EILEEN MYLES has published twenty books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction and libretti, and both they and their poems have recently appeared in the hit US TV series “Transparent”. Myles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Foundation, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, was named to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List in 2015, and they received the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing in 2016.

Myles lives in Marfa, Texas, and New York. Visit their website at www.eileenmyles.com

PRAISE FOR EILEEN MYLES

“For those of us who became who we are in large part via Chelsea Girls when it came out in 1994, it comes as no surprise that Eileen Myles’s landmark book feels just as kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless today. For those of you who are encountering it for the first time, I envy your ride. Chelsea Girls is a riotous, unmatched classic and an act of social justice.” Maggie Nelson

“[A] new generation of public feminists, including Beth Ditto, Lena Dunham and Tavi Gevinson, cite her as an inspiration, finding in her writing a ribald and ponderous succession to the New York School” New York Times

“Myles’s work has always been uncompromisingly frontal, a face-forward presentation of herself, simultaneously vulnerable and scrutinising. If you look at her, she looks back” Dan Chiasson, New York Review of Books

“Despite having written [Chelsea Girls] twenty years ago, Myles’s literary style feels as contemporary as the essayistic autobiographical fiction of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Tao Lin, who might be considered her literary offspring” New York Times

“When Myles is described as an ‘avant garde’ poet, it makes her art sound difficult and intimidating. It isn’t” Guardian

“She and her work are unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable … She is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way” Ben Lerner

“Chelsea Girls is one of the great, if under-read, New York City novels—a boozy, glassy-eyed account of lesbian sex, drugs, and family in the 1960s and ’70s, with the title being a tip of the hat to the famous hotel hangout of the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith and Andy Warhol … One part Just Kids, one part Jesus’ Son, and one part New Narrative, Myles at once works in an established tradition and transcends it” Jeva Lange, Electric Literature

ALSO BY EILEEN MYLES

I Must Be Living Twice (2015)

Snowflake/different streets (2012)

Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010)

The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009)

Sorry, Tree (2007)

Tow (with drawings by artist Larry C. Collins) (2005)

Skies (2001)

On My Way (2001)

Cool for You (2000)

School of Fish (1997)

Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems (1995)

The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (with Liz Kotz) (1995)

Not Me (1991)

1969 (1989)

Bread and Water: Stories (1988)

Sappho’s Boat: Poems (1982)

A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981)

Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman) (1979)

The Irony of the Leash (1978)

CHELSEA GIRLS

EILEEN MYLES

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

First published in the USA in 1994 by Black Sparrow Press

First published in 2015 as an Ecco Paperback, HarperCollins Publishers, New York

Copyright © 1994 by Eileen Myles

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 326 0

FOR TED MYLES

CONTENTS

Preface

Bath, Maine

The Kid

Merry Christmas, Dr. Beagle

Light Warrior

Bread and Water

My Scar

Everybody Would Go Play Cards at Eddie and Nonie’s

The Goodbye Tapes

Robin

Madras

1969

February 13, 1982

Violence Towards Women

Toys R Us

Neuromancer

Dog Damage

My Couple

Mary Dolan: a History

Popponesset

Marshfield

My Father’s Alcoholism

21, 22, 23 …

Quietude

Robert Mapplethorpe Picture

Leslie

Epilogue

Jealousy

Chelsea Girls

Acknowledgments

PREFACE BY EILEEN MYLES

Apart from the fact of trying to figure out if Chelsea Girls is a novel or a memoir or a collection of stories (or whether it’s really even a book at all) I think I mainly want to tell you that in the time of the writing of Chelsea Girls --- which was long: 1980 to 1993 was the actual time of the composition of the thing—I mostly needed to say what I thought was real. I wanted to cover it. I probably wanted to make a film more than anything else and so did my girlfriend (for much of this time) but how could we make a film. We had so little. People were making films around us in the East Village and we weren’t even seeing them but we were hearing about them and we wanted to make films too. And we tried one night and we thought about it for months and I don’t think I even saw that footage for years but we had no idea what we were shooting since the camera didn’t have that part (to tell when it was shooting or not) but the point was we made that attempt and finally I just wrote about it. The first chapter I wrote here, “Bread & Water”, was like a substitute film. Because we couldn’t make a film I just had to decide that writing could be a film.

