Small Axe Books

It’s hard to know exactly why Christa snapped. It might have been that heat spell back in June, when you could roast eggs on the sidewalk and little dogs and homeless people slumped in doorways, gasping the way fish do as they die on the bottoms of steel canoes. It could have been the glint of summer sunlight in the pocket watch her father sent her in his place as a birthday present, a gaudy reminder of his broken promise to visit. It could have been her mother’s threat to send her back to that psych ward at Our Lady of Souls for the summer, this time indefinitely.

Yeah, any of those could have caused it. I remember hearing an answering machine message with her voice all spacey, yet queerly resolved, saying it was over. Exactly what was over was never clear, but the next day she was gone. No note, no forwarding address, just an empty bedroom and a sink full of black, crusty hair. Her Dead Kennedys poster was missing, a memento of their last Chicago gig where Awol and his cousin got assaulted by ten skinheads in an alley for wearing Chais, and an alligator purse stuffed beyond capacity with the contents of three drawers and a medicine cabinet. She left her clothes, records, pictures, even a quarter bag of pot which her mother flushed down the toilet before any of us could smoke it in her memory.

I was seventeen, a black-clad pretty boy into eye-liner years after the North Shore punks thought it passe. Of course, none of us were in fashion then, “alternative” or otherwise. Christa called us all posers, and we were proud of the term. It meant that no one liked us–not the preppy Reaganist jockophiles we went to school with, nor the overprivileged denizens of the industrial concerts we went to semi-religiously. We were Christians–followers of Christa, the spiky haired Siouxsie Sioux look-alike who burst into St. Anthony’s High School with a confident disdain for the wealth-machismo based social order that hadn’t changed since June Cleaver’s kids went there in the ’50s. She didn’t care if she sat by herself in the cafeteria, thinking rejection by assholes the highest of compliments. Soon her lone table crowded with similar rejects, some self-styled as she, others (like myself) rejects plain and simple. Friendship with her was a blessing in the colossal curse that was high school, an island of truth in a vast sea of shit. Acceptance by her friends meant something to do on weekends besides watching PBS documentaries or tagging along to the drunken vomit-and-date-rape parties thrown by the St. Anthony’s social elite.

But she was gone now.

“Tristan! Tristan! Pick up man! I know you’re there!”

Dingo screamed at the answering machine a few seconds more before I got there, calling me more names than I care to remember for sadistically listening to him scream. I picked up with my calmest “hello” to piss him off further.

“About fuckin’ time! You heard from Christa? I’ve been calling all fuckin’ day. Now her number’s disconnected!”

“She’s gone, man.”

“Whadya mean, gone?!”

“I mean, she’s gone man. I got a message from her yesterday saying `it’s over.’ So I stopped by and her Mumsy wouldn’t let me in.”

“The bitch!”

“Yeah. So I climbed in through her window.”

“Use the rope I gave ya?”

“Yeah. And the grapple, too.”

“Good deal. I knew I’d teach ya something. Did she leave a note or anything?”

“Not that I saw. I had to book pretty quick, though, coz her mom started walking up the stairs. She only took a few things–some clothes, some make-up, her jacket, that DK poster Awol gave her. She left lots of shit behind–even her hair.”

“She cut her hair off?”

“Well, she left a lot of it in the sink. Guess she wanted to look different. A spiky-haired sixteen year old’s pretty easy to spot out here.”

“Yeah? So’s a bald one.”

Dingo calmed a little.

“I knew she’d run away,” he said softly. “Eventually. I wish she woulda called me. . . Hey! Did she take her pot?!”

“No.”

“Did you get it?”

“I didn’t have time.”

“You suck!”

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

“I’m sorry, man. I don’t wanna be morbid, just I’d really like to get stoned right now. No, what I’d really like to do is ice that bitch of a mom she’s got!”

“I know what you mean.”

“Hey! You busy? Let’s go over to Awol’s place. He’ll probably have some weed and we can tell him about Christa. Maybe he’ll know where she is. . . “

My dad was terminally depressed. He was out of work the whole past year and spent most of his time sleeping. I found him stretched out, as usual, on his bed all dark with late afternoon. He lay there on his back naked with his arms stretched out like Jesus, snoring and breathing painfully, his mountainous stomach rising and falling in fitful tremors.

“Dad?” I called.

His voice was deliriously distant. It was as if some other voices were occupying him and mine was a confusing interruption.

“What?” he managed to say.

