Belonger
It was the seventies. My girlfriend had left me for some spiritual community a million miles away – in Canada and I thought I would try to win her back. I threw together my nickels and dimes to travel by bus from L.A. to a Christian-y commune north of Toronto, only to verify what I already knew, that Ginny didn’t want to be won back.
“You understand I’m happy here, right?” We were in windowed porch attached to a kitchen, an old, quiet room saturated with morning sun. She was scrubbing enough potatoes to feed twenty people which didn’t seem like a reason to stay, but I was more of a seeker and definitely more corrupt than she was. “What about you?” Her blonde hair was wound around her head as if she was living in another century. “You okay?”
No, I wasn’t okay. It wasn’t the easiest – to be a lesbian in the seventies and then have your girlfriend leave you for a community that churned butter and prayed. I caught a ride to Toronto where I boarded a bus to Buffalo in the mighty nation of New York.
As I walked into the Buffalo depot, a crazy rumpled man blocked my path for a sec, then with the curlicue gesture of an eighteenth-century footman bid me continue and receded as if he were a special effect in a movie, as if I’d smoked a little, which I couldn’t because I didn’t have any. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window, of my short, carroty hair which framed my face like a one-size-has-got-to-fit-a-whole-lot frame from a five-and-dime, and accepted myself with my many limitations. I believed – and still do – that being a dyke gets me a pass on matters of fashion. I got a Snickers from a vending machine and settled into a scratched-up plastic chair to think. And watch some old ladies fussing with purchases they were ushering back to Canada.
“Can you tell?” Lady Number One had a tiny head with frizzy hair. She wore two dresses. I knew because the hem of the first showed two inches below the second. “Maybe you want to switch the dresses?” Lady Number Two’s eyes narrowed, like she was the dealer in a tight game of Texas hold’em. She’d chanced on a sale on Contac paper and importantly arranged the flowered tubes in her giant paper bag. Her sculpted hair, veiled in a black chiffon scarf, looked secret.
I tossed the Snickers wrapper in a sand ashtray, consulted a phone book, and dialed the “Y” for walking directions. When I arrived, I stumped the clerk because all I had was six dollar bills and a cashiers’ check for $200. The clerk, who was skinny, pockmarked, and tired phoned a superior, put him on hold, asked if I had anything I could put up as collateral. I showed him my graduation present, a Bulova watch. He handed over a room key.
Women in curlers watched bowling on T.V. Hearing I was from L.A. one asked about, “Dat dere beauty contest, you know, the Academy Awards.” The elevator door had iron webbing. My room had a slanted ceiling, the bed a scooped-out cradle in the mattress. Sleep overtook me, which helped with a rational approach to business the next day. I cashed the check at a nearby bank. My watch was returned to my wrist. I wasn’t sure what was next, stopped for coffee, and struck up a conversation with a woman my age. She was like me, lesbian. I don’t know how you know these things, even now I don’t know but the knowledge is delivered by something old and sure in the body. You just know. Myra invited me to her place which I hoped smelled like she did, of essential oils, lavender and geranium. Like Ginny she was a blonde but her long hair was loose, and maybe a bit dirty.
The day was beautiful, bright, and crisp. I liked Buffalo’s warm brick buildings as backdrop. I lugged duffel bag and followed her. Maybe this was the greater rationale for my having traveled so far from home just a few months after graduating college, to meet my truly great love. We transferred from one local bus to another, facades changed to shabby, stuck-together houses, like in a photograph of America back then. The bus bumped over railroad tracks beneath many wires.
“I have a roommate.” Her eyes were small and black, shaded by dark brows. She wore a long dress that looked like an Indian bedspread stitched-up. “Don’t let the landlord see you.”
I hesitated but she smiled, and man oh man, I wanted more of that smile.
“Don’t worry.”
We arrived. “Mr. Ami lives there. She pointed to a doorway by the stairs we ascended. “He doesn’t like our having guests.” The other “us” was Ren, who was tall and lumber-y-of-motion. She made us tuna sandwiches. I wolfed mine.
“So. California?” I found Ren’s voice to be coarse. “I hear San Francisco is over, that free love is no more.”
Her words were a rebuke of my home state. Suddenly I was fighting back tears. She wasn’t the sort to notice, and when Myra told her I was from L.A., not San Francisco, her face, its small features bunched together, lit up. “We want you to stay here.” She was fake magisterial, like Laurel or Hardy could be, without the lovability. The kitchen was crummy looking, with paint peeling from the cupboards and an ancient stove you had to use matches with to make work. The living room, which we’d settled in, made me sad, not because of old furniture but because. Fragrant Myra sat next to me on the couch. Something was going on. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Myra put a finger to her lip, the international distress signal for quiet, and asked if I needed anything. She popped up, slinging her woolen purse from Mexico over her shoulder. “The store’s just a few blocks in that direction.” I didn’t want to stay there with Ren, but Myra was out the door so quickly. And Ren had settled in the bathroom. “On the toilet!” she shouted. I wandered. The few bookshelves were filled with self-improvement authors. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Florence Scovell-Shinn, Ayn Rand, a Cliff’s Notes for Thoreau. Someone was a student of the Akashic record, something I gleaned from tomes on spirit guides, alchemy, Edgar Cayce, and Atlantis.