So Chelsea Girls initially and finally is a lot of things it’s not. Little films, videos, performances, accounts of lots of recuperated disasters, long-form poetry, myths. Like I look at my secret favorite story here February 13, 1982 and it’s an account of the disaster of the author’s first book party. Everybody who writes knows (and even people who don’t write know this) that a book will change your life. So this is a story about how that didn’t happen. And how it did. I remember thinking that night that being famous was about the stupidest thing there was. To be standing at your party being ogled or ignored, to be trying to figure out like always where to be in the loft and it was your party meant it was the beginning of the end which is myth, right. When I say long-form poetry I just mean that when poetry was invented nobody knew what it looked like so why shouldn’t it look like this and sound this way. I don’t think anything about whether something is poetry or prose but people do really like it if you say it’s a novel. I like it. For a while if you said a poem was a performance people would say wow. I love your poetry. And the person who wrote this book wanted that of course. As all these dreamy messy evanescent experiences were happening and the person living and writing was crying of course because everything was always going to be gone and how would she ever be real unless she told the story of it. Who was she. It’s definitely the story of a “dyke”, a one syllable word in a less complexly gendered time and I really wanted to tell her truth even before she was that—when she was just a little kid. Life is shocking to me, is and always was, full like a garden of so many selves. I was sitting in a garden in the East Village last summer, Le Petite Versailles it was called, and it was on the occasion of the memorial for a friend of mine, Leonard Drindell who, among his many things, was a taker of so many photographs and I remember sitting at the memorial thinking that in some ways Leonard’s heyday was the ’80s when you would stand around looking at a somebody’s pictures they just developed and later on they’d put them all over their walls, a collage. Leonard always took the grossest and craziest pictures. I was thinking that Leonard was really an analog man and then I thought (and I took a few notes on my phone) and this is a really analog book. And the writing is the analog for the time. Writing was the only enhancement, the diversity, the imaginary like the only space I could go to then to show how utterly real it all was—I think to be female and strange and to want art so much and be drunk and high even waking up from that, all of it and really to have lived.

BATH, MAINE

I really had no damn business there. I mean, why am I living with my ex-girlfriend and her new girlfriend, and her ex-girlfriend. How could that possibly be comfortable. I could be writing this from a jail cell. Funny, huh? Ted and Alice, before I left, said: “Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Eileen.” I didn’t know what else I could do. I flew, yes I did, up to Portland and Judy and Chris picked me up there. I was so ripped on the plane. Elinor had given me some of that crystal, one good line, and I had a handful of Tom’s pills. He had stayed at my place the night before. I was writing these poems up in the air, really stupid ones all over those cocktail napkins they give you. God, they were awful. About vitamins and stuff. I was off cigarettes which always made me particularly insane and I had those red beads on, when did they break, I remember them breaking in Maine—well, the two of them picked me up—I remember we went right into a bar—I think I remember having a shrimp salad sandwich and beers, and Chris was already drinking icy Margaritas. The place had all lobsters up and traps and all. Then we got back in Judy’s car. That night we all went to the gay bar in Augusta. Oh god, that night. We were all speeding, and drunk, and it was real hot. All the men were taking their shirts off and dancing. We got mad. We wanted to take our shirts off. So we did. Everyone thought it was great. Except the manager and a couple of fag bartenders. Put ’em on. The men don’t have to put their shirts on. Just get out. You can’t be in this bar with your shirts off. Put your shirts on and get out. We did. But first we took our pants off and walked out. Chris threw a beer bottle at them too. She always had a lot of style. This is just three years ago.

