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By Darren Kaminsky

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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three.  The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C.  As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.

Click here for a Chapter Index.

Chapter Eighteen

Sunday, June 26

I unfolded it and held it one way, then the other. It was a thing of beauty; in four marvelous colors...Nell tried to hold back the anarchists...Tiny winced in pain as her arm was shattered...the police charged into a peaceful crowd. Vindication.

Half an hour after it appeared in the bodega down the street, the phone rang. It was the lawyer. The prosecutors were “re-thinking” the charges against Nell, Brenna and Kerran and dropping the charges against me entirely. No matter what name I published under I was now protected by the -- apparently still respected --1st Amendment.

For three days I’d gone nowhere, avoiding work, Dani, all social activities, Bella, all phone calls, as I was sure the phone was bugged, and the windows, as I was sure they were being watched.

Since no one around here likes answering the phone anyway, we eventually had the brilliant idea of turning the ringer off (only after having --masochistically -- sat and watched it ring and ring and ring).

I had jilted the cops who wanted to extort the film from me.  Mental images of them, lounging against their car, waiting in the same way that the phone kept ringing, gnawed at me. I imagined myself number one on a list kept by some un/semi-official police hit squad. They’d make it look like a burglar or serial killer had done it. The murderer would never be caught. My body would be dumped in the alley. My blood would feed the vines that wrapped around the old paving stones.

Maybe the Shotgun Murderer had been framed? It was a story they’d invented to cover for the hit squad. They’d planted the evidence and marched their little stoolie in front of the news cameras like some two-bit, just-as-nuts Lee Harvey Oswald. Reality manufactured for your pleasure on the evening news. All bets were off. It would snow today despite the forecasts and they’d still report it all clear.

But, no need to think about it...yet...because, for the moment, we were exonerated and could go on with our lives...

The first place we went with our lives was to get margaritas and tequila shots at Trolly’s, the broken down El Salvadoran place up on Mt. Pleasant street.

We sat in a booth with torn seats, the cushion material popping out in tufts. Brenna sat across from me in a motorcycle jacket and cut-off blue jeans; she was sitting with her back against the wall and her legs, which had a purple cast from stubble, pulled up in front of her. Kerran was sitting next to her in the outside seat and kept ramming Brenna against the wall. As he rammed her harder and harder, his usual shit-eating grin got bigger and more monstrous. On my side of the table, Jean sat in the outside seat and tapped her fingers against the side of her head and I leaned against the wall and put my legs across her lap.

None of us said anything. The waiter came by with glasses and a big pitcher...the largest pitcher I’d ever seen. Tonight, we would attempt to swim in a margarita green sea.

First, we toasted each other to a Tequila shot and it tasted deeply sour and burned like napalm; then, we toasted with the margaritas. We toasted Nell and Tiny and even the cops and the anarchists. There was enough drink to toast everyone and everything, eventually we were too drunk to toast; we’d hold up our glasses like we were going to toast, then wait for someone to say something and when no one could, we’d all giggle and drink anyway.

“Remember that time when you, me and Coby drank that bottle and a half of Tequila?” Brenna said, waving her glass back and forth menacingly.

“That was more like some sort of suicide attempt or cry for help,” I said.

“No, it was a cry for air-conditioning!” Brenna said.

Don’t make me think about it” I said, which, of course, immediately made me think about it. The three of us, lived together in an old row house during the hottest, most humid, most oxygen-deprived summer I could --barely -- remember. The fans would run constantly and all the windows and doors were always wide open. We’d stopped sleeping and sat all night on the living room sofas misting ourselves like plants with spray bottles filled with cold water and drinking lots of cold beer and fruit juice mixed with grain alcohol. Not because it made us cooler, but because it made us forget that we were hot. During the day, the air shimmered and we walked around like zombies, numb and unaware, from the sleeplessness.

Trolley’s was playing bad lounge music in Spanish. It was funny at first, but then got more and more irritating. “We’ve got to put something on the jukebox,” I said and started fishing my pockets for quarters.

Jean went up with me. The jukebox had something for all of Trolley’s multiple clienteles. There was Mexican/Central American Pop, a couple of BritDrone albums, a lot of AlternaPunk and then albums by local DC scenesters.

