Fringes

The Contents of My Backpack

One ragged spiral-bound book filled with recycled green paper, swirls of purple and orange and bright pink ink scrawled across the pages. Drawings of seaweed, flowers, fishes. Stickers on the hard black cover: Everything Not Strictly Forbidden Is Now Mandatory; yellow and black alien head from the MOA store on Vermont in Silverlake; silver x-girl hologram from the X-Girl shop next door. Pilot Precise Rolling Ball pens, V5 Extra Fine, in turquoise, violet, lime. Clear vinyl pen bag. And a square silver straight-edge, marked with 18.5 centimeters on the side (lifted from an art supply store in France, a stolen memento of my year abroad).

Bag of berry Skittles. Bag of green M&Ms. Tweety Bird Pez dispenser. Silver foil sheet containing ten blue Valium. Three hits of E. Two tabs of acid (twenty-four years in the federal penitentiary). A wine opener. F.A.M.I.L.Y. fliers (red and purple fractals). Fresh Produce fliers (animated broccoli stalks, carrots, tomatoes). People Who Love You fliers (glow-in-the-dark flowers on green fun fur squares). No I Tu Love fliers (Ecstasy poem written by the promoters on the back). Technostate fliers (Cat-in-the-Hat with glowing yellow X drawn on the tongue). Green Floam. Purple wand. Squeaky Willy Worm—soft green and yellow body with six squishy toes and an inquisitive red face topped with a blue button nose. Purple glass Galaxy Gallery pipe. Silver iPod Nano, current playlist: Concept In Dance, Trancefusion, Technomancer IV, The Hard Edition.

Black spike platforms from Frederick’s on Hollywood. Ziganne V bikini from Playmates next door. Seven-hundred-dollar black Alaia skirt from Rodeo Drive. Matching seven-hundred-dollar shirt—tight, long sleeved, dark. Black DKNY stockings (I only wear stockings when I see him, because he wants me to). Chanel handbag (I only carry it when I come here, because he gave it to me).

Three MAC lipsticks, one black eyeliner, eight one-hundred-dollar bills, and a check for thirty-eight hundred—Fall Session fees—inside. Tylenol. And sleeping pills, for when I have to stay. The Portable Beat Reader, required reading for my Beat Generation seminar, in case I still can’t sleep—not to fight the insomnia, but to give in to it; I’d read it anyway. I can never sleep. Not here. Not twisted between cool gray sheets while naked girls smile desperate smiles on the television—going to be actresses even if it kills them—and even with a vibrator he still can’t come. And I pretend. Numb.

iPhone, with a text from my friend Paisley: CAFFEINE BREEEEAK 911!!! AAAHH!!! Sent this morning in the middle of my Tuesday seminar, Communications 197K. Silver bubble wrap folder. First-day assignment final paper proposal inside: Pornography In The Media. Letter of acceptance into the Creative Writing Workshop series. Sparkle glow-ball and psychedelic sunshine decal from my friend Charlotte. Two poems from Paisley. Purple cat hair clips and a mazy ink doodle from my roommate Lucy. I picked my friends up at one. Now it’s four. Paisley’s back at her office temp job, Lucy’s somewhere getting baked, Charlotte’s with her new boyfriend Zack, and I’m in a penthouse bedroom in Century City.

Crushed velvet navy Diesel pants. Black canvas Guess shoes. Tight silver t-shirt. Squishy Puk Puk squeeze me face across the chest that says I Love You when you press. Minny Mouse ponytail elastics—presents from Paisley. Orange pacifier decorated with pink and peach hearts on a purple satin string. Also from Paisley. Pair of underwear (frayed black cotton, tied together on the side where my ex took a pair of scissors to them). What I wore today, before I came here, to see him.

Now I’m wearing nothing, and my backpack is spilling out onto plush cream bathroom carpet on the other side of this impeccable pink and gray condo.

Beach Ghetto

It is Saturday afternoon. I stand in line at Van Go’s Ear in Venice Beach with my friends Charlotte and Paisley. We are wearing Los Angeles: Los Angeles in my purple flares and long brown pigtails, in the orange and blue day-glo flower pendant hanging over my blue BugGirl halter; Los Angeles in Paisley’s yellow spacebug tee and shiny purple-black hair; Los Angeles in Charlotte’s faded tie-dye tank and not-quite-matching tie-dye shorts.