After that everything went pretty much the same way. The night I was all amorous in the back seat of Judy’s car with Darragh, her ex-girlfriend, we were actually out looking for Chris who had left us because she was looking for someone else, a man. Naturally, we were all smashed. Chris had been picked up by the cops for whatever the Maine initials were for operating under the influence. Understand, this was common practice to get arrested. We worked at this mill and every morning, or pretty close, someone had been arrested for speeding, drunken driving, had an accident, got in a fight. This is baseball hat and truck country. I loved it. The men were all men, and we were all lesbians, and everyone loved to get smashed. After work we’d sit on this big green lawn and Casey, the boss, would put down case after case of Bud Light and Labatt’s and we’d just get crazy. Sheila was a problem. She was this big blonde girl, and she was Casey’s girlfriend and she was really interested in the fact that me and Christine were lesbians. Now, I am a sucker for paternalism, I love having a boss who’s a young good old boy, and when his girlfriend seems to want to go the other way, fascinating as it seems, and I do want to be the one she’s wild about, nonetheless, I try and turn the other way.

Chris stopped drinking after the arrest night. She still had to go to court, it was a small mess. I loved her not drinking, she just got prettier and prettier, all glowing, and she got rid of that bloat she was getting from beer. I have never seen it make as much difference as it did with her. Also it was a relief. One night I was in bed with Judy and she came at me with a crowbar. I’m going to re-shape your head, asshole. What a frightening moment. I could see the shadow of her head, hand and crowbar against a strong light from behind. See, I had actually been up for a week the month before and had thought it was just like Valhalla. You know, it was just like paradise. Judy has this house in the middle of all this land in Maine, and out back are sheep bah-ing, and she had dogs, one a black lab named Myles, and there’s little kittens, and hens out back, and a rooster, and fresh eggs and beautiful breakfasts with fried potatoes and tia maria in our coffee in bed. The first night I was up that time me and Chris were instantly back in love once we got drunk, and were out in a hallway, kissing each other, and saying: what about Judy. So the three of us were in their big bed—I just happily climbed right on top of Judy. Christine didn’t like that—I wasn’t supposed to get so into it. It was smash, battles, right from the start—though only one major eruption that week—Chris had gone out running, leaving Judy and me in bed and when she came back something was going on that—“How come you never fucking do that to me, Judy!” Judy would soon get hers. Christine was an emotional tyrant. Her and I had lived together for a couple of years in New York, before she came to Maine, and it took watching the movements of her and Judy’s relationship to see just how demanding and impossible she was. I myself was a good-natured cloud, which would float by and steal things, and wait for praise. I could never understand why life just didn’t feel substantial enough. I was sitting on your couch, or we were drinking your whiskey in my apartment. Now, let’s go out, I’d say. Do you have any money. I’m broke tonight. I’m really sorry.

One night after work we all went drinking in Bath, Maine. “We” meant me, and Chris who was breaking out that night, figured it was okay, Sheila wanted to go out with us, and we had to go home and pick up Judy. I guess they all were going to play that night, they had a guy in Bath they played with, Mr. Michael, some kind of architect with a loft. All of Judy’s friends were professionals pretending to be artists. Pretty disgusting, yet they had the stuff: lofts, the cars, houses etc. They are the mommies and daddies. Usually they’re so insipid and have nothing to say, but you get to be fabulous, for a while. For me, they’re like jobs.

I don’t think Judy was overwhelmed with love for me. I think I was there to be neutralized. You know, Christine would get drunk and call me. Or, she’d just talk about me all the time. Okay, let’s get this icon and get her on my farm. Things would happen like one night Judy had her whole collection of mangy men over: Ron, the lumber man, who she was always going “clamming” with tomorrow, or who was the little weasel who knew all about, what, electricity or something. They were all anti-intellectual types who were dying to fuck Judy and she kept them around for, I don’t know, entertainment, and certainly real help, and I think she thought of them as colorful, possibly admirable. They made her think she was countrified. She was a consultant to an environmental outfit, she would go and look at fish factories and come back drunk. Previously, she had been a broker in San Francisco. Now she’s some kind of film person in Boston. Judy looks right. And she’ll never stop telling you about what kind of good girls’ school she dropped out of. Her mother’s a drunk. She’s one of those women who despises her mother and is just like her.

