Christopher Alessandrini

Once when I was very young, the girl I loved had a seizure in the deep end. Her name was Melanie Fitzgerald, and I didn’t much like her. We spoke very little, and when we did, it left an ugly, pitted feeling in my stomach. The dull features of her face scrunched tight around the nose, and the ends of her mouth were in the habit of turning inward and down. We were playing Marco Polo, a group of us, the tall boys inching along the sides of the pool to six feet. And she followed them, her hair fanning flat where it met the water. She walked until the water kissed her chin. It was midday, and the sun made her hair shine like lacquered wood.

I could feel the pool jet against my stomach, as if it were trying to burrow deeper under the skin. It seemed a very pure force. When I turned again she was facedown on the water’s surface. Someone was shouting, the lifeguard maybe, or one of the tall boys. They dragged her to the stairs at the head of the pool, where she floated in the gentle tide like a skiff.

We exited single file from the pool, and as I left, I felt her hair tickle the back of my legs. For a moment I grew warm all over. The water winked and dimpled in the sunlight, so that everything shone impossibly white. Two of the tall boys had their hands about her wrists, anchoring her, and there were many other children shivering poolside to watch the spectacle play out.

In the locker room later—after the ambulance had arrived, and all the tall boys were in the showers making jokes—I rubbed my legs until I didn’t feel anything at all, just the raw red make of my skin, the dead memory of her hair along my legs, how real it felt, even then.

Chronologies have never interested me. I’m going to keep things to the bone. I’m going to tell you only what you need to know. Some have said that in my retelling I withhold or that I do not fill in the right gaps. Maybe this is true. But this is all I have—the memory of a place, and the people who, for a time, occupied it.



Each of us was going to run away. It was only a matter of time, we said. There were the four of us: Kennie and Levi and Fresno and me. We drove the Strip for hours. We took Fresno’s car, a shitty blue pickup given him by his father, a farmhand, for his sixteenth birthday. We got burgers and shakes at this little drive-through where the waitresses still went around on rollerblades. They all smelled of cherry cola, the waitresses, and went by names like Brenda or Linda or Sherry or Jill. When their shifts ended, they exchanged their rollerblades for checkered pumps and short skirts.

The Strip lit up like a carnival at night, the electric signs flashing and winking like schoolgirls, the night sky opening up beyond the lights to where the hills grew dark and tall with pine. At the end of the Strip the lights stopped blinking and the storefronts went dead with plywood. Fresno turned us around and we started north again, toward the lights and the crowds. Fresno was a good kid. He was the first to go.



Kennie went to vocational school the next town over where she learned to work cars. She had three piercings in each ear, a nose ring, and one on her belly button. We met in junior high when she was the new girl and she asked me to dance. We kissed on the dance floor. Freshman year of high school she told me she’d fallen for a girl. Then she switched to the vocational school.

It was about that time that Levi and I met at Saint Paul’s Rehabilitation Center for Wayward Youths. Saint Paul’s had stone buildings with cupolas and porte-coche?res and therapists who combed their hair to one side and didn’t think a thing of taking three-week “hiatuses” to Geneva or the Berkshires. Levi was in for being a sexual deviant and I was there because I didn’t seem to have many thoughts of value and that didn’t bother me.

I slept on the top bunk in a room with four beds and one window. Every morning I slammed my head on the ceiling. The schoolmasters at Saint Paul’s didn’t know much. They bettered my handwriting and claimed improvement in French and Latin. They taught me not to leave my elbows on the dining room table and I learned the importance of cufflinks, something I wouldn’t use until many years later. When I returned to school my junior year, people thought I was the wrong kind of kid. That made me a lot of friends, though I couldn’t give you any of their names now.



The girls at Queenie’s had little red and gold tassels clipped to their nipples. Friday nights they lit the neon signs over the bar and served fifty-cent wings and fixed the jukebox so it played the whole song catalog on loop. Kennie’s friend Margot performed Friday nights and we went to watch her. Levi and I met Kennie and Fresno at the round table off the bar near the jukebox.

We only knew about Queenie’s on account of Kennie’s meeting Margot. The vocational school offered free car tune-ups as practice for the students. Margot brought her old Chevy in and Kennie got it running good as new. After that they started seeing each other. Kennie said Margot was like nobody she’d ever met. She had a theater degree from a little school in Michigan and her hair was a new color each week. That first time it was red.

