BOOT SHELLAC

part one is finally finished. there's one piece that i may decide to place elsewhere, but the rest of it is as near to done as it will be and i need to post it now, before i go soft on it.



Ian likes to say that he pulls teeth for a living, but that isn't exactly true: Ian sells cocaine. That's how we met. He ripped me off, and I let him, and we've best best friends ever since. More or less.

Ian says, You have tiny hands.
Ian says, I can feel your ribs.
Ian says, If I wasn't in love with you, I'd break your face.

He thinks he's stronger than he is. But I can tell you, that was about the only thing he's ever wrong about.



When I was seventeen, my boyfriend, this big guy named Wes, pushed me down the stairs of his apartment building. My shoulder came right out of its socket, and they had to wire shut my jaw (split clean into quarters) so it could heal . Other than that, I was fine. Wes said, She fell, so from then on I was clumsy. Clumsy and quiet. They fed me milkshakes through a straw; I lost 26 pounds.

When I got all that headgear finally taken off, my teeth were straighter and I had a series of criss-crossing tan-lines from the wires snaking up and down my face. Wes made fun of me no end. Three months inside that metal cage, I'd practically forgotten how to speak, let alone to tell Wes not to make fun of me. So I took it.

Except that one night, Wes's guy went out of town, so we called Wes's guy's guy: Ian. We went to meet him at the corner of Amsterdam and 139th. He walks up, tall and skinny, with his dark loose curls cropped short against his head. He gives us much less than a gram, no doubt about it. Wes got pissed. Wes said, Look here, asshole!
That made me nervous. I said, Wes, stoppit.
Wes said, Shut up, freakface.

Ian says, That's no way to talk to a lady.
Wes's neck is nestled safe between the sidewalk and Ian's knee.
Ian says, Apologize to your woman.
Wes's lip is bleeding.
Ian says, Get the fuck out of my neighborhood.
Wes is running, looking over his shoulder and calling my name.
Ian says, Come with me, beautiful.


Ian drives an old, impractical pick up. A Chevy from about 1962. I laughed when I saw it, and then I thought maybe I'd hurt his feelings, because his face turns pink. So I said, I'm sorry, this is just really, uh. And Ian nods, and opens the door for me. And I got in, because that's the kind of girl I was. I had a hard time saying no.

In the cab of the truck, I got a good look at him. Ian is gray all over, with dull green eyes and uneven stubble cropping out on the lower half of his face. Ian is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He looks weather-worn, and mean, but in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth there is a hopeful sort of promise for better days. But I also saw that kind of thing a lot back then. My eyes were tuned to it.

Ian takes me back to his place. He lives in this shitty apartment building, above a deli. But his apartment was gorgeous. All white walls, hardwood floors. It looked, and was, expensive. His kitchen was 90% stainless steel, sparkling clean, and fully stocked. We could have stayed there for weeks without ever having to leave. Ian has money. Ian has a lot of money. Inside the freezer (he shows me this later), there was a secret panel and when you opened it, you could see that the appliance was lined with Benjamins. And at the back of the pantry, behind the cans, were stacked these perfect bricks of coke. They were so geometric that at first I thought they were just the wall behind the cupboard, painted a dull, uniform white. Then I realized.

Ian opens me a beer, and takes my sweater. He hangs it up by the door, polite. He asks me my name, and I told him. Louise. He tells me that it's a pretty name, which it is. He's right. He says, it suits you.

Ian's wearing dark wool trousers and black shoes. Ian's got on a white button-down shirt that needs to be washed. Ian takes off his jacket and hangs it next to my sweater, and he's wearing suspenders, and he rolls his sleeves up, and he looks like he's from some other time. He says, I like your dress, Louise.

I liked that dress, too. It had belonged to my mother, and I'd taken it from the attic when I left home. It made me feel young and American, for some reason. I thought it fit well with my haircut. I guess I was going for that whole 1950's thing. Thinking on it now, I realize what a bitch I must have looked like. What a hipster. But at the time, I felt unique and pretty. And when Ian comments on it, I didn't feel like he's hitting on me, and I wasn't expecting him to say anything like "Now take it off". And he doesn't. He's calm, and polite, and he offers me a seat on his sofa. He says, How did you break your jaw?

So I told him. I told him about Wes, and I told him about falling and not being able to talk. It was the most I'd spoken in months, and it felt good. Ian actually listens to me. He responds to me thoughtfully. As I answered his questions and told him about myself, he's sitting in this big leather chair, leaning over the arm of it and cutting the most perfectly straight and even lines out onto this mirrored jewelry box on a side-table. He's actually using a straight razor. And when he's got about four lines separated from the little mountain on the side, he takes a hundred dollar bill- a real one- out of his pocket, and rolls it up. I felt like I was in a movie. Ian is just living his life.

