, and my own was next in line. My silent screams could have filled canyons, and echoed forever. And all this for the sake of a boy who claimed that latex made him itch, a boy who pumped gasoline for a living and probably couldn't spell my last name.

During the longest fifteen minutes of my life, I drank half a bottle of white zinfandel, never stopping to care about the health risk. Screw the Surgeon General, whispered the loosely bridled rage in my heart. I'm sure that's a man, anyway. I drank and waited for a cardboard stick to change colors — not just its own, but the colors of my world. I waited and wondered and wished and even wept a bit, but I did not pray; I held at least to that one small shred of dignity.
When nothing happened, I kept my wits and remembered what I had heard about false negatives. I went through not less than five of those little off-brand test kits — I could never have afforded the more expensive ones, and hoped it would not make much difference — before a new thought struck me. My body had decided to skip a period for purely stress-related reasons: my parents' divorce, work, screaming fights with ex-friends who had dumped me when I "got weird," lack of sleep, migraines. My personal baby factory had shut down simply because it had deemed me unfit for its task. I was not pregnant. That fact came as little shock compared to the revelation which followed it: the vitality I felt, the spark of freshness I had taken as a separate entity, was in reality the breath of my own soul, long dormant, now stirring in my blood and breaking through the lifeless shell of my immobile passion. It was no child which was coming to life within me; it was myself. That day, I vowed to never again be the vessel of any man's empty somatic gratification, and I have kept that vow.


I suppose one other incident should be recorded in this anti-AA argument I seem to be writing, perhaps the most significant to my case: I was drinking (though by no means drunk) when I met Cedar. Exactly one week before fall term was to start, just after lunch on a sultry Indian summer day, I was working at the library, skulking as usual in the dark corners of Special Collections on the second floor with my flask of vodka and a tattered paperback of poems by Adrienne Rich. From nowhere she appeared, starkly beautiful in each curve and solidly real in every color. Something in me loved her instantly, as I had loved no one since Willow. Inescapably, she reminded me of Willow, a resemblance only heightened by the bare opposition between the two. Willow had been lithe and sylphlike, draped in silken mystery; this girl was nakedly bright and boisterous, shining with clarity. My feelings were all the same. I had been disarmed by Willow's elegance; now I was ravished by this scintillating stranger's unassuming simplicity.

Right away she laughed at me, first for drinking on the job, but then again and more for reading "dyke poetry." I asked if she had given it a chance, and then it was my turn to laugh when she told me she was "forbidden"; her parents said Adrienne Rich was a messenger of corruption and would be divinely punished for her moral depravity. I wondered aloud whether she always listened to her parents, and she blushed the most charming shade of rose. I wanted nothing so much as to throw my fortunes at her feet and follow her throughout the world, not as a heathen travels blindly the path of a goddess (as I would have followed Willow, had she let me) but as a child chases a butterfly through a dewy meadow. She was looking for A Christmas Carol, claiming that August was the single month most universally unappreciative of Dickens's holiday genius. I went to find it for her in "the back" (a widely accepted code name for any room in which things no sane person would want are stored); when I returned, she was thumbing through the paperback I had been reading. I coughed. She blushed again, and dropped the book. I picked it up and told her to keep it; it was mine, not a library copy, and she seemed in desperate need of some wickedness to flavor her inflicted chastity. She thanked me and fled — like a fox, not a vapor — before I had the sense to ask her name.

But she found me the next day, right at the end of my shift, and we ate cheeseburgers and laughed together and I showed her the attic and my "weird" stuff did not scare her. By the end of that day I was more enamored of her than I had ever been of anyone, but with an affection more sororal than sensual. By now I had close to a full bar in the attic; when I asked what she wanted to drink, she told me to choose for her. She was not allowed to drink at home (liquor, apparently, was the devil's means of bottling hellfire for human consumption) and clearly needed the experience. I made her a fallen angel — still my favorite, though I did not make them often. I do not believe that I consciously wished for her first drink to have the same effect as mine, but neither do I think that I could have been unhappy if it had. Fortune, of course, had other plans.


The rest, as they say, is history — darkly ridiculous, tragicomical history. I laugh, now, reading the pathos and poetry penned in the riotous ecstasy of youth; I always laugh. I should cry more, I know. I should grow up. I should get a new sponsor. I should drown my insubstantial daydreams in the soporific secrecy of sleep; I know I should. But still a voice drums through my veins, a psychedelic melody calling me back to the sandy shore of myself. And she is there inside my head, that irreverent girl slouched on a beanbag chair, trapping her fluttering thoughts with a pen on a page, as "Hotel California" echoes from the attic walls, as liquid candlelight constellations shimmer in waves over empty bottles strewn like fallen icicles across the floor.


"Implosions"
Adrienne Rich

The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by

Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it's finished and we're lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues

I'll have done nothing
even for you?