She's Not There Read online

  As I played that night, watching the pints march down the top of the upright, I was thinking about a girl. I’d met her at a party the night before, a few hours after I’d walked toward, and failed to enter, the British Center for Gender Study.

  We’d met at a party, locked eyes across the room, and gravitated toward each other. Simultaneously we’d said, “Who are you?”

  She was Donna Fierenza, a student at Brown, just in London for the weekend to see her brother, Bobby. I liked him. One good thing about Bobby Fierenza was that he had a lot of chest hair. He also had a good laugh and played electric bass.

  Donna wanted to be an animator. “I’m not just talking cartoons, Boylan,” she said. I told her I was a writer, which was nice. Saying it almost made it true.

  She grabbed a bottle of Johnson’s baby powder that was sitting on the table. “Yuh ever do this?” She shook it into her hair, then my hair, turning it gray. “This is what we’ll look like when we’re old,” she said.

  As it turns out, she was wrong. I don’t look anything like that now, although I probably would if I didn’t go the salon every couple of months and pay the extra hundred dollars for foil highlights.

  Donna was from Massachusetts and had a shocking accent, which was working-class North Shore Italian:“My fatha wuhks in GLAHWSTAH.” She had curly dark red hair. She had four horizontal creases in her brow that became deeper when she laughed, which was frequently.

  “I want to see you again, Boylan. What are you doing tomorrow?” It was Friday night. She was flying back to America on Sunday. “You want to meet at the Great Portland Street tube stop at one?”

  The hell yes.

  Which was where I was at one o’clock the next day, holding a bouquet of roses.

  I was still there at one-fifteen.

  And one-thirty and one forty-five.

  At two o’clock I threw the flowers in a trash can and walked back toward Fitzroy Square, passing by the London Foot Hospital, singing an Elton John song to myself, an old tearjerker about being stood up called “Come Down in Time”: There are women and women and some hold you tight / While some leave you counting the stars in the night. . . .

  Whatever it was Donna Fierenza had seen in me by night, she had lost sight of it by morning.

  That night I played “Come Down in Time” at Mr. Pitiful’s. I didn’t sing it, though. They didn’t like it when I sang in the pub. It was too much like someone talking.

  I got paid twenty pounds out of the till when I finished, and I walked in my long dark coat out into the rain.

  Then I stopped in the middle of the street and thought. Donna had said that she was going to a concert that night down at the Marquee Club in Soho. That was why we’d made the afternoon date instead of an evening one. If I went to the Marquee Club right now, there might be time to find her. I hadn’t waited long enough this afternoon—that was it! Surely she’d showed up after two, crushed that I wasn’t there.

  I turned around and started walking toward the Bakerloo line. Then I stopped.

  I was a woman, or felt like one. What kind of relationship did I expect to have with Donna, even if I found her at the Marquee? Women seemed to detect some sort of inner struggle in me anyway, some sort of feminine streak that kept them from getting too close. Surely Donna had sent me a clear enough signal by standing me up.

  I turned around again and started walking home. Then I stopped. The waves crashed against the boardwalk in Surf City. Maybe you could be cured by love.

  I ran through the rain to the Bakerloo line.

  It would have been interesting to watch me, from some high window. A young man in the pouring rain—I think that’s a man— with a long tattered coat, long blond hair, walking first one direction, then stopping, then walking the other, then turning around again, over and over, spinning like a top. Then, finally, running off in a new direction. I hoped that it was the right one.

  The Marquee Club was on Wardour Street. The Stones and the Who and all those bands had played there a long time ago. At the time, I was reading The Two Towers, and to me, Wardour sounded like Mordor. I was every bit as scared heading down there as if I’d been heading with Frodo and Sam for the Cracks of Doom. And I was out of lembas , the elven way-bread. Actually, lembas wasn’t the only thing I was out of.

