Red Earth and Pouring Rain (52 page)

What about Mother, you say, but I kept quiet and was carefully thankful, biding my time for I don’t know what. I was waiting.
I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew my reply would have to be momentous. Anyway, I knew my NASA plans were off,
because even the thought of getting on a plane to go to Texas or someplace like that made me pukey. On the weekends I got
up early to go to the park, where I watched the morning workers sweep up the leaves and work with the water and manure. Also
I read a lot, mostly, why I don’t know, but mostly folktales, German and Indian, Icelandic sagas, stuff like that. I guess
it made me feel better. I talked to no one.

After a while I started to go to the park in the evenings too. I told Mother it was boys, dates, parties, and eagerly she
believed me. I sat on the grass and waited as darkness came in, then I got on the last bus and went home. I should have been
scared but I wasn’t. One day, I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of sprinklers, a soft shushing sound repeating itself,
I felt the water float onto my skin and bead and make it cool, and as I tried to raise my head I couldn’t, it was as if my
muscles had given way. I thought then that if I let myself go I would disappear into the earth, become mud and soil, and I
sat up and came to myself with my heart pounding. Holding my chest, I scrambled up and started to walk. I went outside the
park and walked on, and I walked past many things. First, near the park, were the houses of the rich, big and glowing, the
windows like precious soft bits of hot metal, like barriers which hid a whole world. Then I walked past the houses of the
ordinary people, past the orderly rows of boxlike, dark bulks. Then came a festive, noisy mall, the lots filled with cars.
Then I saw scrubby grass lots,
factory buildings, tin sheds. Then I walked past the homes of the poor, rows and rows of apartment houses, stoops, rotting
vehicles. Then there was a huge empty place, gray and abandoned, strands of wire here and there, a white animal skull and
barking in the darkness, here and there the scattered fragments of a building. Then a long moment of nothing, complete darkness,
not even a road. Then, finally, a red glow in the darkness, a circle of neon, a jagged script with lost letters in it, spelling
“Joyland.”

When I went into Joyland they assumed I was looking for a job, and I didn’t say no. Because I was so young they were nervous
and yet obviously they wanted me, so I let them go through their moves, bargain and slick and wheel and deal, I knew as soon
as I walked in. They took me behind and I waited in the wings until it was my turn. Then I walked onto the stage, ignored
the music, sat on the edge and slowly pulled off my clothes. I mean it wasn’t a show or anything, I didn’t even try to dance,
I just took off my clothes, but they seemed to love it because after a while I called for the lights to come up and I looked
them in the face and met their eyes and just sat there and took them all off and then I sat there some more and stretched
back a little and that was it. I mean it wasn’t much and I’ve often wondered why there was that sudden quiet and the other
girls stopped moving around on the floor and everyone just watched. I sure as hell don’t believe that I have the kind of looks
that stop people from drinking and buying stuff and going on just because I take my goddamned clothes off, so I wonder what
it was that first night. I don’t know. Maybe it was just that I looked everyone in the eye and I wasn’t trying to sell anything.

So I started there. I don’t want to tell you that it was all pleasant: there was booze on the floor, women working to feed
kids and others, drunks in the bathrooms, all those men sitting in the darkness, their eyes, knifings now and then, cruising
cops, bad money from the Families, all that. But three nights a week I told Mother I was off to see Eddie and Barbara and
Pennel, and instead I went down to Joyland and did my thing. Why, you ask, who knows, it did good for me. I would have done
it anywhere, I think, on the street or on a bus, but at Joyland it was all set up and I could do it, so I did.

Some of the women despised me, and others took care of me. The men circled and watched, not at all sure what to think, and
all kinds of
rumors flew. But still, you want to know, what did I get out of it, what did I feel, didn’t I feel cheap and used or something?
No, what I felt, under the sharp moon of the spotlight, was just me, the sweat on my skin. I think for sure there were others
who danced there who despised those who watched and themselves, but to me that wasn’t even important, that, or money, wasn’t
why I walked to the edge of town. It was that it anchored me. In there I was free of the knives of progress, at least for
a while. And it was truly for me very innocent: I went straight home afterwards, ignoring all the invitations, the sad and
hopeful queries.

Time went: I graduated, and did what I did, and one hot July night I walked home, and everywhere small groups of people gathered
in front of store windows, watching a gray, rocky surface, a small white craft floating in black. When I got home Mother was
sitting upright at her table, and in the back the television spoke softly, urgently. She was looking at me.

“You know?” I said.

“I know.” It was no use to ask how, there were a hundred men who came to my shows, and so somehow she knew. She had her hands
flat on the table in front of her, her face was in the darkness, but flashes of light danced over her head from behind.

