That was the worst month of my life. It started with my mom doing my hair before the women's rights march. I thought women already had all the rights they wanted, but mom said they were continually oppressed by societal definitions and glass ceilings. I was thinking about real glass ceilings, wondering if they'd be a good idea, and my mom was talking over me.
"Honey, you really should do something with your hair," she said. "There. Doesn't that look better?"
She held a mirror out to me, showing me the manicured part with just enough hair falling in my eyes.
"You really look so beautiful when you put a little effort into it," she said.
"Thanks."
We drove downtown in a rush, as usual, and I was still tying my combat shoes when we parked in front of city hall. I marched around for a couple hours wishing this were the sixties so someone would start passing around a joint or burning a bra or rioting. Finally the women sort of lost steam and went back to their families. I walked to Juicy Juice, where my friend Jeff worked.
Juicy Juice is this new age store that only sells juice, or "fruit-centered life-enforcing power smoothies." For fifty cents you can add all sorts of "boosters" like Echinacea and honey comb and wheat grass pulp to help lose weight or attract good karma. The juice isn't half bad, but it costs about five dollars per Styrofoam cup, so that usually puts it out of my price range.
Jeff is the man I once thought I would marry. He is the man who would never pay five dollars for a fruit-centered-life-enfocing power smoothie. He's also about two hundred pounds overweight, which means it took him almost a month to find a job, and his whole life to find a girlfriend. We stopped dating
at the beginning of the summer but we still hung out a lot, mostly due to a lack of other options. We still fucked when we felt like it.
"Did your mom do your hair?" he asked me as he made my smoothie. He gets a half off employee discount, which means that I got a half off discount, which means that at $2.50 the smoothie was only about ten times the cost of production.
"Yeah. She fixed it for the protest." I gave him the money and he stole some organic potato chips.
"It looks awful," he said. Jeff never tells you what you want to hear. "You really shouldn't let her do that to you."
He punched out a few minutes early and we went to this sandwich place where I used to work, and the guy I knew behind the counter gave us free food. We sat on the sidewalk outside and ate. He talked about his job, and I talked about Tye.
Tye is this friend of mine, in a way. He was goth before goth was cool, and I respected him because of it, even before we even met. He's the person I feel the closest to. I used to be really in love with him, and he knew it. Sometimes I feel like I still am, like love is something you can never get over. If they invent an anecdote for love, I'll be the first to buy it.
One night a couple of months ago I went to this party I knew Tye would be at and we ended up having sex in the backyard. He never called after that, and I had this big traumatic realization that he just used me for sex, and he didn't care about who I was, he didn't care that I was so in love, blah, blah, blah. I would have cried to Jeff about it, but I had left Jeff for Tye and I was pretty much on my own.
After that party Tye disappeared for a couple of weeks, came back out of the blue, and called me. I snuck out of my house to drink vodka from a plastic bottle with him in the basement of a literal crack house and grew some balls and finally asked him why he had sex with me.
"It was what you wanted, wasn't it?" he said.
So in a way Tye fucking me in an uprooted flowerbed was like his gift to me, the gift of his body and his time. I still have a little trouble understanding it, but at least I knew how it felt to him. And I got a lot of poetry out of it. I once read this quote from Axl Rose: "Any of the shit I go through is worth it if I can make a song out of it." I felt that way about poems, until someone told me Axl got about a million dollars for every song he writes.
I once told Tye that I wanted to be a poet.
"Do you write poetry?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Then you're already a poet," he said.

I drove Tye home the night we had that conversation and we sat in my car for a couple of hours outside the shitty apartment complex where his father was dying of emphysema and talked religion. That was what Tye did best. I think that if we had lived with the Native Americans, or really lived any time other than now, he would have been a shaman. He was so concerned with religion that he couldn't even get through high school. Now his father was sick and this girl was pregnant with his twins and he just sat in my car and smoked and talked about what the Bible really used to say. I was expecting him to confide in me, maybe tell me what it feels like to be admired and loved by all sorts of different people, or what it feels like to have way too much to handle. He was expecting to teach me.
"So the first woman God made was named Lilith, and He made her out of air, but she just didn't work out and God's work was flawed."
He preached to me as if I was a little kid.
"Because she was rebellious?" I asked
"No, because you can't make something out of nothing." He pulled on his cigarette, the glowing tip showing the caverns of his powdered white face. "It just doesn't work."
I acted like I understood. I left Tye and drove home when the sun started to come up, a huge red sun painted by the pollution of thousands of commuters.