So Judy said to Chris once, riding in her car, I just don’t see where Eileen gets off thinking she has the last word on truth. That’s what she said. What’s funny is I picture her car saying it. You know, one of those shots where the white Datsun is wobbling through the narrow windy roads of mid-coastal Maine and the car says: “… thinking she has the last word on truth.” Fuck you, Judy.

I remember standing in the back of the truck that fateful night drinking a Bud Light and thinking: this is not going to be perfect—about the night, it looked too perfect—going with the girls to Bath. Judy and Chris would play with Michael, Judy on bass, Christine on rhythm, Michael on lead. Sheila and me roving through the local bars, sounds okay, but—what?

What I was trying to say about Judy and her gross men was that she’d have these smelly horny guys come over—that night we made a pitcher of strawberry daquiris with Mount Gay which I was currently binging on, and once drunk Chris passed a slip of paper to Judy which I later learned said, I want to eat you—how Christine paid her rent, and the two went giggling stumbling off, leaving me to be game warden to her charming friends. This is why I had been invited to Maine. These guys talked real slow—stopped after each phrase for your girl-reaction. The best I could do was an occasional heh. After a while I just stared at my feet.

At work we dipped in these small—or sometimes fairly large—wooden frames into vats of stain. Their destination was the cheap carnivals, and beach towns of America. Those mirrors that say Grateful Dead, or NY Yankees. After dipping the frames into vats of stain and lining them up in rows of twenty on the sticks overhead, bundling them, and putting the plastic tape around each bundle and stacking them in the truck to Chicago or wherever, at the end of the day I’d be covered from head to foot with brown stain, Dickensian-looking I thought. I usually didn’t bother to get the stuff off before I got drunk. With me sloppy has always been good, meant sexy.

But this night we were using this “glup”—it was tan, looked like bacon fat, and seemed to come in Mason jars, but the people I knew bought it in quantity. We were really going out, so we had to take the spots off. That’s what I usually looked like: a dalmatian. I just think dogs are the cutest beings, and the most perfect. Sheila seemed to be getting bombed on the vodka, cape codders we called them. I remember taking showers, having a drink going and a beer going, being way up there and wondering if maybe tonight I wouldn’t have to come down.

The light looked translucent, just pearly, as we drove into Bath with plenty of beers in the car. I really missed drugs. All we ever had was this shitty homegrown pot. David was coming up at the end of the month and I was begging him to bring heroin. It was beginning to seem preferable to getting drunk. I mean, if you were going to get really drunk, you could just achieve the same state in a much less messy manner by snorting some stuff. I liked it. But the last time I got some we got beat.

We parked out in front of Michael’s, and Sheila decided she needed to lay down in the loft. See, we worked really hard, starting at about six, so some nights you had no tolerance at all. So I went up for a minute, sort of remember a big yellow bathroom, and an extremely pleasant loft that Michael had “done a lot of work on,” those people are so boring. I was glad to be going off on my own.

The bars in Bath were like the bars everywhere, except with that New England distrust, no one talks to you. I whipped out my notebook, but I couldn’t even communicate with myself. I was drinking vodka and grapefruit. I had on a white teeshirt with FATS WALLER on the front. I ate a lot of peanuts. Next bar I switched to tequila. What could happen. I sat at like this long coffee table, kind of Gothic looking, ancient S & M, with a big candle. I didn’t want anyone to come near me. The place looked kind of “datey,” like it was attached to a restaurant. The clientele was sunburned and clean, like vacationers. Was I feeling better? In the last place when I had nothing to say in my notebook I began to write the words from the jukebox

And only love

can break

your heart

So try to make sure

right from

the start …

It made me suspicious. I had willed that I really was not still in love with Chris, I had decided to be a dispassionate viewer, it would be a pleasure not to care. What if I didn’t know what I felt anymore? I probably had never known what I felt. I only liked getting drunk and being in love. If I wasn’t either one of those things, I simply needed my rent, cigarettes, and coffee, simple enough. I really liked the life of the poet.

