No, that’s another of those pretty lies, the kind I tell you, the kind real estate developers and sleazy travel agents shill to gullible cheapskates, the kind the local founding fathers sold themselves on when they named their shit sprawl of gas stations and strip malls Shore Village, even though it was a twenty-minute drive from Jersey’s least attractive beach. We lived by a Blockbuster and an off-brand burger joint and a vacant lot that drunks used on Sunday mornings to puke up their Saturday nights. We lived alone, just the two of us, except it was mostly just the one of us. Between waitressing and groupie-ing, boozing and fucking, Loretta didn’t have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn’t notice.
Poor Lacey, you’re thinking. Poor, unloved Lacey, with her trash mother and deadbeat dad, and this is why I don’t tell you these things, because for you everything is a fairy tale or a Lifetime movie, Technicolor or black-and-white, and I don’t need you imagining me in some sulfurous pit of trailer-trash hell. I don’t need your Oh, Lacey, that must have been so hard for you or Oh, Lacey, what do food stamps look like and how does neglect smell or, worst of all, Oh, Lacey, don’t worry, I understand, I have my pretty little house and my father knows best and my picture-perfect fucking sitcom life, but deep down we’re totally the same.
I made do with what I had, and what I had was the smell of the ocean when the wind was right, and the beach itself, when I could thumb a ride. I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.
Mine was a nineteen-year-old dropout with greaser hair and a James Dean jacket, squatting in the empty apartment beneath ours, because his mother was the super and had given him the key. He read Kerouac, of course. Or maybe he didn’t actually read it; maybe he just strategically spread it across his lap while he napped in one of the crappy metal chairs he’d set up in the vacant lot, his own personal tanning zone. He definitely didn’t read Rilke or Nietzsche or Goethe or any of the other moldy paperbacks we passed back and forth while I coughed down his cherry vodka and he taught me how to smoke. He was too lazy to make it past the first chapters of most of them, but I can believe he made it through the Kerouac, because Jack spoke his language, his druggy, pretentious, wastrel nympho native tongue.
His name was Henry Schafer, but he had me call him Shay, and don’t get me wrong, Dex, even then, fifteen and swoony, I didn’t think it was love. Love was the stack of books piling up in my room, maybe, and the bootlegs he brought me; it was sailing down the Schuylkill in his beat-up Chevy, Philly on the horizon; it was South Street and head shops and smoky nights in a shitty back room listening to slam poetry; it was the heat of flesh the first time I dropped acid, salty skin when I licked my own palm. Love was not what Shay had me do to him in my mother’s bedroom while she was off trying to fuck Metallica; it wasn’t a sticky glob of him in my mouth or the pain of a finger up my ass; it certainly wasn’t finding him with his tongue in his girlfriend’s ear and then pretending, the next night, that I’d assumed a girlfriend all along, that of course I’d understood what this was and wasn’t, that there was no harm and no foul and no reason he couldn’t keep using me to kill time while she was busy, and yes, I should be grateful that he’d always used a condom, what other proof did I need that he was thinking of me.
This isn’t what you want to hear. You don’t want to hear that I studied those books, at least at first, to impress him. That I listened to Jane’s Addiction and the Stone Roses because he told me that’s what people like us should do, and when he asked me whether the baby’s breath of hair on his upper lip looked cool, I told him it did, even though I thought his girlfriend was right, that it made his mouth look like a peripubescent pussy. He spent that night with me and not her, and that’s what mattered, and still, Dex, that doesn’t mean I thought it was love.
I liked him best when he was sleeping. When the lights were out and he was curled into me, kissing my neck in his dreams. Bodies can be anyone, in the dark.
That was before I turned sixteen, before my mother’s season of rebirth, born again into the loving arms of AA and then again into the Bastard and his Lord. That was the year I discovered no one gave a shit about how many classes I skipped as long as I still scraped through tests with a C-plus and, when I did bother to show, did so in tank tops that erred on the side of boobalicious, a tactic that also proved effective when my mother would put on a Bon Jovi album, spin the dial up to ear-shattering, sing and twirl and drink along until our landlord showed up to whine about volume and rent. That was also the year he started slapping my ass instead of hers, and she stopped noticing me, except for the nights she would sneak home late, sticky with someone else’s sweat, crawl into my bed and whisper that I was all she had and she was all I needed, and I would pretend to be asleep.