I told Jeff a little bit of this story as we sat outside the sandwich store. Some of it really couldn't be explained, and some of it he just didn't want to hear. Jeff thinks Tye is mostly full of shit, but Jeff doesn't think much of religion either. When we got sick of talking I gave Jeff a ride home and went back to my mom.
My dad is a non-entity. He lives in California, does business, and makes lots of money. My mom is too proud to ask for anything from him and I inherited that. I last saw him two and a half years ago, when I was entering high school. I think he came here on business, some plastics company was setting up a new factory. He took me out to lunch at the Olive Garden. I wore a pair of jeans I had cut to tiny streamers. It looked like a grass skirt. I had been sent home for wearing it at school. He wore a tailored suit and a watch that was worth more than my life. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu as he asked me what I wanted to do with my future.
It reminded me of the Self-Empowerment speaker that came to our high school right before the year ended. He came to tell us to stay off drugs, be good and get a job. We would do this through the double miracles of Time Management and Positive Self-Esteem. I raised my hand in the question and answer session.
"How does it feel to have a future?" I asked. "I mean, I'm just curious."
He seemed a little flustered, but he pulled off an admirable shirking of the question by telling us we all had a future, that was what he wanted to show us by sharing his Valuable Life Experience. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear the rest of his answer because the principle asked me to leave the speech and go to his office to learn about Attitude Adjustments.
My dad talked a little about attitude adjustments too, as we leaned in over steaming piles of pasta. I wanted to ask him if he had ever considered a career as a motivational speaker but I held my tongue. Unlike most people my age I never learned to hate my father. He was rich, and he was distant, and I could count the number of conversations we've had on both hands, but you have to love the careful way he buttered his garlic bread. You have to love the way he joked with the waiter.
Once my dad had been reassured that, while I wasn't motivated to empower my life, I also wasn't addicted to drugs or pregnant or suicidal, he renewed his invitation for me to come out to California for the summer. This invitation has been around since he first left my mother but I've never really wanted to go. I think both of us would be shocked if I accepted. He left town the next day, to return in a few years on another business trip. Since then he's sent me several cards, birthday or otherwise, stuffed with twenties.

Back at home, finishing my sandwich after dropping Jeff off, my mom asked me if I liked the protest. She seems like she's under a lot of pressure. It's probably her boyfriend. She's dating this man from Indiana, a professor at some big university out there. He's the number one world wide expert on Pitium Serchay, a French sociologist who worked in Russia before the Communist revolution. Serchay knew Trotsky and had published one book. My mom's boyfriend, Barry, knew nobody of importance and had published four books about Serchay. He was working on his fifth, which involved a lot of time in libraries combing translated books and newspapers for any mention of Serchay. I guess that's what world-renowned Serchay experts do.
Because he was a sociologist, he would listen to my stories of teenager age discrimination and high school social classes for hours. It doesn't do anything justice to say I only liked Barry. I loved him, and so did my mom. He was the first adult I ever traded CD's with. Both my mom and I were waiting for him to propose. They had been together for four years, but recently he'd been acting fucking weird. My mom was getting a little nervous herself, waiting for that ring.
After reassuring my mom that I appreciated all her work towards women's emancipation I went out again, looking for Tye. It was a mission, the mission of almost every night that summer. I wore something that looked like a T-shirt from the front but was just two spaghetti straps in the back. That shirt was an open invitation which Tye, later that night, respectfully declined. My mom didn't say anything about the shirt, she was big on individual liberty, but she did ask if I wanted any eyeshadow.

I spent that night near Tye anyway, in a big house on the other side of town, the scene of the drunken party where I'd found him. He had been standing alone in the corner of the kitchen, wearing all black with his long fingernails wrapped around a glass and his almost clear blue eyes staring from behind layers of eyeliner. I thought, not for the first time, that the next time my father invites me to dinner I'll bring Tye. The look above my father's silk suit would be worth a million.
Tye looked like he wanted to talk to someone, but it wasn't me. He dismissed me casually, like you refuse a kid. I spent the night isolated in that swirl of humanity, wishing I could call Jeff but knowing that would break some unspoken contract we made. Once you dump someone you forfeit the right to three in the morning drunken phone calls confessing loneliness. I spent the night on the couch, and Tye spent the night outside in the lotus position, so he wouldn't have to decline any more of my invitations.
It was like a lot of other nights we spent together, sleeping in different rooms surrounded by different people, but I really didn't mind. It helped me sleep, knowing he was there. God only knows why.