In barged Sheila and Chris. Judy’s an asshole, Chris goes. What are you drinking, Margaritas? Yay, let’s get four, I think they’re slow. Then we were all in the bathroom, unrolling toilet paper all over the place, and kissing each other. Judy and Michael showed up just as we were getting thrown out. At the next bar we seemed to be standing in line watching something, but I can’t remember what it was. The order you stood in was very important, so I wanted to go outside.

I think I was sitting on the curb when the cops came. Everything occurred very fast in some grey soup.

The cop was trying to pull Chris out of the front seat of Judy’s car. Chris was hanging on to Judy’s hair who was holding the steering wheel tightly. Previously, they were wrestling for the car keys. Drunk out of her mind, naturally, Chris wanted to drive. I guess I still do love her. She is a trophy to anger and intolerance with brown curly hair. She was always like my little sister I wanted to be as bad as. So she was bashing Judy’s head against that thing the stick shift comes out of, and maybe she would’ve gotten the keys if the cop hadn’t come along. I figured it wasn’t my fight. See, I come from an alcoholic household, and resultingly kind of don’t react to violence. I think it terrifies me, but I am so drawn to it. I never hit anyone, but I would love to kill a lot of people

It’s okay I tell the cop, as he moves through the grey soup, towards the white car. As the story goes, he said Stop into the car window and Chris punched him in the face. God, I love her. So that’s when he started pulling her out.

Like a famous tackle I performed on a boy in sixth grade, the last tomboy gesture of pre-adolescence, I do not remember getting off the ground, I only remember sailing through the air, leaping on the cop’s back, getting my arms around his neck to choke him, or flip him, or something. On my float towards him I saw something. The girl god, or the dog god, or the dead drunken daddy god, all the gods that protect me in my living did not spur me to reach for the one thing I saw as I flew to his big blue cop shoulders. The gun!

No, I just landed up around the shoulders, and so fast I was way over there, on the sidewalk with my head smashed down, and MACE in my eyes, it stung, and there were tons of them now, cops, a holocaust, and yet handcuffs, too. I was a freedom fighter of some kind. I’ve been in handcuffs a couple of times. Handcuffs make me wild.

They were trying to take my picture down at the station, and of course I wouldn’t stop making googly eyes, sticking my tongue out, spitting on the floor. They were not going to have an attractive prison picture of me. There was a fat woman guard I really had it in for. You are a traitor to women, you’re a dyke, hey you big bulldyke, look at you, you bitch, you traitor, you like to suck cunt don’t you? I guess I started this in the squad car on the way to the jail—which wasn’t far—the police station was right across the street from where Judy’s white car was parked. All through my denunciation of this woman I continued to spit on the floor. Also my Fats Waller teeshirt had ridden up around my shoulders so I whipped it off and started screaming police brutality, police brutality.

Eileen, shut up, said Chris. All in all, Christine believed I started this, had started the whole thing. This is where she really became a little creep. She didn’t know it was a cop, that was her story. I did know it was a gun and was glad I didn’t go for it. And, in my heart I know the moment of my flight towards the blue shoulders of the law, I was flying for Chris, did love her, and was saving her from the professional mediocrity of white Datsuns, I was releasing her from bourgeoise captivity, maybe bringing her home to the scrubby plains of my drunk art and love. Oh, Chris!

Well, she didn’t appreciate it, the little bitch, why wouldn’t I shut up, I was just making things so much worse.

Also, my real moment in the police station in Bath, Maine was when I lifted my sword and revealed to them that I was a poet.