Margot was a character. She had wide owl eyes and the very smooth dark skin that men found attractive. She knew things, like how much eye shadow was too much and which outfits made the right kind of men like her. For her the whole thing was a hoot. When she was drunk enough, and enough men had squeezed her thighs, and the skinny pimpled barmen had stopped giving her free drinks, she turned to me and said, “This whole thing’s a hoot, you know. Hoot-hoot-hoot.” What was I supposed to say? I bought her a drink.

Kennie brought us to Margot’s shows. Margot circled our table with a big cherry-lipped smile to her face and performed the little tassel bit for each of us before walking to the next table to tassel for the paying gentlemen. They pinched her cheeks and about once a week one would grow gutsy enough to squeeze her breasts and she would shriek and play coy, then rub her backside along his shoulders as he closed his eyes and moaned. Margot told us she only did this for the ones who didn’t wear wedding rings. She said she couldn’t respect the men who didn’t even pretend.

Fresno was Hispanic and well-muscled, a good-looking kid one year our junior who studied cars with Kennie at the vocational school. He said he was born in Mexico and that he wanted to travel America in a flatbed. Those were the two main things on his mind at any given moment: Mexico and the road. He always had gum. Usually he chewed three to four pieces at once, a thick little wad in his mouth like a wine cork. He’d fallen for Kennie even though he knew about her and Margot. When Margot flitted about him with her tasseled nipples he always stared ahead at Kennie, who stared ahead at Margot.



There was a little tin bell over the door at Queenie’s that you only ever heard as you walked in or out. The rest of the time the music was so loud you didn’t know if people were coming and going.

No one carded at Queenie’s. The barmen were drunk half the time and the bouncer was a regular goof called Charlie who spent most of his time doing hits with the manager in the back lot. He was friendly and calm and when he wasn’t stoned he played at shooing people from the door. But for the most part he couldn’t keep his mouth in a straight line for more than thirty seconds. He liked a good time, and for years Queenie’s played the part.

Levi and I played games like, How many people will Charlie turn away tonight? Or, How many drinks will Margot get for Kennie tonight? Or, How many times will Fresno rub Kennie’s hand across the table? After tallying our scores, we escaped to the back lot. Levi had a soft tongue and nice smooth cheeks and he didn’t go slack when we kissed. Then we sat and smoked a pack of Pall Malls and he’d tell me about the men he met online—who they were, and how he used them.



After they found Fresno’s body, I started to forget things. Small things at first, like the names of grade school teachers, or where I’d left my wallet. Then bigger things: which bus led home, where to find a good time, my mother’s maiden name. People mistook this for grief. They said it was only natural.


Once Charlie sat at our table and spent the afternoon with us. When Margot returned from her rounds he told us about this job he’d had right after high school mowing a rich man’s lawn. He said he spent most of the time sitting in the tool shed, which was bigger than the studio apartment he shared at the time with two roommates, reading *Playboy* and drinking virgin pale ales he found in a wheelbarrow. He said the job had definite perks. One was that he got to watch the house when the mister and his family went on vacation, which was often, and for extended periods. Another was that the mister’s daughter was a thing of beauty.

“She was purty,” he said.

“P-U-R-T-Y.” He pawed the rash on his cheek.

“Did you make the moves on her, Charlie?” Margot said with a drag. Smoke went from her nostrils like she was a bull, or a sorceress. “Did you take her away and make her yours?”

“I had half a mind.”

“Half a mind only, Charlie?”

“Half a mind only.”

“Tell us about her.” I leaned forward and burped into my glass. Levi popped a PBR and slid it my way but not without taking a sip first. I made no move for the can, as I didn’t like thinking where Levi’s lips went at night.

“Tell us everything.” Margot was fixing her bra. It slipped around a lot after shows. She held Kennie’s hand under the table. I could feel Fresno watching.

“Oh I would but it makes me sad,” Charlie said. He blinked a few times fast and we all laughed. “Charlie doesn’t like to be sad. Charlie hasn’t got *time* to be sad.”

“Why’d you quit?” Kennie asked. She wasn’t even listening.

“Didn’t,” Charlie said. He grinned so we saw his missing teeth. “I drove the mower into the pool and that done me in.”

“That done him in!” Kennie and Margot shrilled.

“Oh yeah it did,” Charlie said. “It done him in good.”