I balance myself on daisy fabric platforms. Paisley stands beside me in chunky Fluevog boots. Charlotte carries her Birkenstocks in her hand, in the rare event that she should feel like removing the rollerblades from her feet. We look like victims of a Hollywood movie costume designer. That’s the thing about LA, all the cliches are true—it is sunny every day and everyone does end up in the movies. Just last week we saw ourselves in the closing scene of Virtual Reality and I had a fuzzy recollection of a film crew at some downtown party, at some blurry point in the not-too-distant past.

The counter girl slaps an order pad on the scratched wooden counter and waits, glowering, for our order. She wears a frayed black velvet skirt and a ripped black satin tank, and she doesn’t like us. Death black and corpse white are the goth colors of choice, with silver body piercings and suicidal attitudes for decoration. I suspect that our colorful attire offends her depressed sensibilities; we don’t look tormented enough.

I’ll have a double mocha, extra whipped cream, light on the chocolate, and... I peruse the chalkboard menu behind her head through the bleached white porcupine spikes defending her scalp. And the sun-dried tomato pesto linguini, extra parmesan.

She scribbles on her pad and turns to Paisley.

Paisley stares back, unfazed. Spaghetti squash, extra broccoli instead of shrimp—no shrimp. Last time you forgot. Vegan cheese instead of parmesan, but on the side. Paisley is never fazed. And a double soy cappuccino. Dry. But with lots of foam this time.

The girl grits her teeth and scribbles nothing on her pad. Her hair looks like it’s about to attack.

I’ll just have the Fruit Fuck, says Charlotte.

We’re out of the Fruit Fuck.

Well, couldn’t you just blend a bunch of fruits together and-

It’s pre-made and we’re out of it.

But-

Sorry. Goth girl smiles. She looks anything but. I write a mental note never to order after Paisley at Van Go’s Ear.

Well, what about vegetables? asks Charlotte. Couldn’t you just puree some lettuce and carrots and celery and throw in some spirulina or protein powder or something?

Charlotte would do almost anything to avoid conflict, but she’s on a liquid diet in hopes of losing ten pounds by Tuesday afternoon for an aerobic infomercial audition. She rolls nervously back and forth on her blades, her burnished copper hair rippling in shampoo ad waves to her waist. If not for the wheeled footwear and the mismatched tie-dyes, she’d look like she should be frolicking through a romantic garden scene.

Other people think so too. The year she turned thirteen she started modeling Jessica McClintock gowns and Vogue Spring Collections, did the six-week trips to Japan, the runway shows in Madrid and Milan. Eventually she turned seventeen. That was the year the boyfriends came and the magazine covers went. I met her two years later in the cafeteria, when we discovered that we were the only two Communication Studies majors in our building of five hundred, right after she’d acquired a new agent and new jobs that paid for her car and her rent and her tuition.

Fine, says the counter girl. She lets out an exaggerated sigh and rolls pained eyes towards the glinting row of rings piercing the length of her brows. She punches several cash register buttons. Fifty-nine seventy-two.

Almost the price of three tables dances—two with tips. But in spite of the personnel and the prices, Van Go’s Ear does have twenty-four-hour entrees, and a top-of-the-line Pasquini espresso machine whose foam is the earthly distillation of a cloud.

Forty minutes later, as a skinny boy who looks like he’s never not been stoned delivers our food, Charlotte’s newest boyfriend Zack comes running up the stairs to our second-floor table.

Hey guys, I want you to meet my best friend August, he says. In a green-striped shirt and blue Jamsworld shorts, Zack looks like a poster model for the stereotypical California Boy.

August just drove down from Monterey yesterday, he says. He’s a farmer.

August’s slim tanned hand slaps Zack’s head from behind.

I’ve never met a real farmer, says Charlotte, as sculpted Portuguese-Caucasian features follow the hand into our line of vision. In psychedelic-print drawstring pajama pants and skin that you can tell is naturally the exact perfect shade of tan that no combination of oil and sunbathing ever seems to achieve, August looks nothing like the stereotypical California Boy. August looks like he just stepped out of a calendar of Boys From The Tropics or something, one of those luscious pictorials where you just know all the men are gay. August isn’t gay. I just know.

Paisley seizes my hand and grips her cappuccino. Charlotte fingers the two bumpy strands of Indian beads hanging around her neck and sucks on the fat orange straw sticking out of her blended salad.

Dude, I’m not a farmer. If August’s features were capable of expressing animosity, the look he’s giving Zack would be a glare. My dad’s a farmer. I help him out with his accounting.