I’m a poet, you fools, you asshole cops! Poet has always meant to me saint or hero, the dancing character on the stained-glass window of my soul, the hand lifting slowly through time, the whirr that records my material against strong light, gosh, why I live. It’s the channel this ex-catholic took when getting down on her knees didn’t keep anyone alive, or help the dead stay dead. I was a devout child, but my prayers were ritualistic insurance, and a real list of dead people—God, take care of grandma, grandpa—it became so long it was unfeasible, by about age eleven, or twelve, so I began to keep a diary and sat under the light of the hall stairs and recorded what I ate that day, and who I thought hated me, and who I loved, and how I won. The poem got born in jobs, when I realized I wouldn’t win, wasn’t in fact, even present. So I began to take up residence in my poems, saw my life as a loser’s, hence poetic.

Okay, okay, so you’re a poet, let’s hear a poem. I don’t know my poems I proffered, snobbishly, being baldly attached to the page. I hold the poem, the sacred document. Oh, alright. This was like martyrdom, baptism by fire, by blood.

It’s called: “Roast Chicken.”

I hesitated, stumbled, and forgot a lot, and they mocked me, but I got it out. And, nothing happened.

Sometimes …

Roast Chicken!

Okay, okay, “Roast Chicken.”

Sometimes …

Some poet, she doesn’t even know her poem.

Sometimes

in the middle

of the night

I think about

holding you

in your beautiful

tan

I think about

in your beautiful

tan …

I blew it. They weren’t listening anymore. I had failed. So what. The test of blood was on.

Sometimes

in the middle

of the night.

I think about

holding you

in your

beautiful tan

wishing you

were

all of mine

and I

was only

yours.

Finished. “Oh, no,” said Chris, when she asked what poem I was yelling at them. “Oh, no,” she cringed, “not that one.”

THE KID

I came home from school one day in the 7th grade with a punish task in my head fresh from Giovanna’s fat white face, “Eileen Myles, 500 times, I will not talk in the corridors.” I can remember my feet that day getting heavier than usual on the gray slate steps of St. Agnes School. We were on the third floor by then. It had taken us seven years to get there. Once to the top, you were out. For some of us, that just meant across the street.

So I came home that day too intent to even be pissed off. Kathy Marshall was having a party that night, boys were invited to come late, so it was a boy girl party I could go to—the party starting off all girls so I think I could go.

She wasn’t listening to me that day when I was telling her what my punish task was all about. Watch your father while I go hang clothes, will you? Will you set up the card table in the parlor. It was another “watching Dad” job. I already had a pile of paper, white with blue lines and I would do my punish task in ball point. Pencil wore down too fast and you had to keep sharpening the pencil. Sometimes it was fun letting it get all flat, and pointed in different ways, running your pencil into the ground. Once I wore out a ball-point, a Lindy pen, writing the Constitution 7 times. I loved seeing a pen die, rather than losing it, like usual. Or someone clipping it in school.

The card table was smooth like old paper. Sometimes I put my face against it and rubbed. Once Mom caught me and called my name in that scarey way, like something you were doing was really sick. Anything we did that didn’t look normal, that’s what I felt scared her the most. She wanted everything to look good all the time. Because she was an orphan.

The card table was so brown and it was an old painting of a country house with trees and maybe people with a straw hat and a dog. It was so easy not to think of it as a painting but more like a rug, where it has things but you don’t think of it as a picture. You only look at it if you get stuck like in church. There I counted everything, it was my prayer. I knew how many little holes were in the round ceiling that looked like light came down from a tube, and I knew the scrolley designs very well. Though they made me sick I would still go around them like a little car. Then I even doubled back to make sure. It was my job. In mass on Sunday I kept the church there by crawling along the designs. Otherwise it would all go away and I’d be alone.

Dad lay on the couch in front of me in his grey plaid shirt. I liked that shirt, he turned the cuffs up to his elbow and he had black hairs on his arms, and a wedding ring, and when he did anything he held his cigarette up to his lips, thought, and then spoke. He looks great against a tree smoking. Or else in the window of his car.

Dad, as you lay there sleeping, I can feel the bristles on your face, and I can feel the hair on the back of your hand and I can see your slippers on the couch which was funny, because you usually wore those white mailman socks which the doctor said were more healthy.