Ian's about the only person I ever felt I could talk to like that. I'm still not sure if that was just part of his charm, or if all that talking actually interests him. But it didn't matter to me. I talked and talked and talked. And Ian listens, and we converse, and I felt grown-up.

I continued talking into the silence of him for a while. Eventually, it got late, and soon Ian turns the lights off, letting the blue glow of dawn into the apartment. The light rose slowly, first staining the white of the apartment a dull blue-purple and then revealing the perfection of the space. Each corner seemed sharper in the white morning light. I was beginning to come down, and was seeing with anxious eyes. Ian cuts out two more lines for us, ever precise with his blade against the fine powder. Watching him do that was like watching someone else feed a child. My vision started going out, which sometimes happens when I've been awake too long; images come in but they don't get processed. The cocaine helped. Everything straightened out, stopped slanting over to the left.

As the light slowly gave birth to morning, I began to feel the edges of something in Ian, a tenuous quality I couldn't name until months later. Hunger.

That night he barely touches me, though honestly I would have let him take whatever he wants to. He knows that, probably. He read it in me when I got into his truck. But for whatever reason, he hangs on, doesn't fuck me and throw me away. I'd like to say that this is because Ian is a good man, and because he can see that I was already bruised; because he doesn't want to hurt me more than I had already been hurt. Or that he likes listening to me, and thinks what I have to say is interesting or important or both. But none of that is true. Ian has a keen eye. And that dress fit me perfectly.

His hands were rough against my face. I could feel the force of them, though they do nothing but brush a stray strand of hair behind my ear. He asks me if I'm tired, and I was. Ian says, Sleep here. I need to go out, run some errands. I'll be back around noon. So he shows me into the spare bedroom, pours me a glass of water, and closes the door behind him when he leaves.



When he comes back, he's bearing two things. The first is a paper sack filled with groceries, and the other is, and this is not a joke, a trunk full of my stuff. It's a big wooden thing, old and worn, with iron clasps. Something my grandmother might have owned.

I searched his face, and he offered no explanation. I guess I didn't need one. He'd gone, probably first to to Wes' apartment and then to my parents' old place, and collected my things. Simple. I wondered at first what he meant by that. I was 17; I hadn't finished High School yet. Then I thought maybe I'd said more than I thought; he knows I had nowhere else to go, and he's moving me into his apartment. I opened the trunk and there it all was. My dresses, my books. Even the things I'd kept in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. All of it neatly folded and placed considerately, organized. And on top was a crumpled brown paper bag, the kind we used to bring our packed lunches in in elementary school. I opened it, and pictures of Ulysses S. Grant looked back up at me. There must have been at least 10 or 12 stacks of bills. Reading my mind, Ian says, I figured Wes owed you. For your jaw.



..

He sat next to her in homeroom, 10th grade.
Assigned seating by alphabet.
During morning announcements he'd sit with his head on the table.
And she always scribbling. Last minute math homework remembered.
He was vaguely aware when her hair no longer reached halfway to her ass (she'd cut it herself.)
She was peripheral and ephemeral in that immortal teenaged girl way. Thin, gangly limbs that protruded from ill-fitting attire. Limbs that, over the course of a schoolyear, went from a deep healthy summer tan to sickly pale and back again. Limbs that, had be been paying attention, he would have worried for.
Even at 15 years of life, it seemed her body hadn't considered puberty yet. The somewhat childish scent of citrus and oatmeal hung on her.
And then in November one morning, she walked into class and every person possessing male genitalia was, immediately and irrevocably, captivated. As if suddenly the hint of flesh was palpable under those worn out hand-me-down jeans. And there, under the white cotton of those huge tshirts- were those nipples? Luteinizing hormone & follicle-stimulating hormone, those fuckers. For exactly three days, about thirteen times a year for the next eternity, her pituitary glad (suddenly awakened by God-only-knows-what) will trigger the complex set of chemical reactions resulting in the release of the ovum.
Bitch in heat.
Jonah knows nothing about what happens in girls' bodies. All he knows is that for a few days every month he is drawn to her, and that about two weeks later the vague idea of the scent of blood seems to cling to her.
But show him a picture of her face and he wouldn't be able to put a name to it. Some of the older boys, Wes among them, developed fascinations with her. They discussed her body as if it didn't belong to her at all, guffawing between hits of spliff behind the gym. But Jonah, lost in his own early-morning aches & pains, can't be bothered to stare at her the way she wants him to.
Until.
There are rumors that her mother's boyfriend (the dad long gone) got mad and went apeshit or something, beat her to death. Louise does nothing to quell the spread of talk like that. But the sick truth is that the woman had a coronary arrest in her sleep. Just didn't wake up on a Friday morning. Louise was out of school for maybe three days. When she got back, her face was all puffed up and she had on the most beautiful fucking dress. Having finally grown some tits and hips, she consequently now fit into the contents of her mother's closet, and had been given posthumous permission to permanently borrow it all. So she did.
And her first morning back at school, Jonah just happened to let his eyes rest in the space between the underside of the desk and her lap- a place he usually gazed into, where his glance would be met with the innocence of her baggy, washed out cotton tshirt. But today her clothing hugged her abdomen. And for the entirety of the 15-minute morning announcements he watched as her belly expanded and contracted slightly under the fabric of her dress. Watched her breathe.
This is the moment that Jonah Stark fell in love with Louise Stillman.