Accounting... says Charlotte. She stares at August like she’s not currently sleeping with his best friend and might at any moment pull him into a supply closet and ravage him on heaps of organic Colombian Dark Roast. So does Paisley. So do I.

Zack, who’s been assessing the food situation, targets mine. He grabs a chair and helps himself to a mouthful of pasta. I am reassessing my—shockingly narrow-minded, I am beginning to see—opinion of accountants, and couldn’t care less about the fate of my lunch at the moment.

You want to share my smoothie? Charlotte brandishes her vegetable puree at Zack. Through the tall red plastic, mysterious orange and yellow lumps lurk in the grayish fluid. I thought we were going on a liquid diet together, she says.

Yeah yeah, we totally are. Sorry. Mouth is full. Zack quickly refills his mouth with another forkful of my lunch.

I didn’t know accountants could wear their hair like that, I say to August.

It’s amazing, says Paisley. It totally makes up for the fact that you’re an accountant. I didn’t think anything could make up for that.

Uh, thanks, says August. I think. He sticks out his hand towards me. What was your name?

I follow August’s long curled locks down to the toned, latte-colored triangle of his tank-top-clad shoulders and waist. I wonder, five months celibate after the boy-fiend before, if he will be the next. Ever since the horrid morning when I woke to discover my virginity hopelessly lost amongst the sheets of some loathsome boy’s bed the day after my eighteenth birthday, this is the longest I’ve gone without sex. I haven’t much missed it. Until now.

Sarafina, I say. I drop Paisley’s fingers and reach for his. One of my plastic Hello Kitty barrettes falls off my left pigtail and onto the square wooden table. I pick it up and fasten it to one of his delectable tresses.

I’ve been thinking-- says Zack, apparently unaware of the sudden voltage in the air due to August’s appearance --my friend James is moving out of this killer townhouse in Venice to live closer to campus--two of his roommates flaked and his dad doesn’t like him living in the beach ghetto and won’t cover the rent--and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if we all moved in.

The ghetto? says Paisley.

Paisley only relocated to California this summer, after she graduated from university in Pennsylvania, and she’s not yet familiar with the layout of Los Angeles. She was actually considering places with 818 phone prefixes before my roommate Lucy and I rescued her; now we all live together in a double student room. After only three months, it’s getting tense. Paisley doesn’t take well to Lucy getting oil paint stains on her one-of-a-kind thrift store garment treasures and scratches on her rare import b-side singles, and Lucy’s concept of personal space—i.e. her space is everyone’s space and everyone’s space is her space—isn’t likely to change.

It’s not like Watts or anything, says Zack. It’s right up the street, six blocks from the beach. We could check it out today and move in any time, like, this weekend.

Oh, Zack, you really want to live together? I could start moving my things in tonight, or even this afternoon. I was going to go rollerblading but if you helped me we could go rollerblading together later, at sunset! Charlotte beams. She looks like she’s about to call him Bitsy Pookums, or Honey Snuggles, or something else that I am equally incapable of living with for the next nine months.

We can’t move in this weekend, I say. We’re going to Sunny Side Up tomorrow afternoon.

Yeah, says Paisley. "I can’t miss my first beach rave. The ghetto?"

It’s not Compton, says Zack. He smiles at Charlotte. I thought you’d be excited.

You’ve only been seeing each other two weeks, says August, laughing. No way am I living with you.

But we’ve lived in the same dorm for almost two years, says Charlotte. Only two floors apart. We just didn’t know it until last spring.

You guys’re crazy, says August. Besides, I already have a killer place in Mar Vista.

I wasn’t asking you, Dude, says Zack. So, what do you guys think? It’s three stories, with three bedrooms, three baths and a terrace. He looks at Paisley and me, anticipating our enthusiasm. I think we’d make an awesome family.

Family. Zack’s family. When Zack was born twenty-three years ago onto a cracked parchment desert floor, spit out three months late between a rock and a cactus, his mother was peaking on acid, and mistook her firstborn son for a disturbing hallucination which would disappear if only she could manage to come down. And so, for the first time in almost twelve months, she did. But the baby didn’t disappear, and for lack of anything else to do with this curious new life form who seemed to claim her as his mother, she dubbed him Oracle Star Koatsa, after the first and second most likely father candidates, and a phosphorescent Native Indian root used as a peace charm during times of strife.