I went home that morning to boxes piled next to the front door. Barry's third book, the one dedicated to his colleagues at the Indiana University, was lying overturned in the middle of the floor. My mom turned to look at me, her tear-stained face as washed out as the cheap living room wallpaper.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Oh, honey!" She came over and hugged me, her eyes beginning to water again. This disturbed me. My mom does not cry easily, a decade and a half of single parenting has made her tear glands hard as granite.
"Barry's not coming back this summer," she told me.
We left the house together, going out for lunch at a café far enough away from our house to be considered part of a good neighborhood. I ordered the tomato-garlic-pesto-baguette.
"Barry called me this morning. It's over between us."
The baguette turned to sawdust in my mouth.
"Honey, I don't know how to say this. He's been having an affair, it's been going on for almost two years."
My God. I remembered the last time I had seen him with such force it almost threw me back in my chair. He brought his kids out to meet me. He had a ten-year-old son and an angel of a daughter, six years old with blonde curls and skin so white you could see the roadmap of veins on her forehead.
"He wouldn't have told me about this?" my mom choked and I reached for her hand, instinctively. "He wouldn't have told me if the woman wasn't pregnant. The paternity papers are being sent to his ex-wife, the university and me."
Barry's angel daughter had told me, the last night they spent in the house, that her dad said he was going to marry my mom. "We're going to be sisters!" she told me, and we danced around living room in our socks.
"He's going to lose his job." My mom told me, crying freely in public. "She was one of his students. I wrote this all down, I don't know why?"
I looked down at my hazelnut Caribbean latte. I remembered kissing Barry and his family goodbye in the airport.

My mom and I left the café, our uneaten food abandoned on the metal tables. My mom surprised me again by going to church to meet with a pastor I barely remembered. She invited me to go with her. She told me she needed to understand evil. I wanted to tell her I thought I understood it pretty well, and if I wanted to talk theology I'd call Tye, but instead I hugged her and told her I loved her. We were a family of two again, back to taking care of each other.
The tires made a squeaking noise as she pulled out of the driveway. On the coffee table I noticed a picture of Barry smiling, facing the sunlight outside our house. I punch his face as hard as I can, getting glass stuck between my knuckles.
"You bastard!" I screamed until my voice disappeared into a horse squeak, my hand bleeding stupidly all over the coffee table.
I shredded the picture, spilling blood and glass and Barry all over the living room. I wrote a poem on the back of scrap paper:
Fall, fall, fall
My mother's angel
Betrayed us
Where we were
Softest

But I didn't feel any better.

I called Tye first. I held the phone to my ear like it was the only solid thing in the house, knowing I would be lost if he wasn't home, I would feel my stomach drop out form beneath me. He finally answered the phone, agreed to spend some time with me, and asked me for a ride. I'm at his house in fifteen minutes, bloody hand wrapped in toilet paper. I tell him everything, immediately, using anger to keep sorrow at bay. He doesn't respond.
"I'm sorry," he says finally, pulling eyeliner out of his bag.
We drive in a silence that I'm afraid will deafen me. Tye circles his eyes with surgical precision. I stare at him. Tye was born looking like a god, like Lord Byron's picture of ideal masculine beauty. It's never made him so unapproachable, and the space between me and my passenger seat stretched to a thousand miles.
He turned to me, looking slightly amused. "Do I distract you when I put on my makeup?"
I know what he wants to hear. "Yes," I tell him, reinforcing everything we both want to believe about him.
Tye talks like an oracle about Egyptian religion, interrupting with directions.
"In Egypt, after you die, the gods put your heart on a scale," he tells me. "Take a left here."
He's going to some girl's house; he told me her name on the phone. It's not the girl pregnant with his twins. I wonder if that pregnant girl ever drove him around, or if she was one of the women whose doorstep he ran to.
"They weigh your heart against a feather," he said. "Turn at the next street."
I wonder who called first, if she hung on the line, praying he would be in, or if he stepped down from his clouds to seek her out.
"And if your heart was heavy with regret or sadness, they would feed your soul to the demon." He smiles at me. "Pull in here, this is it."
I pulled up to the apartment building, Scenic Acres. The only scenery I saw was a half-dead elm and a self-storage facility. I suppose it all depends on you definition of scenic.
"Do you want to talk?" Tye asked.
I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to ask why he waited until I had pulled the car into the parking space to ask if I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask him what it is about this girl that makes him ask for a ride to her apartment when I know he would never show up at my house. I wanted to ask him what it was about him that I liked.
"No, I'm fine," I say.
Because, if you never learned to hate your father, you can never learn to hate any of the men in your life. Even when they treat you like this.
As I watched Tye mount the steps of the apartment building I wrote another poem, this time on the back of a gas station receipt:

Golden pollen hangs suspended
A late summer fertility rite
In the amber afternoon sun
There is ice in me that never melts
How can it be August
When all my thoughts are on
December?

Maybe I'm just
Making something
Out of nothing.

It was a two poem day. In that sense it was a good day.

