Hard Love Read Online Free Page A

time, I guess. As long as you’re not some crazy person who thinks he could turn me straight.”
    “No, really,” I assured her. “I’m not crazy. I’m not a rapist. I’m not anything really.”
    Then she gave me this sort of half smile, one side of her mouth working only, and pointed her finger at my chest. “Actually, I suspect you are pretty damn crazy, Gio, but probably not dangerous crazy. Come on, I know a place.”
    I felt as if I’d been released from a trap, a little shaky and kind of scraped up, but really thankful. I wasn’t Johnanymore. I was Gio. And I was probably pretty damn crazy.
    “You spent half the morning in Tower Records and you didn’t get a copy of Factsheet 5 ?” Marisol said, banging her coffee cup down onto its saucer. She was almost through with her refill while I played with my original cup, now stone cold and way too milky. It was a cool place she’d taken me to, a bookstore café where you could read the shelves from your tiny table. We’d spent an hour discussing the technical aspects of zine production. She knew so much I started writing things down.
    “I never heard of Factsheet 5 ,” I said. “It’s a zine?”
    “No, no. It’s not a freebie. You get it inside on the magazine racks. You actually have to spend a few bucks, but let me tell you, if you plan to keep making zines, you have to get a Factsheet 5 .”
    “How come?”
    Marisol leaned back in her chair and laid one heavy-booted foot on top of the other knee. It seemed so amazing to me that I was sitting in the Trident Bookstore Café on Newbury Street talking to this unusual person—at least I’d never met anybody like her—and having this great, weird time. I even liked the people at the other tables. There were two women with long gray hair, older than my mother probably, wearing long Indian skirts and hiking boots, discussing their acupuncturists. And at another table a group of college students, their clothes spattered with paint, argued about which galleries showed the most innovative work and which brand of veggie-burgers was the tastiest. (Toto, we’re not in Darlington anymore.)
    “It’s a damn good thing you met me, Giovanni Italian. You don’t know squat about the zine business,” Marisol continued.
    I took another sip of my chilly brew. God, you can feel the stuff eating away at your stomach. “I don’t really think of it as a business. I just like writing, and I thought it would be fun to make a zine. I’m not trying to get rich on it or anything.”
    “Well, that’s good, because you won’t. None of us will. On the other hand, the closer you can come to breaking even on it, the more zines you’ll be able to produce, right?”
    “It didn’t cost me that much. Just the copying and the cover stock.”
    “It adds up. Listen, Factsheet 5 tells you how to do stuff cheaply, how to get a subscription list started, and the best thing is they review all the zines that are sent to them, which means people will write to you from all over the country and ask you to send them a copy of Bananafish . You wouldn’t like that? Go back to Tower and get an F5 and send a copy of your zine there right away.” She was so serious about the whole thing.
    “Well, okay, but really it’s not that big a deal for me. I mean, it’s not like what I have to say is going to change the world.”
    Marisol sat up straight and her face got tight. “So why bother then, if it’s just some half-assed way to waste your time? If you’re not committed to having people read what you’ve written? What have we been talking about all morning?”
    “It’s not half-assed …”
    “Because I really hate that … people who don’t take things seriously, who think everything is a big joke.”
    “It’s not a joke. I worked hard on it.”
    But she wasn’t even listening anymore. She was on a crusade or something. “It’s a lie, you know, to pretend that nothing is important to you. It’s hiding. Believe me, I know,