The first time Paisley and I saw him, several years ago when she came to Los Angeles for a bio internship, he’d long since renamed himself Zack. He was wearing a green frog hat with the hat part missing, so that his straight sun-bleached hair flopped around the rubber brim with the four cock-eyed limbs hopping around his shoulders and the gangly red tongue bouncing over his left eye. He held a bong in one hand, a Frisbee in the other, and he demonstrated his exceptional coordination by simultaneously inhaling on the first and tossing the second.

A house six blocks from the beach doesn’t sound too bad, I say. It sounds good, actually. Three stories, that’s about twenty-two times more space than the average dorm cell, plenty of room for Charlotte and Zack to be disgustingly yet unobtrusively in love. And there is that issue of Lucy’s runaway paint supplies, and my growing collection of cracked or empty CD cases...

Lucy is one of my favorite friends, but last week she loaned my entire Anais Nin collection to some girl on the third floor while I was at work, and I have yet to recover my vintage Bjork video collection ever since she couldn’t remember who she gave it to last spring. It might be good to move so she remains one of my favorite friends. And even though she and Paisley are the only two people I know who would willingly wear a terry cloth argyle print shirt hemmed with a curtain-ball fringe in public, I don’t know how long their shared fashion preferences will be able to make up for Lucy’s definition of respect for other people’s property.

You’re gonna need three stories, says August, still laughing. I wouldn’t live with someone even if I’d been seeing them for a year.

Dude, you’ve never even seen anyone for six months, says Zack. He turns towards me and Paisley. It’s a green house, with purple trim... He dangles the words like carrots in front of Paisley’s nose and glares at August. Green and purple is Paisley’s favorite color combo.

I might be able to live in a ghetto if it was lavender and chartreuse, says Paisley, enticed. Especially if moving means that my CDs will be put back in their proper cases all the time. And no more oil paint fingerprints on my favorite shirts.

I never know if I’m reading her mind or if she’s reading mine.

I hate it when my CDs aren’t in the right case, says Charlotte.

Charlotte’s collection is alphabetized by artist and title, categorized down to the third sub-genre, and labeled in Monaco 10-point font.

I guess even if it is the beach ghetto, it’s still the beach, says Paisley. She reaches across the table and pulls one of August’s springy brown coils down to his waist. When she lets go it bounces back to his chest.

Hey, that’s my hair! says August, toppling backwards in surprise. He clutches his ringlets possessively.

I decide that five months of celibacy is long enough. I decide that it’s time for a living situation that involves properly housed CDs. At least until I have the patience to transfer everything into my iTunes and get rid of the annoying dusty stacks entirely.

I think we should go look at the green and purple house, I say. It’s a step up from a foot and a half of closet space and sharing a bathroom with six boys down the hall, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just move out.

I didn’t think of that, says Paisley. If we don’t like it, we can leave!

The next decision takes approximately one minute—the time it takes for Paisley and me to stop staring at August and look at each other instead.

Him.

Paisley

Her name is Paisley. And sometimes she is Praxilla. She is Praxilla in flowery tights and green velvet boots and long handmade hats with jingle bells dangling off the tips. When you call her at the office though, the automated answering service calls her Pearl, because they haven’t yet changed the name from the last secretary.

She isn’t really a secretary. She only masquerades as one between the unnatural hours of eight and five. Sorting through her personality wardrobe in a six a.m. daze she bypasses Raven, dominatrix witch in flowing jagged black and bondage-pothole tights, and Psychedelia, who likes best the patterns that match worst, and Phoenix, who rises every so often from the darkest recesses in blinding satin brilliance, to come to Pearl, office temp extraordinaire, crumpled up in an abandoned heap of floral fabric, one hundred percent rayon, dry clean only.

I saw her once, foreign and adult, lips a neutral shade and hair brushed back, in her professional playpen on the nineteenth floor of that mirrored tower on the corner of Wilshire and Westwood, drinking watered-down office koffee with people dressed in beige. To all those other closet poets and artists and musicians, she probably looked normal, answering phones, entering data, filing papers. To me, knowing nothing but the poet, the artist, and the musician, she was barely visible. If not for a few strands of Praxilla’s hair poking out from under Pearl’s disguise, I wouldn’t have seen her at all. Pearl, sacrificing herself so that Paisley, Raven, Psychedelia, Phoenix, Praxilla, can run free into filigree waves on faraway shores, can curl up cozy in distant cafe corners, sleep soundly in lumpy hostel beds, savor the textures of life unfettered.