I told Jeff about Barry the next morning, over the phone at a reasonable hour. He was hurt, I could tell in his voice. His father is a non-entity too. I suppose Barry had adopted us both, we had both spent so many hours with him as Jeff became a part of my family. Jeff was worried about Barry's baby, but I couldn't be that charitable. Jeff and I spent the rest of the day together, in the comfortable companionship that comes after spending most of your high school experience together. My mom even invited Jeff out to lunch with us once, although she didn't really approve of our earlier monogamy.
"It's fun to date lots of people when you're young," she would tell me whenever I mentioned Jeff, back when we were dating.
I can't blame her for feeling that way, she just has no way to know that everyone has long-term relationships these days, even in fourth grade kids were dating for months at a time. The higher the divorce rate soars, the closer the kids cling to each other, trying to make good on their pretend marriages. Soon we'll all be exchanging vows in pre-school, forcing life to follow the rules on TV.

We spent a lot of time together that month, my mom and I. Crying together over lunch is always better than crying alone, I suppose. Passer-bys feel less of a responsibility towards you.
Over those meals my mom told me the history of her life, the tragedies that made her personal geography. She had a lot of lovers, an ocean of them, but all her stories ended horribly. Then he divorced me. Then he ran out on me. It's enough to drive you to celibacy, listening to these stories.
My mother also turned, strangely enough, to God. I'd heard tragedies could do this but never witnessed it. She came home with pamphlets like "Looking Up When You're Feeling Down" and "It's Ok To Be Angry At God." I got a kick out of that last one, I defiantly had a few bones to pick with God. The last time I prayed it was to ask for Tye, back before he paid any attention to me. "Be careful what you wish," Metallica sings, "You just might get it."

Towards the end of that month Tye sort of faded away. He stopped calling and he stopped appearing in his usual places. At first I felt a kind of panic, a blind fear right in the pit of my stomach when he didn't answer the phone. I still felt like he was the only thing I wanted out of life, to have that beautiful face turned towards me. To fight off the loneliness I began spending more and more time with Jeff. He got this nice new computer game, something about role playing and fighting dragons, so I would go over to his house and we would play it together, sometimes with his little brother. Sometimes we would go in his bedroom and have sex, and I would start to feel all right, like the edges of my life weren't crumbling.
I had almost made it through the month when I got the phone call. It was Jeff, sounding tired and strange.
"I was just the victim of random violence," he told me, astonished that what we read about in the paper was actually true.
"My God," I said.
Jeff had been shot, superficially, but still shot. He had been walking to the 7-11 by his house when this boy, who couldn't have been older than Jeff, started yelling at him. Jeff didn't tell me what the boy said but I was pretty sure it had to do with Jeff's weight. The boy wanted to fight and Jeff ignored him. The boy threw a rock at Jeff and missed. Then he pulled out a gun, although the boy really didn't look like he knew what he was doing.
"I'm sure he didn't mean to shoot me," Jeff told me later, in the thousands of conversations we had about this. "I'm surprised he didn't shoot himself."
The gun went off and the kid screamed and ran back to his Mustang. Jeff said he thought the bullet grazed him, he felt it sting, but when he looked down his shirt was covered with blood. His mom drove him to the emergency room. Jeff was okay, the bullet had been deflected. Deflected by Jeff's fat, probably, but no one mentioned that. No one ever talked about Jeff's fat, it was his invisible burden, the barrier between him and a normal life.
The police claimed they didn't have enough manpower for an investigation, but they would keep their eyes open for an angry young man, either Hispanic or deeply tanned, driving a rusty Mustang. Try every street corner in America, I thought.
I went straight to the hospital in my flannel pajama pants and dirty shirt. The nurse led me to the lowest floor, the basement. This is where they put the poor people who come to the hospital. If my father had been shot, he would have gotten a fourth floor room with a window. If my father had been shot, the police would have put the angry young man and his rusty Mustang in jail by the time I got to the hospital.
Jeff was lying on a bed in a windowless room, separated from an empty bed by an obscenely cheerful rainbow curtain.
"I don?t know where I would be without you," I tell him, and I'm surprised because I really feel that way. The men in my life have been dropping like flies and I don't know if I could have taken the loss of this one too.
"You were the first thing I thought of," he tells me. Jeff will never tell you anything just because you want to hear it. That's how you can be certain he's always telling the truth.
Reaching across all that separates us, I take his hand. Because it's just too hard, sometimes, you know?
Under the buzzing fluorescent lights Jeff starts to smile at me. At home my mom is sitting at the kitchen table, trying to imagine how to hold our family of two together, wondering how she could have let that monster into our lives. Trying to imagine facing another lifetime of single motherhood. Across town Tye is on his black futon in his black room, smoking pot and contemplating the face of God. A thousand miles away Barry, new father for the third time, sits at his desk in his empty rental house and tries to remember how everything started to fall apart. He had once held a gun in his hand in that same room, only to realize that he can't back out of his life now, and he wonders if that could be anything but weakness.