“You filthy creature,” she said, in a voice more full of wonder than anger. “You could have been anything, you could have
done anything. But instead you —” and now her voice cracked, “you chose SHIT.” Her gesture as she held out the world to me,
my future, took in the small kitchen, the
Saturday Evening Post
covers framed on the wall, and especially the image on the screen behind her. She stopped, turned away from me, looked deeply
into the television, then dismissed me: “You barbarian.”

So I left. I walked down the street, and you know what I saw on the hundreds of brightly lit squares on both sides of the
streets, in shop windows and in living rooms, you know whose voice followed me, repeating again and again, metallic and hissy
from thousands of miles of space: “That’s one small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.” You know what I watched:
a white form, light and clean, pushing a flag into the moon. So I found a telephone, and I called. There had been people asking
me things, to do things, so now I called, and in a few hours it was all ready: a creaky metal bed in a faraway, smelly house,
a
torn mattress covered with a cheap but brand new cotton sheet, two small baby spots on metal stands, an ancient and scratched
but working sixteen-millimeter camera, a photographer, and a man. At first the man, long-haired but cowboy-booted, thirtyish,
and drinking from a small bottle, at first he smiled at me, baby don’t worry I’ll take care of you, but I didn’t say a word
and he shut up. I mean I was calm. In a minute I had everything off and I said, let’s go, and he looked over behind the camera,
surprised, I think he thought, maybe wanted, that I’d be scared. He sat on the bed and I rolled over him, skimming and struggling
off his shirt, and then there was the bumpy skin on his shoulders, the slight sourness of his underarms, neck and pulses,
sharp taste in the mouth, bourbon, smoothness of the inside of the lip, eyes darting under closed eyelids, each hair on the
chest distinct, goose-pimpled nipples, my tongue like a dart, a swallow, teeth pinching skin, the trembling breath in the
stomach and the twitching muscles, blessed solidity and the warmth, welcome hint of a pungent bouquet underneath, nose nuzzling
and burrowing, wrinkled skin, so soft, and sliding and precious underneath, mouth opens and comes up to welcome: cock is good,
and then visiting the knees, the poky and scarred childhood knees, extended ankles and curled toes. I swing up, and he moves
kiss by kiss over my back, the side of me, arms and neck and ears, small wet animal, warm and nipping, vibration along breasts,
nipples alert, scoots down and I hunch over his face, smell of myself, lips over me, each movement a long lightening into
my heart, labia luxuriant and thick, ballooned, circling tip searching clit and finding and losing, hands spread on cheeks,
my fingers on myself: sweet inexhaustible goodness of cunt. The camera whirs, I lean back and reach under, take him, now bouncy
against my hand and muscled, move my hips until I hold him, then settle back, the sting takes a scream from me, but I can
see my body shining and wet and above his, holding him inside the reach of him feels so strange, the thought of it —I have
him in —so unexpected and wonderful that I laugh, he trembles and laughs too, and for some reason the giggling takes us, and
we laugh and laugh until I slump and still laugh and the camera stops and all I can hear is the three of us laughing.

So we ran out of film and had to come back the next day to get the come shot. Then we sat up stickily in bed and ate doughnuts.
When I asked why the come shot (this one in slow motion, luxuriant sprays of
liquid), they both shrugged, said that’s the way it’s done, babe, it’s the money shot. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t really
care, because I really was okay. People don’t believe me when I tell them this, straights, I mean, squares, good folk, Mom
and Pop with their two-point-oh-five kids. They look at me with pity and horror alternating over their faces, and when I insist,
they try to pretend I don’t exist. You’re just deluded, Mom says, you’re crazy, you don’t really know what’s happening to
you, you don’t know what’s being done to you. When I still say, no, no, this is me, they snarl “slut,” and try to forget about
me. But, hey, I’ve been all over. After that first day, with the money I got, I bought a beat-up Packard, got in it and drove.
I’ve been to every small town from Albany to Zanesville, every city, and when you get in, when you start seeing the shopping
malls, you swing past the stores, you avoid the commercial streets where the suits live, you angle away from the suburbs and
the lawns, and look for ruined buildings, bums, police cars, rain, and there you find it. I went from town to town and did
strip. Then I came back up east and I did loops, grainy black-and-white stuff, badly lit, the guys sometimes with their shoes
on for fear of cop raids. Then suddenly it was the seventies and we were doing film, with credits, music, and everything,
and people, even women, started to know who I was. I never went home.