...


After I'd unpacked all my things into Ian's spare bedroom, I came out into the kitchen. A spread of bread, cheese, cold cuts and various other lunch foods was spread out on the kitchen table. We sat and ate, tearing off hunks of the soft bread, not speaking. When we were done eating, I made moves to clear the table, and Ian lets me. I did the dishes and put the remainder of the food into the fridge. I began to get the notion that Ian aims to make me his maid, or his wife.

Ian says, School starts on Monday, doesn't it.
I nodded yes. I wondered how old he was, what I thought I was doing standing in his kitchen with wet hands the way I was. What the fuck was going on.

Ian says, Listen, Louise. I know this is. A very strange way to begin a relationship with someone.

He pauses as if to give me time to agree with him. But I just stood looking at him, trying to read his face. He looks so calm, so genuine. But he also looks incalculably sad and fucked up. I realised: that was why I was there. Because I had felt in him, in the way he sits and listens, a familiar kind of lostness. I began to cry.

Ian says, Louise. I won't try to explain my actions. He gets up and walks toward me with his arms open. His shirt feels rough, starched, against my cheek. His hands are firm and warm against my back.


Wes and I met in High School. My first boyfriend. Two years older than me, one of those boys my mother, had she lived to see the day, would have forbidden me to date. But he just so happened to touch my arm one day while I stood at my locker. And he looked into my eyes and asked me on a date. He was big, and dumb, but he spoke to me. After my mother died, friends were hard to come by. I couldn't ignore the increase of eyes that seemed glued to my newly-formed flesh, but Wes. Wes I thought was different. He was a door who had unlocked himself for me, and fuck but I decided to step right over that threshold.

I let him engage me in that familiar High School song and dance of movies and dinners, and eventually he started touching me, and eventually I gave up on saying No. Felt like I owed him something. By that time I was suddenly a C student but so, so happy.

My step-father, to whose care I was entrusted after the death of my mother, basically moved in with another woman by the middle of my junior year, and so I moved in with Wes. That's about the time the drugs started up, which was honestly fine by me. I'd been doing bumps out of my mother's secret coke holdings since the day I turned 13. After a few months Wes started realising we couldn't afford the gram-a-day we'd become used to, offered me up instead of cash.

The first time he did that, I cried and yelled, but he looked me in the eye the same way he had the first time he asked me out and he told me, I love you Louise. Just do this for me.

I had a hard time saying no.


The smell of Ian that day in the kitchen was so visceral, so the opposite of Wes. Wes always smelled like men's deodorant, some kind of chemically-produced manly smell. But Ian just smells of hard work, shoe polish and, well, Ian. And his hands on me, his cheek pressed up against my ear. It was like he's apologizing for everything.

I accepted the apology, and that is how we got started.

It wasn't until later, when I found the jars of teeth and the potato sacks filled to the brim with Dactylopius coccus, that I realized just what I'd stepped into. But by then I didn't feel too bad about it. By then I knew that Ian isn't all spine; he has a soft side just like everyone else. And it wasn't until far after that, even after Jonah and the broken fingers, that I started wanting out.

calculator, straight edge
clean faces scrubbed new.
pinprick
drop of blood in the sink.
salivation.
satiation.
very acute.

and like, magically, everything just fucking
disappears

Boot shellac & cochineal.

Ian likes to say that he pulls teeth for a living, but that isn't exactly true: Ian sells cocaine. That's how we met. He ripped me off, and I let him, and we've best best friends ever since. More or less.

Ian says, You have tiny hands.
Ian says, I can feel your ribs.
Ian says, If I wasn't in love with you, I'd break your face.

He thinks he's stronger than he is. But I can tell you, that was about the only thing he's ever wrong about.



When I was seventeen, my boyfriend, this big guy named Wes, pushed me down the stairs of his apartment building. My right shoulder came right out of its socket, and they had to wire shut my jaw (split clean into quarters) so it could heal . Other than that, I was fine. Wes said, She fell, so from then on I was clumsy. Clumsy and quiet. They fed me milkshakes through a straw; I lost 26 pounds.

