May 23rd, 2007, 9:49 pm

Ready for the check

WASHINGTON, DC, May 23, 2007

Her steps were jagged; harsh crisscrosses on uneven pavement, the too-fluid jangle of hep in her veins.

She wore tight black jeans, and a tank, with a Michael Jackson-style fedora bent and tilted over one eye, fake diamond in her nose collecting DC sun, looking down with off-rhythm cadence:

“Excuse mema’am - I don’t drink, Idon’tdodrugs, and I’m twomonthspregnant and I needsome money, socouldyou help me girl, could you helpme?”

I told her I didn’t have any money, which was true, and I told her I couldn’t help her, which was truer, and what I didn’t tell her was that I needed help myself, walking home tootoofast, with the jangle in my veins just as sure as hers, steps straighter, mind clearer, but help much further away.

It’s a hard town for a white girl to get discombobulated in; cuz by the time you’ve walked home and showered and walked to the diner to set up with a beer and a sandwich and a Powerbook to write, all the poetry gets sucked out of ya.

It’s a blue meanie kinda day; the sort of day when you think about options and feel like they ain’t none, and you need a bit country but you’d settle for a bit rock and roll, or at least someplace smoky and smelly, with depressing old cankers and a persnickety juke box, with a long wooden table shuffleboard and a shaker of sawdust.

And hell o’mighty, how quick you can down that beer.

Now - I ain’t saying there are no stories in DC - I see the bones, in chewed fried chicken on concrete; whores who scream out “FUCK YOU, BITCH!” as you walk down 14th St. NW, piles of mattresses on the street, old ladies in their church-going hats, the firetruck that’s always there, escorting some stretcher, and the myriad, myriad grey suits with white commuting sneakers, avoiding eye contact, early morning, name-checking badges and thinking bout fleece-lined weekends, Excel-ing in the suburb sun.

They are across from me now, at the Diner on 18th St. NW; a pack of ‘em, suit-lined, six to a table, and I want to go up and shake lapels and scream: “This isn’t you! This isn’t life! When was the last time you tasted anything!”

But their mouths are full of french fries and policy, and their ears stuffed up from something else, and there’d be no point, really. It’s a holiday in Cambodia, or at least 3 a.m. in Lisboa; places and people living smaller and happier, less importantly and more honestly - or maybe none of that shit, maybe I made all that up.

A man named after a cartoon dinosaur dog did my hair this weekend.

Not conservative, not conservative, I told him - I am not from here, I am not one of them. But he persisted with “rich caramel highlights” that left my hair the same as before; only altering my wallet. I returned the next day and he protested; “I look at you and I don’t see studs. I don’t see a Ramones shirt. I don’t see wild and wacky. I see your green flipflops and your turquoise necklace, and you have your own style and that’s totally fine but I just don’t see a once a year girl needing the crazy color.” He gave me a red rinse and sent me along my way, and I held onto it until tonight, when I dared wash fragile red pigments down the drain.

I watched the pink water, as if knowing could stop it, arching my back in the dirty claw foot tub, seeing the color swirl out of me.