I guess to put it bluntly you would have to say I became a star, but what I want you to know is what I do is work, and it
is a craft. Think about it —you show up in the morning, and maybe the person —him or her —the person you’re working with,
if you’re unlucky, isn’t into it, they hate it, hate themselves, or they’re just bored or tired, so now you have to carry
the scene. Then there are the lights, hot and headache-making. If they’re going to move the camera you sit there and then
you have to start again, maybe the guy’s losing his hard, the fluff girl’s working away on him but it’s going, so then you
have to revive him. After all this it’s got to work, at least for me it does, I take pride in my art, and it does work, after
all there’s the flesh, shiny and soft under the arcs, the room fading away, a still, lovely concentration even with the director’s
voice from behind the camera.

So I did it for years. The first real film I did, credits and all, the producer said, honey do you want to use your real name.
I told him I’d think about it. That night I sat in my apartment and thought about it.
My real name —never mind what it was —didn’t seem real to me anymore, and maybe it never had. I thought of myself hiding in
a bathroom, skin damp from steam, and outside the thin atmosphere of Mother’s house, the climate of temperate reason we lived
in, and I knew my name had never been mine. So I cast about for another one, I flipped through the books on my walls, walked
about from window to window. Finally I threw on a coat and went outside, north —I lived in Manhattan then, on Columbus. It
was late now, winter, and the streets glittered with ice. I walked, and I could hear the voices of carolers, clear and sharp
as blades in the crisp air. I turned a corner, and St. John’s loomed, I stood facing the huge black shell. As it hung over
me I waited, waited for it to tell me something, waited to ask a question that trembled half-formed in me. But finally I turned
away, nothing said, nothing remembered.

The next morning I had a call from a doctor at Bishop’s: Mother had been brought into the emergency room after a collapse
at work. The symptoms were of acute starvation. When I got to the hospital, the doctor (after his moment of startled recognition,
I was getting used to those) told me that she had been suffering from long and unrelenting constipation, and it seemed that
rather than suffer the abdominal pain, the headaches, the mixtures and pills, the indignity of straining morning after morning,
she had stopped eating. She was asleep, and I looked through the glass window on the door of the room, preferring not to go
in, scared of waking her up. They had an IV in her arm, a tube in her nose.

“We’re feeding her,” the doctor said.

Her hands were curled up in two tiny fists on her chest.

“How long didn’t she eat?”

“Two weeks, it looks like.”

“How long is she going to be in here?”

“A week, maybe ten days. Her insurance should cover it, don’t worry. At least this time.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

It wasn’t. What I was thinking of was how dark her body looked against the white of the hospital sheets, her rage when she
would awaken and find herself defeated. In the parking lot the tears froze quickly on my face, and my head was filled with
a single word, a memory perhaps from some late late movie of childhood, or perhaps I had heard
it lifting toward me from the hospital chapel. That afternoon, I paused from tonguing a breast, from sucking its perfect nipple,
and I raised up and said to nobody in particular, “Kyrie. That’s my new name, Kyrie.”

They kept Mother in the hospital for three weeks, for treatment and psychiatric observation. She refused to answer the shrink’s
questions, and refused to see me: “I don’t want any of her filthy money either.” They released her on Christmas eve, and I
watched her from my car as she strode out confidently into the haze of snow that hung over the city. She walked away and I
watched, for a long time, the lights glowing dimly and far away, listened to the silence. They had her back at Emergency the
next morning, throwing up violently and in pain —she had gone home and gorged on food, on thick slabs of ham, whole cakes
of butter, game hens, pie. When they took off her clothes her stomach bulged, its circumference weirdly translucent and webbed
with black veins. This time they kept her for a month, and had her looked at by teams of nutritionists and psychologists.
Hesitating but reluctant to keep her in the hospital —she seemed so damn healthy —they released her to the care of a live-in
nurse and a smart young doctor out of Harvard. But now, even though she ate regularly and carefully, under the eye of the
nurse, her body seemed to starve. The food disappeared into her, and then vanished altogether —she grew weaker and weaker
until she couldn’t get out of bed. Her hair fell out, and she took on the appearance of a famine-ridden child, the swollen
belly, the huge hurt eyes. She slipped silently in and out of sleep, then into a coma, but then suddenly she awoke and asked
for steak. They gave her some sort of soft gray nutritive slop instead, but by next morning she was sitting up in bed eating
huge quantities of scrambled eggs and asking for more. They swore, afterwards, that they had seen her flesh fill up with muscle
minute by minute. So she lived for the next few years in alternative two-month cycles of hunger and gluttony, of control and
terror, surrounded by her models of
Voyager I
and, later, the space shuttle.