If You Want to Know What You’re Made Of
Self-Portrait at Sixteen
First, it’s just a log you keep in the back of your diary. Novelty. Dates you’ve gotten stoned with friends in the neighborhood: Elly on the electric box, Billy and Sara at the Grove, first period behind the school cafeteria. It’s truancy officers on golf carts considering off-roading into the cheap corners of the desert. It’s the desert that will later be pulverized for a local casino. It’s goodbye to it all. Your family is a set of knives and two unwashed teacups. When you need your mother to be strong, she uses you as a colander. When you need her to be calm, she becomes a soup spoon stuck in the garbage disposal. Your father is a solar eclipse: You need special equipment to make eye contact, a Cracker Jack box and a coin slot. He has barbecue grill hands, smokey indifference, the stuck beef of his charred childhood.
It’s a girl who sees you, sees through your shrunken, muted body from the back of the bus. The way she drills her eyes, heady heady, into the empire waist of your babydoll dress, into your Manic Panic hair. Her persistence in your bedroom. Lesbian is a word you have to suck on, she tells you. It needs to dissolve on your tongue awhile before you can sound it out. Once you sound it out, you like the way it is asking something of you, how the word itself needs your answer to exist. It’s the way her fingers roll over the clear handle of the window’s blinds, turning their backs, the way the whole world will follow suit. She’ll make it happen with her words. She has so many tricks already—eyeballs that vibrate on command, double-jointed fingers that reach further inside you than anything has ever gone. A Zippo mouth, burning the edges of your life.
Girl lips on your girl lips. Girl lips on your body, inside your telephone all night, entering your sleep with gaslight, with baby and wontcha, forever and just us. If you want to know what you’re made of, it’s the way she leaves you and comes back, over and over, abandonment like motion sickness, like Gravitron. She loves you centrifugally while reminding you how unlovable you are to everyone else. She reminds you to wear the plaid skirt with the giant safety pin from the Aerosmith video. She reminds you to steal from your mother’s pocketbook. You practice being Alicia Silverstone. Kids at school start to call you a dyke. At sleepovers, your friends change clothes in bathrooms even though you insist that you liked it when Bobby Perez stung your face with his stubble. You hate being both, you wish you could be poisoned all the way through.
“It Takes One to Know One” is the patron saint your mother prays to on her hands and knees every night, Ernest, Gallo, and Mr. Clean in her terry cloth robe, a drunk husband she likes to wake with bold cooking utensils. The girl taps on your window, her gak-fat smile slips you from your bedsheets. Can she count on you? She wants to lick your Daddy wounds in the black desert. There is a glass dome where you both can live, blue smoke, blue smoke—she shows you how to charm it into your lungs. Her eyes are twin torches. You love the way she watches you when you’re high, quivering trickery of being spoon-fed air and want and just enough. When you wake her after she comes down, she jolts up, swinging punches and spit. You swear you can smell your father’s cologne, Obsession. She’ll strangle you for a moment, her caustic breath, her dead eyeballs. She’ll choke you until she realizes it’s you, then she’ll take your neck into her mouth like it’s a baby animal.
It’s letting your future rot while she waits for you in the backyard, a bed you’ve made for her on patio furniture, the metal teeth catching when she pulls you on top of her. It’s the pork ribs you pretended to eat but really wrapped in a napkin for her. You are the saucer, she is the cup. She’s a troublemaker, dropout, foster kid, thief, runaway dope fiend. She is a VHS tape never returned to Video East. The one you hide and watch over and over, the one with the girls in lacy underwear that you had to find behind a curtain in the back of the store. The one you feel ashamed to love so much. You are the pouty lip, another-chance-giver, the one who understands. You can’t remember which you want more, the dope in her pocket or her. She calls you Kitty-cat and Precious, holds your hair while you snort speed. In the parking lot of the ABC Bartending school, you tip your head back, the blade of crank forming a tear that blurs the sky, desert inverted, your life like an overturned jug gulping one heavy bulb of air before gravity makes its mess, makes it all untrue.
Alone on the entryway tile, you watch for your parents to return as headlights beneath the weatherstripping. You’re made of startle reflex. They never know you’re waiting. It’s why don’t they know? You are stripped of weather, of self. Your grandparents send you a college guidebook in the mail while you force milk and saltines into your throat so you stop passing out. You’re made of a hair clog your mother rakes from the drain. It’s the way it makes her late for work, the way you just stand there, balding, erasing.
The girl becomes your external hard drive of self-worth. You are rent-to-own. You are swap meet junk. It’s how bold, how sure she is to let you still date boys, to figure it out. She volunteers to chauffeur you to the homecoming dance. Her eyes are the rearview mirror eating everything that came before her. And after you drop off the boy, it’s her hands lifting your Windsor dress in the backseat, how you love the way you are disappearing into only a small cage for her to fill with a Tracy Chapman song. Anyplace is better, blue smoke, her fingers in your mouth. It’s melting plastic that makes your kidneys scream but also makes the hairs on your arms stand on end, how that chemical smell will wake you like a dumb animal years later, arousal like a timed bomb she left inside you.
It’s decades later, when she is released from prison. After you’ve keyed out her features in your mind, made sure to avoid going to AA meetings at the Triangle Club off Nellis, just in case. It’s how she will find you easily on MySpace and cut and paste your life onto her profile as if to say, you will always belong to me. If you want to see what you’re made of, you will have to choose. You will have to beckon the darkness inside you and relinquish your own needs entirely. You want to know her all the way to the bottom, the sun coming up on your senior year behind Sportsman’s Weekly Suites.
You’ll have to leave that boy on the dance floor, his hands stinging your waist with an ordinary grasp; “Fields of Gold” playing your homecoming night into a home going you’ll take in long burnt breaths from a pipe she holds the same way your mother held a thermometer, her hand under your chin. “It Takes One To Know One” fills the car up with your absence. This is how it happens. If you want to know what you’re made of, you’ll have to be the wall of balloons and also the dart.
Jennifer Battisti is a lifelong Nevadan. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Witness, Western Humanities Review, Thin Air, Wildsam Travel Guide: The Las Vegas issue, The Desert Companion, and elsewhere. She is a teaching artist for SPRAT! and The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County. She is the author of Echo Bay and Off Boulder Highway (Tolsun Books).