“Dad, can I borrow the car?”

I was reasonably assured of a yes. If the old man said no, I could always wait a few minutes and ask again. He was so drugged up on the Haldol and Elavil the VA had given him that he would completely forget that I asked him before as well as his refusal. If worse came to worse, I’d just take the car. He’d never notice.

This time, though, he said “sure” right away. I always felt better when he approved and I didn’t have to fool him. He was a good guy, really, too fucked up to hold anything against. He usually let me do what I wanted to do, and I respected him for that. He also hated the government, and I respected him for that, too. He kept track of every crooked politician and every CIA plot. He was sure our phone was tapped, and there were times I believed him. I especially believed him when I was high, which made me debate whether the world was really some 1984 nightmare or whether I had inherited my dad’s paranoid schizophrenia. It also made me wonder why I got high in the first place, but with my young face, pot was easier to come by than alcohol.

The car was a steel-grey escort, the kind of car that screamed of the ’80s, a decade in which we were all trapped even after the fact. My dad paid some shyster car dealer three thousand dollars more than it was worth, and shit started going wrong with it about a week and a half after the warranty expired. Despite this, the old man lauded his decision to buy the car, as it helped him re-establish credit after his bankruptcy. To me, it was just a car, a means to an end. And my end was the far south suburbs, to rich white man land.

Most of Christa’s circle lived in the rich white man suburbs, myself an exception. I was from the trashy white man suburb of Calumet City, though increasingly it was just trashy. This made me despise it a little less, but it still sucked. All suburbs suck. The benevolent powers that be wonder why we young people are into drugs and drinking so much, and yet they insist on closing everything by 9 pm. Maybe if there was something to do, we’d stay straight.

But they would never let us have things to do. That would be as illogical to them as making high school classes interesting. Or mall jobs well-paying. Christa once said that the whole system is designed to make people fail so we could be bored little minimum wage-slaves for the rest of our lives. The few who do “succeed” in life are so brainwashed by the time they get any power that they forget where they came from. Then they become the assholes who oppress the next generation.

Dingo waited outside his parents’ house, perched on the hood of the Brown Hornet. That’s what he called the ’83 Buick Skylark his older brother got third hand from his parents. The brother, Detox, was a beer-swilling metal-head who crashed the last car his parents got him a month after he got it. But he never challenged the old man, a vindictive 40-something with boots full of jungle-rot and a heart of the same. The old man liked Detox, even if he was a fuck-up, mainly because he wasn’t Dingo. Dingo had made enemies with the old man about the time he was born, or maybe a little afterwards. His mother told him stories of how the old man would hold the little one year old Dingo (they called him Dean then), softly calling him his “grey-eyed man of destiny.”

Dingo’s eyes were blue now, an icy Aryan blue that shot defiant arrows into anything they surveyed. His close-cropped hair was a shade too blonde to be natural, and stuck out unevenly. He wore a threadbare denim jacket, just thin enough for summer, its pockets bulging with a mysterious assortment of objects he considered useful. The most useful, his Swiss Army knife, was in his hand picking the nails of the other.

“Hey, doc,” he said as I pulled up.

“Hey.”

Dingo approached the car, made a turn to the back, then spun forward and opened my door. He wrapped his arm around my neck as I fell against him, his knife to my throat. I saw him upside down, an amused smile on his face.

“You finished yet?” I asked dryly.

“Ya gotta watch yourself, doc,” he smiled.

“Maybe. You know, it’s a long walk to Awol’s.”

He laughed and withdrew his knife. I pulled myself back into the car as he got in the other side.

“You know, Dingo, if you had any balls, you’d be pulling shit like that with your enemies instead of your friends.”

“I’m just tryin’ to teach ya something, doc.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“Watch your back.”

“You attacked me from the side.”

“Gotta watch that, too.”

“Hmmm. Well, thanks a bunch for the lesson. I feel very enlightened now.”

What Dingo wanted more than anything else was for me to get angry enough to be physically violent. This would never happen. My skinny 5’8″ body necessitated pacificism. To confront Dingo’s wiry 6’2″ brown-belted frame would be worse than pointless. The only way to maintain my dignity was to act as unimpressed as possible, something I developed into an artform.

