A March of Marys, day two

Serializing my first novel on my substack because it's out of print and I want you to read it.

Good morning! Welcome back to my substack! We’re celebrating day 2 of A March of Marys, a literary experience where I share a sequential chunk of American Mary, my first novel, right here online every day throughout the month of March. I’ll skip the intro and get right to it, but please make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a post!

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You don’t come with me to TLA video to pick up Jesus’ Son. 

Michael recommends the movie to me at the cafeteria at Johnson and Hardwick along with Four Rooms and something else, but Michael really loves Jesus’ Son. He feels like it describes his personal experience in life so far. He watches it and he feels like he knows the wandering main character, like he is a similar soul who has seen him in his sorrier states, who knows the kind of shit you don’t want even your best friend knowing about. And I have a weird older brother crush on Michael because he can do a trick where he shakes his hand really fast to make his fingers snap, he lives in an old brownstone near the art museum, and he’s already been to drug rehab.

We get grocery store sushi and eat it in your dorm room, sitting on your bed but feet apart. 

You turn on some twinkle lights. ‘Check out this Moog lighting.’

I laugh.

‘My roommate’s always talking about Moogs. He hears them in everything.’

‘Yeah,’ I laugh. ‘Put on the movie.’

You sit back down and we kind of sit close together. Our hands at our sides. I can smell your laundry detergent or the Bounce sheet or something. Your hair looks kind of greasy.

The movie feels cold. It is cold outside and it is cold on the TV screen and you want to watch a warm movie. You are complaining and it’s kind of killing it for me, but not all the way.

*

I am eating a salad from the salad bar in the cafeteria, dipping my fork into the dressing before I plunge it into a lettuce chunk. Michael is looking at me. You’re not like these other girls. These other girls, they look okay now, but it’s just makeup. They’re really just plain. It matches their personalities. These girls will get older and they won’t look good. They will look old. Their faces will droop. You’re not like these girls, you’re beautiful. You have regal features. You sparkle, like in a lot of ways. You will always be beautiful.

*

Everything is blue. The heat from your radiator smells dusty.

*

It is snowing and my tires slip on the trolley tracks while biking over to Michael’s house. He answers the door in a holey BU sweatshirt and I ask if he ever went there. Michael nods, says he did before he got kicked out. I’m not sure how to respond but I say oh, walking into the living room to sit on his sofa. I like the music he has playing and I ask him what he’s listening to. He tells me it’s Bright Eyes, hands me the CD case and tells me I can have it. Fevers and Mirrors. Michael takes a small bag out of his desk drawer and I realize that it is a drug. I feel weird about watching him dip a key into the bag and hovering it under his nose. He offers me the bag and I say no, but then he tells me to just rub a little bit on my gums and I comply. I like letting him corrupt me a little bit at a time.

*

I guess I want you to kiss me. Or maybe I just want to know if you want to kiss me.

*

I walk up to the restaurant where Michael works and sit at the bar next to a woman who’s drinking a corona with a lime clinging to the lip of the bottle. I watch her drink one corona after another, pushing the lime through the neck and to the bottom of the empty bottle. I sit there for maybe thirty minutes while Michael finishes up his shift. He pours hot water into a tea cup for me and gives me a packet of Constant Comment. I had never had it before, but I like it, especially the name. I can barely remember all of what we did after he clocked out, but I know I got a coffee from a gas station and heard Michael make little comments about how I am drinking through a straw. I don't want my teeth to stain, I say. I think we walk around Eastern State Penitentiary and maybe go to a nightclub to listen to jazz, but maybe we also try to get into a bar and I don’t have a fake ID, so Michael calls me a cab and I go home alone. I wonder what he is doing inside and kinda wish he had taken me to the place we went on Saint Patrick’s day when he bought me a shot called Swedish Fish that I took a sip of but didn’t drink.

*

I look at you every so often while you’re watching the movie and feel you looking at me every so often while I’m watching the movie and I wonder if it will happen. I think it will. You have a poster of Bob Marley and a copy of Tarantula and Howl sitting next to your bed. I wonder if they’re out there to be seen or easy access. Maybe you’re reading them for class. Maybe they help you write songs. That time you handed me a piece of blue-lined notebook paper with center-aligned lines about alley cats and princes scribbled with a pencil and I wasn’t sure what you meant but I showed it to someone at school and they said ‘maybe it’s a poem about you.’

*

Michael takes me to get my wisdom teeth removed because I need a chaperone and I don’t want to bring my parents. And it seems like a silly adventure to go on. They’re probably going to give you codeine afterward, he says as we walk past the security guard in the lobby of the medical office building for my appointment. Michael waits in the waiting room while I’m in the oral surgeon’s chair wearing a nitrous oxide mask and moving my limbs around because they feel funny. I feel like I’m on drugs, I say to the surgeon’s assistant, and she asks me to keep still and the entire process is like watching a movie about people doing stuff to my mouth. I am drooling when I stumble into the waiting room. Michael helps me sign a form and we get into the back of a cab together back to my parents’ house. Michael talks to my mom and dad and holds my hand while we sit on the couch and everything is still blurry and dreamy and I lean my head on Michael’s shoulder and my dad says, ‘What a nice young man.’

*

‘You ever hitchhike before.’

‘No, but my dad used to. Have you.’

‘Yeah, but not in the city.’

‘Oh yeah, makes sense.’

*

I fall asleep in a chair in Michael’s neighbor’s apartment after smoking too much weed and Michael takes me back to his apartment, back to bed with him. He tries to take my shoes off, but in my sleep I tell him not to. I wake up fully clothed at dawn snuggling with a shirtless Michael in pajama pants still sleeping. I turn and look at his face. He looks like a sad Clark Kent. Tense mouth, wrinkled brow, shiny dark hair, little dust flecks everywhere. Underemployed, afraid to use his superpowers. He squeezes me and opens his eyes a little and I look at him and think that he is smiling at me with his eyes and we lay on his mattress on the floor holding each other.

*

I look at you and you notice me looking and I turn slightly and pretend I am staring at your patterned tapestry hanging on the wall. I cough and continue watching the movie. You will tell me later that you had wanted to kiss me, around the part where Fuckhead is working in a hospital, but the point is that you didn’t.

Everything is cold. 

Dirty blue and cold.

---

Missed day one? You can read it here.