After hours, her brighter chameleon colors burst out in unrestrained vibrancy, illuminated by the shifting backdrops of quirky coffeehouse collages, of melting sunset rays, of intoxicating nights, and swingy-haired fish in stripey shirts and jeans worn soft and frayed. Sloshy floppy drunk, she is a jerky marionette in a silver astronaut skirt and Haight Street t-shirt with groove blotched across the chest like an amoebae in a petri dish.

Dressed in baggy jeans, with dark boy hair, heavy neutral stare, those tiny Chinese breasts that look so good in tank tops, and no soft giggles, nothing soft except her heart, pounding like an ambient dub beat beneath one of her father’s old shirts, she is masculine and feminine in one. Sunlight tripping in her eyes, burgundy shadows in her hair, dreams on her tongue, she is my sister soul.

She is affectionate like a child when she leans over to hug me long and tight, affectionate as I would never imagine from her, until her hair is wispy in my face and her breath is warm on my neck and her arms wrap around clinging like a little girl’s. We kiss sometimes, wild cavorting flowers in the night, and people often think we are Together. And we might be, too, if it weren’t for all those stripey swingy fish. But there they are, and there we are, swimming together after their shiny glinting tails hand in hand.

She has music in her fingers, and ink runs through her veins, spilling out secrets in squiggly lines of lavender, turquoise, black, and green, onto unlined pages between purple velvet covers. She is the sort of person other people dress up as, for Halloween, the sort of person who dresses up as herself for office costume parties, ever since last June, when she metamorphosed into one of those mysterious creatures, a college graduate.

That sounds deceptive, as if by participating in the Grown Up world, she has become one of those equally illusory characters: a responsible career-minded adult. And she is on the upward-mobility track. Except that where others aspire to higher numbers in their salary, more powerful and prestigious positions, she reaches for freedom, and feeling. Sometimes she reaches so high that I’m afraid the lightness of life will carry her off and she’ll float away, a bright red balloon, into sky blue ephemeral realms. Her only gravity is that she sees the midnight in things, feels her heartbeat race at the razor edge of life/not life, tastes always underneath the bitterness of ecstasy.

When we first met, the day she arrived in Los Angeles for a summer internship three years ago and got assigned to my decorated dorm room box, I thought she was strange. I didn’t want a roommate. I didn’t want the bother of initial awkward conversation with someone new in the mornings over starchy dorm breakfasts, in lazy afternoons when I thought I’d rather be alone.

Her hair was longer then, and shaved underneath in back. She would dye the underside various shades of purple, and green, and orange. She had one thin braid that hung down her chest longer than the rest of her hair, and she listened to bands I’d never heard before.

I was suspicious of the braid. I was wary of her music. That was way back when Depeche Mode and Morrissey still dominated my limited collection, when the word weird hadn’t yet become a compliment in my vocabulary, way back when my favorite color was still anything pastel. I dressed in pink, sky blue, cream, nice colors, polite colors, Seen And Not Heard colors. I still owned a King James Version. I still thought intimacy was a boyfriend. My journal was still my best friend.

Now I look at her with eyes that see beyond the surface into layers of late nights spent sitting slouched in mismatched chairs at wobbly tables. I look into her face, and I don’t see a face. I see the eclectic two a.m. vampire culture of boys bleached albino blond and ears hung heavy with dull silver and girls moving wet Morticia lips. I look at her lips, and I don’t see lips. I hear the dissonance of a thousand rasping voices of the night telling a thousand indistinct and intimate stories. I look at her hands, and I don’t see hands. I hear the piano keys she played the night she hugged the trees and felt their pain and said this is for the trees, and I hugged her skinny shoulders tight and breathed the notes into my lungs.

I don’t remember the exact moment we discovered the magic synergy winding her ragged black shoelace with my knotted satin ribbon into one perfect soulmate braid. I don’t remember knowing for the first time that I loved her.

I remember crazy London nights, running free down crooked streets, glitter trailing in our hair. I remember lashing lights, and laughter like glass breaking, and songs so good they wouldn’t let me sleep, even though my eyelids closed. Mango oil, and clunky steel-toed shoes, and pouring liquid limbs up dank club stairs to kiss the same enticing boy, twenty-page letters and six-hour calls and pine tree branches moving like anemones underwater—I remember.

Her name is Paisley, and she is my best friend.

Crooked Spoons

Zack is right. The house is fantastic. Light green stucco with lavender trim. Yellow windowsills long and wide enough for five people