Awol had his own apartment. No one really knew how he paid for it. The place was one of those pseudo-’70s pads you only find in the suburbs, the carpeted floors all orange and gold and Chinese red. His few bits of furniture hailed from the same period, the relics of some hippie-turned-yuppie’s garage sale. He had three lava lamps, and wore a mood ring (albeit on a chain around his neck). He even had a smoked mirror inlaid into one of his walls. His poster-print of Charles Manson made the ’60s quaintness fall apart, though, like bits of a shredded tie-dye.

He was playing the Velvet Underground, the album with the banana on it, I think. He ignored us as we walked in, seated at a little card table near his balcony in his black and red anarchy shirt, his orange mohawk hair falling loosely in dread-like strands. Across from him stood two guys I didn’t know. They smiled, watching him measure out little mushroom stalks into a plastic baggie. Nyota lounged on the wrap-around sofa, her natural dread-locks flowing down to her shoulders. She sipped a cup of tea.

“How are you guys?” she asked without expression. “Heard from Christa?”

“Yeah, yesterday,” I answered, my tone matching hers. “She’s gone now. Anybody know where she is?”

“Awol seems to. He’s a bit busy now, though.”

Awol pushed a few strands of hair back behind his triple-pierced ear. He adjusted his glasses.

“That should be it,” he said, weighing the baggie. “I picked an even number of caps so it’s easier to split.”

“Thanks, man,” said the shorter guy. He pocketed the bag and produced some green bills which he laid on the table. Awol glanced at them a second, then away again. He rose to see them to the door. Before they hit the stairs I was already in Awol’s fridge to steal a swallow or three from the bottle of Stolie he perennially kept there.

The door slammed shut. “Put that away,” Awol said with unusual clarity.

“Oh, man,” I begged. “Can I have just one pull?”

“Take it with you then.”

Awol grabbed his jacket and told everyone else to do the same. I grabbed my trenchcoat in one hand and the bottle of vodka in the other. Nyota threw on her oversized baja and shouldered her hemp-fiber purse.

The questions came in waves. “Have you heard from Christa?” “Do you know where she is?” “Why’d she take off?” “Is she coming back?”

But Awol said only that he had heard from her, and that we all had to go now, and so we followed dumbly to his van hoping he would explain as we went.

My sense of direction has never been very good. I’ve been known to get lost ten blocks from my own house. But after a few minutes in Awol’s van, I knew it wasn’t just my directional incompetence that made me feel lost. Awol was taking us far out of the way of our normal paths. He weaved in and out of the fast lanes of main thoroughfares, breezing past the endless stripmalls and glassy office buildings of suburbia, then onto obscure side roads lit only by intermittent starlight. We seemed more and more remote with each passing mile, and Awol remained annoyingly vague about our destination.

Half way through, I realized Nyota had been talking to me as I was zoning. She had the incessant, giddy babble of someone who had smoked far too much. I found myself unconsciously granting assent when a string of words stopped, and wondered suddenly what I’d been agreeing to for the past five minutes.

“. . . So you see what I mean, Tris, right? I mean, you could hardly expect me to say no.”

“Uh, right.”

“I mean, it’s not every day you get a chance to do that. Y’know?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever done that, Tris?”

I was caught. Either I had to make some half-ass attempt at an answer (no I haven’t, maybe), or I would have to ask her to explain the last five or ten minutes over again, which even if it would not have been rude would have been far too taxing on my vodka-soaked brain.

“Actually, Nyota, I’ve been kinda zoning. I’m worried about Christa.”

I heard myself say it, like my voice in a movie, without forethought. Nyota nodded solemnly.

“Me too.”

No one thought to ask Awol, whose eyes fixed on the patch of buckled road in his headlights. Actually, everyone thought to ask him, but we realized how useless it was. We would find out when we were meant to, when and if Awol arrived at his destination.

The great hulking mass of an abandoned factory came at last into view, its shadows more ominous for the feeble headlights. Awol slowed to a stop, parking behind a rusty dumpster near the factory gates.

“This it, doc?” Dingo spat.

“Yeah,” Awol said. “This is it.”

“Why all the secrecy, then? I’ve been here before.”

“Yeah, me too,” Nyota added.

I said nothing, though I dimly recognized the place.

“There’s no secrecy,” Awol scoffed, opening the door and beckoning us to follow. “I just didn’t feel like talking about it then.”

“How ’bout now?” Dingo pressed.

“Just follow me.”