  I entered the club at about eleven. It was a punk club now, and a sign on the wall said FUCK HIPPIES. The crowd was breaking up, and the lights were on. People were heading toward the exits. Alone with my long hair and John Lennon glasses, I walked against the tide of pink spikes and blue mohawks. Somebody hit me in the shoulder and said, “Will ye fuck off, ye gay queer?” He pronounced “gay” so that it would rhyme with “hi,” at least it would in America.

  There, up near the front of the stage, was Donna’s brother, Bobby. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that was buttoned near his navel. “Hey, man,” I said to him. “Is Donna here?”

  He looked at me suspiciously. It was his sister we were talking about. On stage they were taking apart the drums. A guy in a torn white T-shirt yelled at the crowd: “Everybody get the fuck out!”

  “I think she left,” said Bobby.

  I headed toward the exit. Which was when I felt a finger on my shoulder and turned around.

  It was Donna.

  “I got lost,” she said, blushing. “I got to the station at two-fifteen and you weren’t there. I bought some peanuts from the vendah and went across the street and sat on the steps a some church and ate them. I just sat there, tryin’ not to cry.”

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “Do you want to get out of here?”

  “Yep,” she said, and we put our arms around each other and walked out onto the street.

  It had stopped raining, and now a warm wind had turned all that rain to mist. The steam was rising up from the cobbles and dissipating around our knees. We began walking through the deserted streets of London. I didn’t know where we were going, and neither did she. It didn’t matter.

  “How was the concert?”

  “Uh man, it sucked! Fuckin’ noise, and I’m not kidding. Everybody loved it. Me, I just kept thinking how I’d fucked up with you, Boylan. I thought I’d nevah see you again.”

  After a while we came to a restaurant I knew, the Three Lanterns. We had somehow snaked our way through the mist back to Marylebone and were by now only a few blocks from my apartment, where my bonehead roommates were probably awake and drinking Pepsi.

  Donna and I went into the Three Lanterns. The place was deserted. A cat crawled around our legs, then sat in the window. It was incredibly quiet. The waitress, who knew me, came to the table and said, “The usual, sir?”

  I nodded. “The usual” was a bottle of retsina. The waitress brought us the bottle with two glasses, and we drank the whole thing as we talked and didn’t talk. At one point, Donna leaned over the table and kissed me. We kissed for a long time.

  Then we left the Three Lanterns. We walked up the street toward the British Telecom Tower, then up the stairs of my apartment on Maple Street.

  Where my bonehead roommates were sitting around drinking Pepsi. There was Frank, who wanted to become a composer of whimsical music, like Leroy Anderson. He played Leroy Anderson music at every hour of the day—“The Syncopated Clock,” “The Typewriter,” even the one with the mewing cat. And there was Lou Muggins, a computer nerd, who had curved shoulders and a sad little mustache and thick aviator glasses. He liked to make the noise Haink in response to things. Like “Lou Muggins, there’s a spaceship outside!”

  Lou Muggins: “Haink!”

  Or “Lou Muggins, there’s a man here to give you a check for two million dollars!”

  Lou Muggins: “Haink!”

  We entered the apartment and I simply said to the guys, “I need the double for a while.” At that time, we had a double room and a single. I was in the double with Mr. Syncopated Clock. Frank agreed to stay out in the kitchen for a while. Lou Muggins didn’t offer to let me use his single room. He just said, “Hain
k!”

  Donna and I went into the bedroom, and there we talked and we kissed and we made out and did not have sex. I’m not sure if she was expecting for us to have sex then and there, but it didn’t really occur to me that that’s what was supposed to happen. I was a twenty-year-old virgin—unsure, awkward, stupid, transgendered. Still, my life had changed. I didn’t want to be a woman so much. I wanted to be in love with Donna Fierenza.

  At two in the morning, Frank started making noises outside the door about how he wanted to go to sleep (“I’m tired, Boylan, I mean it!”), so Donna and I left the apartment and walked out into the night again. Now thick fog was everywhere, and the streets were deserted. In the morning of the next day, she was flying back to America.