Dad, the worst time ever with you was when Mary McClusky was over and you had your red lumberjack shirt on and you were lying down and you had those awful headaches which kept pounding and made you always look like you were going to cry, and you put your two fingers to your lips—were you talking on the phone lying down or were you watching a movie on teevee. You couldn’t talk and you kept making that two-fingered gesture even though I felt like it wasn’t what you wanted I knelt down and kissed you in front of Mary which was hard because she is such a tomboy. “No, God damn it, a cigarette.” “She kissed him,” Mary laughed. Myles kissed him, she laughed all the way down Swan Place as if I wasn’t there. I know you got angry because of your headache, Dad, but I felt like such an asshole. I think I just wanted to kiss you in front of Mary because you were lying there sick.

The day you died I think I even knew it was going to happen. I felt like I was in church. In front of you: Eileen, watch your father, like I did all the time. When I saw what was happening I knew it was right and I always wanted to watch someone die, and those sounds that meant more and more, and I knew exactly what was happening but I still stayed there, even kept writing to be sure that it was really happening. This can’t be a lie. I didn’t want to tell anyone, I wanted to be alone with you when it happened because it was like you were mine all along and it was my job to stay there and see, and then let everyone know.

I hated all the rest of the stuff, the way I got ignored, and I was there. Didn’t anyone ever tell anyone that I was there when it happened because I was your kid? People going to Terry, well, now you’re the little man of the family. Father McGinty asking Bridgie to do her tables for him while the whole house was crying except me. What was I, invisible. Well, from now on I would be. If they think I am a kid, I will be a kid forever. They made me wear lady clothes to the wake. Black velvet bow on my head and a royal blue straight wool skirt, and squash heels. Yuck. I winked when we filed out of the church the morning of the funeral. I saw my friends in the last row of the church and I winked at them, and Franny told me later, they all cried at that.

I wish I was in school the day they said over the loud speakers, “Prayers are requested for the father of Terrence, Eileen and Bridget Myles. He died last Thursday. They won’t be in school today.” Everyone in the room will have to think about me and the kids who hate me won’t know what to do. What can they do? Sit there and hate me because my father’s dead. Ha. Scoff on them. Especially boys.

All the boys who I love and think I’m a jerk and the girls who think they’re too good for me will die. They can’t say a word. When I came in everyone acted the same and I hated it so much. I had to act different. I acted real serious and got real cheap. I acted like I couldn’t do anything anymore because we were poor.

We weren’t but I decided I would act that way. It made me sad, and I decided that was a new way I could be. Nothing made me feel. Everything was quiet. Mom was funny, Terry was mean, Bridgie would just crawl up on my mother a lot. I acted like a kid. I would be a beatnik, I would make everyone so sad and be so cool. Loads of laughs, Eileen.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, DR. BEAGLE

There’s a place I don’t go anymore. Get on the “F” anywhere, take it, bells ringing and all, air-conditioning in the summer, out to Roosevelt Avenue, there you change to the number seven train, old clanky, interior dry as bone, people grim, canned—to the very end of the line, Main Street, Flushing. Come up, into the street, Alexander’s, finally pass the intersection into the area of small brick buildings, down a couple of concrete steps, note the security system warning on his dark red door, step in to the bright nightmare of Dr. Beagle’s office. Sign. Sign your name on the clipboard. Eileen Dolan. I chose this name eight years ago on my first trip to the doctor’s because of my best estranged friend who had that last name. She’s a nurse, her husband’s a doctor, they would abhor this action, using her retired moniker as the key to my life of endless mornings. Wake up. Again and again. Turquoise pills that break neatly because of the indented line across their circumference. Made for breaking, made for sharing. Alice loved those halves a lot. I made some friendships that way. Hello. Would you like a good pill? I love these. Salty, then just behind the tongue those little glands go blinng at the familiar taste. Wheeee. Not the strongest pills, or the roughest, or the smoothest, but just the prettiest, my blue pills. I got 84 each month for seven years. At first I’d sell you ten, I’d give you six, I’d pay back the money I owed you by letting you have sixteen free, acid from Ann in exchange. Eventually times got hard and I sold them all to Harry at the Strand. Nervously bounding down the stairs to the basement. Hi. Two wry grins, and boomp back up the stairs to the street, free. Or one more stop.