I heard a key in the door, and wondered if Myra had forgotten something. It wasn’t she. “I’m Mr. Ami,” announced a tall, skinny man in workers’ overalls. I shared my name, feeling like a run-away teenager in need of outreach.
“I want my money.” He was direct.
“Ren?” I shouted. I told her she had a visitor. “I’ve been here half an hour,” I whispered to Mr. Ami.
He didn’t block me as my duffel bag and I raced past him. I worried I’d run into Myra, but a bus pulled up and I boarded, making my way to the bus depot where I bought a ticket to Albuquerque, where my cousin Joshua lived. A Greyhound attendant tagged and stored my luggage even though I was hours too early. “You have some time on your hands,” he said.
“I do indeed,” I replied and headed outside, reflecting that the attendant was nice and that nice people are everywhere. I breathed, in and out, in and out. I had dodged a bullet, although I didn’t know how, why, or the caliber. A small adventure over. Maybe that was what this trip was about – learning to live with uncertainty. Learning to be light on my feet. I watched a few women herd children and random people looking anxiously down the street, presumably for a relative to retrieve them. A van pulled up. Folk of the tribe of the tie-dyed were dropping off a friend. They felt more like my people than anyone since I left L.A. I wasn’t a hippie, but they felt like home.
“Hey, guys.” I waved.
Whoever was at the wheel backed up.
“Hey, traveler,” a girl my age responded. She was wearing enough black eyeliner to be a forerunner of Goth.
I asked where I could hear some music. “Maybe some women’s music?”
“Hey, man, that’s cool.” She was okay with me being a dyke, something I hated. Don’t approve of me, sister, I thought. But I figured, things were going to keep being strange so why not, and climbed into the van. The passenger seat next to the driver was gutted. A slight guy named Ralph was in the back with Dee Dee, the eyeliner queen, both wearing T-shirts of the gods – Morrison and Hendrix. I eased down, took the joint passed to me, toked, passed it on. God that felt good.
Jack, the driver, asked where I was from and everyone suddenly wanted to know if I could surf.
“Man, I could use a quick vacation.” Jack turned around and made eye contact with Dee Dee who reached into a battered ice chest, popped the cap on a beer, and handed it over or tried to, but the van ran a curb and hit a car parked in a driveway. We were baptized in cheap booze.
“Ah shit!” Jack slapped the steering wheel. “I already got my license suspended.”
“Bummer. You okay?” Dee Dee asked.
“Move the van, man, move it,” Ralph yelled.
Jack backed off the curb and hit the gas. “We didn’t hurt that car, not really.”
“It had fenders, I saw them.” Dee Dee crawled as far front as possible and rubbed his arm. “Where’s the joint?”
I was holding it. “Uh.”
I must have looked pretty out of it because they broke into laughter. I can be funny, generally when I’m not trying to be. I said, “I’m hungry. Would you mind bringing me back to the bus station?”
They laughed again because of course I was hungry. I was smoking weed.
“That’s crappy food,” Dee Dee sneered. “Bus station food.”
“It’s crap!” Jack yelled. He looked back at us and I held my breath.
Ralph’s lips pulled down as if a cartoonist were drawing an unhappy face, but then he lightened. “Wings. You’re in Buffalo, let’s get you some wings.” By the appreciative murmurs all around, I figured he was onto something. Jack made a quick U. A beer can rolled. The van lurched. I held out the joint. Ralph lit another match. I inhaled.
We pulled into a parking lot for a sallowly lit building with a neon sign: Wings Over Buffalo. Ralph and Dee Dee told me to wait. I thought about fried chicken backs – something my mom would make for us the day before payday. Looking out I noticed a red glow. Jack swore and ran into the chicken wing stand for Ralph and Dee Dee. I peeked out to see two policemen nearing the Wings’ entrance, stubbed out the roach, and gingerly climbed out. There stood a cop, who looked me up and down. “This your van?”
“I met these guys at the bus station, and I gotta get back.” I showed him my ticket. He looked me up and down again. I swear he knew I was a lesbian and judged me meanly for that, but he told me to get moving. Which I did.
These days, every other bar and coffee shop sells chicken wings, but not back then. I slumped in the scooped-out plastic of a row-chair, wiping bus station hot dog mustard from my Pendleton, and feeling I’d missed out on something special.
“Cheap thrills.” The disheveled man from the day before stood in front of me, pointing to a t-shirt barely visible beneath his ratty sweater. He was pointing to Janis Joplin, to a t-shirt of a goddess. He drifted like smoke into the end chair of my plastic row, and unlike smoke started pushing back and forth with enough force it seemed plausible he would yank out the bolts and send me toppling.
“I see you.” His eyes were looking straight ahead but he had me in his peripheral vision.
I was relieved to hear that. It is good to be seen. Definitely for one’s sexual preference. Maybe for one’s tarnished soul. When my bus was called, he’d fallen asleep. I sneaked a dollar bill into one of his pockets. The attendant who’d stored my luggage walked over as I was boarding.
“Saw what you did for Lawrence.”
I shrugged.
“We take care of him.” He tapped my shoulder. “You’re one of us.”
My little chest heaved with pride. Then I boarded my bus.
...first published in Callisto (Sibling Rivalry Press), Raymond Luczak, editor
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