  A taxi’s lights stabbed through the fog. The cabbie pulled over and we embraced again and kissed, and she said,“I fell in love in London.” I gave the man £10 and said, “Take her to Elephant and Castle,” and then she put her hand on her side of the rain-streaked window, and I put my hand on top of hers on my side of the rain-streaked window, and then the cab pulled out into the night, and I stood there on the corner and watched the red taillights disappear into the fog.

  I didn’t feel like going home yet. I looked around at the dark buildings of London surrounding me. There was the Great Portland Street tube stop. A soft chime came from the bell tower of the church across the street, where earlier in the day Donna said she’d sat on the steps and eaten peanuts.

  In the months to come, Donna and I would write dozens of letters to each other. I kept hers in my pocket as I walked across Europe with my ridiculous backpack—through Spain, through France, through Italy and Germany, through Belgium and Holland and Scotland and Ireland. I would lose my virginity—barely—to her in my own teenage bedroom that summer, in the Coffin House. I would travel by Greyhound bus to visit her on the North Shore, where we drank wine and made out on the beach under a full moon. She would talk to me on the phone about her former and then occasional and then “other” boyfriend, Neal, about how Neal didn’t understand her, about how Neal didn’t believe in her, about how Neal’s favorite expression was “and shit,” to mean “et cetera,” as in,“I really love you, and shit.”

  In the fall I hitchhiked to Brown from Wesleyan, and there we broke up. I still had slept with her—barely—only the one time. I think Neal began to have a pretty good sense that I was no threat. Still, as Joyce wrote in “The Dead,” “I was great with her at that time.”

  In Providence, Donna showed me the grave of H. P. Lovecraft (with the epitaph I AM PROVIDENCE), and there she said, “I don’t think I want to be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore,” and I said okay. By then it was all the same to me. I’d already been imagining what I’d look like in her clothes. I left her apartment on a Sunday morning, and I never saw her again. I hitchhiked back to Connecticut and wrote her a poem as I lay in the back of someone’s pickup truck, something along the lines of This is sad but don’t forget that night in London, that was really cool.

  As the taillights of her taxi disappeared in the fog that night, I knew I wanted to hold on to the evening just a few moments longer. So I walked toward the church, and as I did, I wondered, had she just made all that up about being an hour and a quarter late this afternoon? Was she ever here at all?

  I sat on the steps of the church. It was three in the morning. I was surrounded by fog.

  On the steps at my feet were the shells of roasted peanuts.

  Monkey Orphanage (Spring 1982)

  I found out about the monkey orphanage while I was doing a story for a magazine about the Skunk Club. Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn’t quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy. Whenever I needed a quote, I’d just make one up and attribute it to an “anonymous source.” On one occasion, I alleged that something had been stated “according to someone that would know.”

  Fortunately, American Bystander magazine wasn’t too concerned with accuracy. Mostly we went for the yuks. The Bystander, which was run by former National Lampoon editor Brian McConnachie, lasted for a year or two in the early 1980s; it was funded and sustained by a ragtag group of former Saturday Night Live performers, some writers from the Lampoon and Second City, and a handful of cartoonists from The New Yorker. The goal was to be “an American Punch” or, as we put it then, “a hip New Yorker.” This was long before Tina Brown and all that.

  The other magazine being launched at the time was Vanity Fair , which had been defunct for many years and was now being brought back to life by Condé Nast. Over at the Bystander, we were skeptical about Vanity Fair’s prospects. Oh, sure, like that’ll last more than a couple of issues.

  Being managing editor of the American Bystander was my first job out of Wesleyan, and to this day it is the best job I ever had, aside from the fact that I got paid only $600 a month. I rode around on UPS trucks in Manhattan; I had lunch with the New Yorker cartoonists; I went bowling with famous comedians. On one particular occasion, I was one of several people who tried to figure out how to float cartoonist Roz Chast across the Gowanus Canal with weather balloons. It would take a lot of balloons, we deduced, but it was doable, at least it was until Roz got wind of the caper and announced, “Listen, I’m not doing that.”