They had both versions of "Head On," the one by the Pixies and the one by Jesus and Mary Chain, so we played both; then we picked "Winds of Change" by German heavy metal group The Scorpions...for irony value of course; next, Liz Phair’s "Fuck and Run" because “Guys suck,” Jean said; then "Friend to Friend in Endtime" by DC band Lungfish which we’d never heard but seemed to suit our circumstances; and Hole’s "Miss World," "for Nell," we agreed; and right afterwards Bikini Girl’s "Rebel Girl," because we couldn’t imagine Toby Vail and Kathleen Hanna hating anyone so much as Courtney Love; then two Fugazi songs because we had to; and then, because it was rare and Jean had never heard it, we picked The Gits version of "A Change is Gonna Come," only to be found on a bootleg 12”. It’s easily the freakiest song ever with Mia Zapata singing that she’s “not afraid to die” and saying “Brother, help me please?”

“It’s kind of like Martin Luther King’s ‘I’ve Been to The Mountaintop’ speech,” Jean slurred. And we both nodded.

Back at the table, we couldn’t pick which version of “Head On” we liked better and Kerran said that Jesus and Mary Chain were “pussies.”

“The Pixie’s version is obviously better,” I said.

“The Pixies are pussies,” he said.

Next was "Winds of Change." "I’ll give you some winds of change," Kerran said laughing, “The Scorpions are definitely pussies...They’re pussies because they’re trying to be macho.”

“Well, we picked a Fugazi song,” I said. “Are Fugazi pussies?” I asked. He kept his mouth shut to that one. To criticize Fugazi would be heresy.

But, later Lungfish played,and another DC band called Bluetip, and we were informed that “Lungfish and Bluetip are pussies,” which I should have expected, but there was an interesting twist when the Gits’s song played. “Whoever killed her is a pussy,” Kerran told us. “I’d use a different term on that one,” Brenna said and the rest of us nodded, but nodding while this drunk was dangerous; my jaw clapped up and down (and back and forth) slackly and Brenna and Kerran moved up and down like the vertical hold had gone screwy on an old TV.

“Put your legs down,” Jean said to me and raised her hand to her face and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “My legs are starting to cramp up.”

Kerran had ordered some chips and salsa and was eating it too quickly and laughing while he ate; a shower of red salsa drops was spraying across the table, in a weirdly even pattern.

“We need to have a party,” Jean said. “To celebrate our innocence.”

“Like you’ve ever been innocent,” Kerran said. “You and Death Girl over here,” he said pointing at Brenna, “...wouldn’t know jack about innocent.”

“Who are you calling 'death girl'?” Brenna said.

“All those paintings you paint look like fucking cadavers,” Kerran said.
Brenna’s paintings hung all around the house. She painted portraits of people and family scenes that would be happy and loving if, and it was kind of true, the people didn’t have a gray pallor and fixed gazes and slack mouths. I had always thought that she’d done the people like that on purpose.

“They are not dead people.”

“Are too,” Kerran said.

“I like living things,” she said with mock hurt. “In fact, I want to get a pet snake,” she said.

“NO!” Kerran, Jean and I said in unison.

To which she gave us a pouting look and glowered for a minute from beneath her eyebrows.

There were shapes moving towards us. Four of them. And they stopped at our table. One of them I recognized as being a guy named Gavin I’d known at school. He used to tell everyone to call him “Gav,” but that had mutated into “Gaff” which had stuck. Now, he even told people to call him Gaff.

He’d always reminded me of a dog who hadn’t realized that he’d gotten bigger than the puppy he’d been and didn’t know what to do with his big legs or big paws. He was always moving, mostly nervously.

The other guys had noun names, Truck or Car or Critter, but I was too drunk to remember them, but I did remember Brenna telling us that they lived in a house two streets away from ours.

They sat down in the booth behind Brenna and Kerran and after only a few minutes, Brenna and Gaff were kissing across the partition.

When Jean, Kerran and I pushed ourselves up to go, Brenna said that she was staying; we stumbled home without her.

Almost the moment we got in the door, the phone rang. I ran and picked it up.

“Where have you been?” Dani said. “I’ve been so worried.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t call you because of the police, but did you see the insert? We’re exonerated! We just went and got drunk to celebrate?”

“You’re exonerated and went to celebrate and didn’t even bother calling me?” She said, her voice rising as she spoke.

Oh, Shit, I said to myself as she hung up on me.

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.  He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.

© 2005 Me Three