We walked with Awol to the side gate and watched him lug his hefty form over the top with some difficulty. Nyota and I followed, our lighter bodies making the climb and jump easier. Dingo insisted on using a rope he fished from his backpack that latched to the top with a grapple hook. When he got there, he clipped the barbed wire with a pair of pliers. The three of us disappeared into the building before we could admire Dingo’s ingenuity, crossing the crumbling blacktop all overgrown with weeds and bathed in the light of a florescent bulb twenty feet above, one of those buzzing things that stay lit years after they should have burnt out.

The inside of the factory was a dark contrast, a cavernous place thick with the smell of dust and machine oil, lit only by the moonlight that managed to filter in through the filthy windows near the roof. Our eyes adjusted slowly, and even when we could see our hands in front of our faces, the piles of rusty barrels and mangled machinery assumed ominous shapes in the darkness. Shadows in the corners seemed to have form, almost breathing. Distant scurries along the pipes added to an uncanny feeling of being watched, most certainly by hundreds of pairs of tiny rodent eyes, and perhaps by something more. A crackle resonated from the far corner, and a flickering glow grew brighter as our eyes adjusted.

“There’s a fire,” I whispered.

Dingo slapped my arm to shut me up. Awol advanced toward the glow, shaking his arm free of Dingo’s grasp. We all followed, at a distance.

Rounding what was once part of an assembly line, we saw the source of the light. A small campfire burned in a circle of rusty metal, a severed section of an oil drum. A long pipe lay behind it, with rocks and cinderblock bricks running along the length. Wooden planks lay between them, forming a bunk above the filthy floor. An army blanket covered a form which rose and fell, breathing. Awol smiled.

“Christa?” he called.

The form stirred. He called again. The form stirred again and at length an unfamiliar face peered out from the covers. A woman in her thirties, though she looked older, her face the color of sun-dulled leather, stared at us through bloodshot green eyes. She held something small to her breast that coughed weakly. She spoke, flashing crooked teeth as yellow as her matted hair.

“Who are ya?” she asked harshly. “Whadya want?”

Awol’s smile faded.

“We’re looking for someone,” he said.

“Ain’t nobody here ‘cept me and Obi and the kid here. Go ‘way now, else she’ll wake up.”

She turned away and fell back to sleep.

“What now?” Nyota whispered.

“I don’t know,” Awol said slowly. “Christa said she’d be here.”

“When she tell ya that?” I asked.

“She left an answering machine message yesterday.”

“Well that was yesterday, doc,” Dingo said needlessly. “She’s obviously not here today.”

“But she said she would be.”

“Lookin’ for Christa?”

The voice came from behind, a deep male voice. We spun around to see a tall, fortyish man in Army fatigues. He smiled at us, amused at how startled we all were.

“Well?” he asked. “Ain’t that who you’re all looking for?”

“How do you know her name?” Awol asked suspiciously.

“You kids got a bad memory. Christa said you wouldn’t remember me. Got a tendency to edit your brain cells, I guess. Or maybe you just lost some. People like me don’t stick in your mind too long. People like me are statistics.”

He was familiar, something about his bony, sallow mahogany face, his dark gentle bulging eyes, the black triangle pin on his floppy hat. That pin . . .

“Fuck it,” he said without malice, and shrugged his shoulders. He walked to the plank bed and sat down beside sleeping woman. He pulled out a bunch of hotdogs wrapt in plastic from his jacket and offered us some. When we refused, he shrugged again and stuck one on the end of a car antenna, putting it into the fire to roast.

Awol glared at him. “Look! You still haven’t explained how you know Christa.”

“Fuck it, man! I know her, that’s all! If you can’t do me the common courtesy of remembering who I am, why should I tell you anything?!”

“Do you know where she is?” Nyota asked gently.

He softened a little. “Naw,” he said. “She left a few hours ago. ‘Fraid the cops’d get her. She said people might come lookin’ for her, though. She left a message on the wall over there.”

He went back to his hotdog. We walked over to the wall he had indicated. It was a mess of graffiti, mostly gang shit claiming this rat infested pile of rocks and metal the property of the Vicelords or the Kings or the Folks or refuting those claims. The fight had gone back and forth for years, the oldest symbols fading into the stone in an endless succession of crowns and pitchforks right-side up and then upside-down and then right-side-up again. There, scrawled in black over all of it, was the single word ANARRES.

It was typical Christa. One word with anarchy A’s and a backwards S. One word, no context, cryptically suspended in limbo.

“What the hell does that mean?!” Awol shouted, frustrated to the point of losing it. Everyone drew a blank.

Then I remembered.