Rat Bohemia Read Online Free Page B

Swedish. The subtitles said, “Forgive me.” I went downstairs into a stall in the ladies’ bathroom and masturbated. Then I went up and watched it again.

Chapter Five
    When I was a girl my father and I were always fighting. If he told me to get out and never come back, I’d be hovering on the front stoop for hours screaming to get back in. If he put his foot down and told me I couldn’t go out, I’d do it anyway by going down the fire escape.
    Our street, Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights, was so quiet that me yelling or him yelling was enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. After a few people started complaining my dad got into the habit of calling the local precinct as soon as we’d get into a fight.
    â€œOfficer,” he’d say into the telephone. “We have a girl here, out of control.”
    There were Spanish kids in Jackson Heights then, but not as many as now. The Spanish and the whites never mixed. That really dates me. There was only one Puerto Rican guy who worked with my dad, but he lived up in the Bronx. There was a psychological divide then that was only violated, occasionally, by a passing beat-up Ford Falcon blasting salsa music from the radio. I didn’t know that was the sound of the future. Rice and beans were what you’d have to eat if you didn’t amount to anything. They were a threat. Not something delicious, orange and black with pork fat, hot sauce and fried plantains. Out on the street we only saw good-girl German Jews coming home from their violin lessons and lots of Irish kids blaming themselves for everything starting at the age of twelve. I knew a girl who lived two apartments up from ours named Claudia Haas and she started out as a good girl but ended up as a tramp.

    My father was a rough guy. He’d already chased Howie out of the apartment and off to California somewhere to find peace and fortune. Dad’s second girlfriend had dumped him about a year before and it was taking him longer than usual to find another one, which also put him in a foul mood. So when he tossed me out for the fifteenth time, I shrugged it off and went to the candy store to buy a pack of Salems.
    There was Claudia Haas, tight jeans, tight V-neck short-sleeved sexy knit top. She was hanging out, a real hitter from Queens. She was drinking Mateus Rosé out of the bottle and listening to Seals and Crofts on WPLJ radio. The real truth is that Claudia Haas fell in love with me and I fell in love with her even though it wasn’t possible on a warm Queens night in 1975 because neither of us knew what a homosexual was. It wasn’t a word that was bandied about the newspapers then as it is today. Even I, who had already experienced it, had never uttered the word. I had never conceptualized myself that way.
    Claudia and I talked together until late that night. We sat on cars, smoked cigarettes, listened to Yes do Close to the Edge and fell in love. Claudia’s boyfriend wore his Vietnam army jacket, turned us on to Thai weed, drank beer, listened to Grand Funk Railroad, to War, to Average White Band and Janis Ian, to the Allman Brothers singing “Whipping Post” live at the Fillmore East, to Carly Simon singing “You’re so Vain,” to the Stones, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Acoustic Hot Tuna, and the Dead. It was a different, stupid America. We hadn’t yet given up trying to get over Vietnam. We reveled in our mediocrity. America wasn’t nihilistic yet. We weren’t all suffering.
    That night, after partying, the sky was all mine, warm on my
skin. I followed Claudia up to her parent’s tiny apartment, like ours, four rooms smashed together in a purposeful square. Remove the walls and we’re all head to toe, head to toe. Her mother had left the kitchen light on, illuminating a plate of muhn kuchen , invitingly untouched on the rickety table.
    â€œCome on,” Claudia whispered, leading me into the family bathroom