When I got all that headgear finally taken off, my teeth were straighter and I had a series of criss-crossing tan-lines from the wires snaking up and down my face. Wes made fun of me no end. Three months inside that metal cage, I'd practically forgotten how to speak, let alone to tell Wes not to make fun of me. So I took it.

Except that one night, Wes's guy went out of town, so we called Wes's guy's guy: Ian. We went to meet him at the corner of Amsterdam and 139th. He walks up, tall and skinny, with his dark loose curls cropped short against his head. He gives us much less than a gram, no doubt about it. Wes got pissed. Wes said, Look here, asshole!
That made me nervous. I said, Wes, stoppit.
Wes said, Shut up, freakface.

Ian says, That's no way to talk to a lady.
Wes's neck is nestled safe between the sidewalk and Ian's knee.
Ian says, Apologize to your woman.
Wes's lip is bleeding.
Ian says, Get the fuck out of my neighborhood.
Wes is running, looking over his shoulder and calling my name.
Ian says, Come with me, beautiful.


Ian drives an old, impractical pick up. A Chevy from about 1962. I laughed when I saw it, and then I thought maybe I'd hurt his feelings, because his face turns pink. So I said, I'm sorry, this is just really, uh. And Ian nods, and opens the door for me. And I got in, because that's the kind of girl I was. I had a hard time saying no.

In the cab of the truck, I got a good look at him. Ian is gray all over, with dull green eyes and uneven stubble cropping out on the lower half of his face. Ian is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He looks weather-worn, and mean, but in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth there is a hopeful sort of promise for better days. But I also saw that kind of thing a lot back then. My eyes were tuned to it.

Ian takes me back to his place. He lives in this shitty apartment building, above a deli. But his apartment was gorgeous. All white walls, hardwood floors. It looked, and was, expensive. His kitchen was 90% stainless steel, sparkling clean, and fully stocked. We could have stayed there for weeks without ever having to leave. Ian has money. Ian has a lot of money. Inside the freezer (he shows me this later), there was a secret panel and when you opened it, you could see that the appliance was lined with Benjamins. And at the back of the pantry, behind the cans, were stacked these perfect bricks of coke. They were so geometric that at first I thought they were just the wall behind the cupboard, painted a dull, uniform white. Then I realized.

Ian opens me a beer, and takes my sweater. He hangs it up by the door, polite. He asks me my name, and I told him. Louise. He tells me that it's a pretty name, which it is. He's right. He says, it suits you.

Ian's wearing dark wool trousers and black shoes. Ian's got on a white button-down shirt that needs to be washed. Ian takes off his jacket and hangs it next to my sweater, and he's wearing suspenders, and he rolls his sleeves up, and he looks like he's from some other time. He says, I like your dress, Louise.

I liked that dress, too. It had belonged to my mother, and I'd taken it from the attic when I left home. It made me feel young and American, for some reason. I thought it fit well with my haircut. I guess I was going for that whole 1950's thing. Thinking on it now, I realize what a bitch I must have looked like. What a hipster. But at the time, I felt unique and pretty. And when Ian comments on it, I didn't feel like he's hitting on me, and I wasn't expecting him to say anything like "Now take it off". And he doesn't. He's calm, and polite, and he offers me a seat on his sofa. He says, How did you break your jaw?

So I told him. I told him about Wes, and I told him about falling and not being able to talk. It was the most I'd spoken in months, and it felt good. Ian actually listens to me. He responds to me thoughtfully. As I answered his questions and told him about myself, he's sitting in this big leather chair, leaning over the arm of it and cutting the most perfectly straight and even lines out onto this mirrored jewelry box on a side-table. He's actually using a straight razor. And when he's got about four lines separated from the little mountain on the side, he takes a hundred dollar bill- a real one- out of his pocket, and rolls it up. I felt like I was in a movie. Ian is just living his life.

Ian's about the only person I ever felt I could talk to like that. I'm still not sure if that was just part of his charm, or if all that talking actually interests him. But it didn't matter to me. I talked and talked and talked. And Ian listens, and we converse, and I felt grown-up.

.this originated around june 17, 2009. it is not finished, and may never be; but i'm tired of it sitting in the drafts pile, so whatever.

Go ahead.
Fuck her.

However there are a few things that belong to me, and I would rather she did not have them.
.do make say think
.the plane of your back (the morning after)
.oxytocin (this is unfair of me)
.you, going down (this is also unfair of me; moreso, even.)
.nevermind, they are all unfair.

Oh, god damnit, Christopher.
She's better than me, isn't she.
I am drinking wine out of a box, of course she is better than me!

It's ok. Really.
Oh so many words but they are all blurred.