Ellen was Sherryl’s friend, in medical school, Ellen did a lot of speed. I was fifteen pounds heavier than her, I was perfect. She borrowed a car and we drove down the BQE to the doctor’s the first day, eight years ago. I had no interest, really, not doing drugs, just drinking a lot as always. I agreed to take fifteen anyhow from that first lot, I took one hesitantly. It wasn’t so great. It just made me a little different, nervous, not hungry—yogurt was fine. Coffee and cigarettes were sweeter I noticed and … xeroxing at work was a joy! Flash, flash flash, I loved watching the sheets kick out of the machine, I began to time it with a little twist of my hip, bend my knee. I loved the exquisite calm of xeroxing. I had a notebook where I put my thoughts. Dry Imager. That was the name of a small poem I wrote around that time.

I was going to Alice’s workshop on Fridays and I would give her a few in the bar afterwards to make her like me and she did. Eventually she liked me anyway but now at least she liked me. I drank bourbon with my blue pills and one night I fell down in Phebe’s on this combination and another time I fell down in the Locale. It was really embarrassing. A) I was with a bunch of older writers who were allowing me to hang out with them and I was doing well and B) the bartender rushed over and put ice on my nose, I believe, as if I were a dog, and I realized I knew him. I had waitressed at the last bar he worked in. I was such a drunk. It showed.

In my real lofty voice I want to tell you this is a sentimental journey I don’t take anymore—at least since last March and I realize I have taken this trip with more regularity than any other action repeated in my life in the ten years I’ve lived in New York. The trip to Dr. Beagle’s was home. The waiting was excruciating. You never saw a good looking person in Dr. Beagle’s office. Or even cute. Big thighs in jeans. Just big immense thighs. Since this was all going on in Queens everything was synthetic. Blouses, purses, shoes, paintings on the wall, vinyl chairs, my name—I couldn’t believe these people were real. “Sargent,” the nurse behind the desk would call. A fat lady would get up. Sargent, the nurse would repeat, handing “Sargent” her card. Eileen Dolan I was called next. Hi, I said dryly. I felt tiny. What’s that little bitch doing up there I felt the collective angry fat in the room aiming at me. “Now, we want to get into a bikini this summer,” the worm beamed at me, “so, Miss Dolan, we’re going to have to work a little harder. Watch the breads,” very slowly he spoke, “no, sweets,” he flirted, “and I’m sure …” he heaved the time-worn card into a stack of others “… we’ll see some progress,” he dinged the bell for the next cow to come in through the door, “next month.” What a cynical bastard I thought to myself, dropping the tinkling container of pills into my bag. I was usually unscrewing the lid in his hallway, slipping the two into my jean pocket.

I stopped in the Barn-hill pub to wash them down. And wait. Early days had me “getting off” someplace between Queens and Manhattan on the “F.” I’d be looking out over the blackening sky of industrial Queens, and boom the flatness of a pane of glass would come over my feelings, all smoothed down and graphic. I could look at them. As pieces of business. There. And often a good solution would come to mind. I’d marry this guy or go to New Hampshire this summer. Leave New York when I was thirty. I must. To have any integrity at all. Good. Settled, now what can I do tonight?

But, I don’t know, I suppose it was the introduction of a companion to my ritual. As all rituals are, it was private. Maybe I’d stop at the donut shop on the right side of Roosevelt Ave. as I was heading to the train. It was the most synthetic donut shop. The sandwiches were served … old women, a few clean men, me, smoking a cigarette with coffee. Perfectly slipping my plastic lighter in and out of the correct pocket, controlling my change, just nervously shifting things before the descent into the subway again and the big shift, into the speedy weekend. This coffee shop was merely a discipline.

“Let’s go in there and get a beer!” suggested Christine. No, I always go to the coffee shop up there … “What do you do that for! I’m getting a beer. C’mon.”