  I lived in a horrific apartment in Spanish Harlem with bad plumbing and bugs and mice. I ate beans. My first roommate was a guy just out of NYU film school named Charlie Kaufman. He was finishing up a movie of his on a giant editing machine he’d rented and kept in a corner of his bedroom. Together Charlie and I put roach poison out for the roaches, mousetraps out for the mice. The mice liked to hang out in our upright piano, one of two pieces of furniture I owned. At night, we could hear their little tails brushing against the strings.

  The apartment was on the second floor of an old West Side building, with high ceilings and wood floors. It looked out into the back of the block, where clotheslines were strung from building to building, and German shepherds patrolled the backyards. Downstairs from us was some sort of homosexual dungeon, where in the middle of the night I often awoke to hear the clank of chains from the flat below, one man crying out in orgiastic delight while another sobbed in a voice of almost unimaginable, mortal despair.

  Big thick iron bars covered all the windows in the place. One afternoon, I was sitting on the radiator, eating a banana, looking out the window at the dogs and the clotheslines. I put one hand on the bars and with the other held my banana. Now wait, I thought. What do I feel like now?

  Later, Charlie Kaufman moved out, and a friend of mine from Wesleyan, John Flyte, moved in. Flyte was a painter, and he sat for hours by the window, painting oils on a canvas.

  Toward midnight, sometimes, Flyte and I would walk out into the night and close down various low dives, the two of us sitting at the bar as the tired waitresses put all the other stools in the place upside down on the tables.

  Come on, boys, it’s closing time.

  Occasionally during this period I would go out on dates. Once I asked a girl I met in a bookshop if she’d “like to go and get some pie.” She found this hilarious and left the store, still laughing uncontrollably, as I stood there ashamed. I didn’t think it was so funny, getting pie. On another occasion I tried asking out the bartender at a nasty bar just down from the Brill Building. I don’t know what her real name was, but everyone called her “the Snail.” She had a buzz cut and tattoos. I tried the pie business again, and to my surprise, the Snail said sure. “You know, I don’t know many guys like you, Boylan,” she said.

  “Guys like me?” I said.

  “Yeah, like non-assholes? You don’t see that many.”

  It was a nice thing for her to say, I had to admit that.

  A few nights later, I waited for her as she shut down the bar. When she finally finished, we walked out into the hot New York night to go and get our pie. A man was waiting for her, though, leaning against a brick wall, smoking.

  “Where the fuck have you been, bitch?”
he said to my date.

  “Whoops,” said the Snail. “Sorry. I gotta run.” She walked over to the man and put her arms around him. “It’s okay,” she said to him softly. “I been busy.”

  “Who’s this guy?” I said, and the Snail looked over at me as if unsure whether or not I existed.

  “I’m her boyfriend, fuckwad,” the man explained helpfully. “And maybe you’d like a bullet in your ass?”

  “Ah,” I said.

  I took the number one train home.

  Then, as throughout my life, I found myself attracted exclusively to women. I never even thought about men romantically; it never even crossed my mind. Still, my relationships with women were decidedly odd. “What’s it like to have breasts?” I’d ask. “How does it feel?” It was a question women found baffling.

  “It doesn’t feel like anything,” one girl told me. “It feels like having an elbow, a nose, a toe. It just is.” I couldn’t believe she expected me to believe this. Of all the things that I thought being female would feel like, nothing wasn’t an answer I’d considered.

  On another occasion I went out with a woman named Casey. She was tall and beautiful and worked as a fashion photographer. One Saturday we rode the Circle Line around Manhattan, and she took pictures of me, standing by the railing, looking at the Little Red Lighthouse beneath the George Washington Bridge. Casey’s long blond hair was held in place with a New York Yankees cap, which she wore backward, catcher style. From underneath, I thought the George Washington Bridge was frightening, the distant roar of traffic high over our heads. I felt as if I’d never been that close to something so large before.

  Afterward, Casey and I walked up through Riverside Park, looking at the Hudson. I reached out for her hand and held it. We paused at one place where a large number of people were fishing. A large culvert emptied gray water into the river.

  “Who are those people?” I asked Casey. “What are they doing?”