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Bradley's is closing. The end of an era. The bar is packed. It's 2 am. There's a crush of preppy women in black velvet headbands dancing on the scarred oak bar, sliding around in puddles of beer and scotch. Bras are being shed, flung up to the rafters. Stockbrokers and financial planners sans jacket and tie are jumping up to snatch stray La Perla lingerie out of the air. I can smell Polo aftershave and Drakkar Noir and I close my eyes and it's the late eighties.
I'm pressed in a corner next to the jukebox. A cute real estate attorney is leaning over me, spilling his beer straight down my back. His eyes are wide and blue and there's something in his grin that speaks of Robin. He's talking and I'm smiling and nodding and hovering maybe ten feet above us.
its all right if you love me its all right if you don't
1981. I was in sixth grade. I was twelve years old. It was homecoming weekend. I had a new white Esprit sweater to wear to the parade down Main Street in town. I had a jeans jacket lined in plaid flannel to wear to the football game the next day. Next fall I would be in my first year of junior high school.
I went over to Paige Thorne's house before the parade. Paige Thorne's older sister was 16 and a varsity cheerleader at the senior high school. She and a bunch of her friends were hanging out on the lawn chairs in the back yard.
Paige Thorne and I watched them from an upstairs window. A grinning boy stretched across a lounge chair was Robin Altemus. There was no bolt of lightning. There was no stunning premonition that just about four years from that day I would be in a bar, drunk, smoking, stoned, with a dead father, and kissing that lazy smiling boy in an alley behind the bar.
I just noticed he was cute and tucked him away. Being up close and personal to a high school boy was significantly important to me at the age of twelve that I remembered that day.
i'm not afraid of you running away darling i get the feeling you won't
The lawyer raises his right hand, sort of brushes my cheek. His face changes, and for a second he looks exactly like Robin. I shake my head abruptly, dispel the image. Ask him to get me another drink. Move away. He's nice, I think. And I'm completely not interested.
dykes and fairies tell me where the sanity is
The next year, I was in seventh grade. My first year of junior high school. I shared a locker with Claire Faye. We travelled in a pack of ten, even had a secret club name for ourselves that is far too embarrassing to reveal here. I will say that name hinged on the number 69, which was Lucia's address. We came up with the name at her slumber party.
We were popular, I suppose, although in seventh grade we were far too wrapped up in trying to adjust to changing classes and ninth graders to spend much time strictly drawing lines in the sands of the social strata of adolescence. We listened to Pat Benatar and Joan Jett and Joe Jackson.
There were two absolutely mesmerising ninth grade girls. One of them was fair and blonde and resembled Olivia Newton-John. The other had super-long feathered dark hair and wore ankle boots and looked like a prettier Joan Jett. Amanda and Angela. I could not take my eyes off of them. They were best friends, and the contrast between them completely fascinated me.
I was once in the girls' locker room, brushing my hair. In the mirror I surreptitiously watched as Angela pulled out a tiny Ultima II compact, laden with little rows and pots of brightly-coloured eye shadow. I was dying to touch her hair.
I walked the next day after school to Saks and looked at all of the little pots of eye makeup. I bought an Aziza eyeshadow trio at the drugstore on my way home. Three shades of a silvery gray. I played with it for months, contouring and highlighting endlessly in Nan's mirror, but the first time I would even dare wear it out in public would be my Bas Mitzvah, still to come in June. To this day, I credit Angela with my obsession with Pupa kits.
I think I had a crush on Angela, although at the time I would have denied it. I had had a crush on a girl like her once before, when I was at sleep-away camp. Gabriella had old eyes and a Brooklyn accent and I loved her fiercely. Her accent seemed darkly exotic to me. At nine years old, it didn't particularly bother me that I had a crush on another girl.
Anyway, since Gabriela, I have been drawn to this type of woman, and Angela definitely fell under my version of interesting. I followed Angela around the entire year, and since she was friends with my next-door-neighbour, I actually hung out with her once or twice as well. I stammered around Angela in a way that I never did around the boys in my grade.
At the end of the year, Angela graduated from junior high and moved on to high school. Whereupon she immediately began dating Robin Altemus, a senior to Angela's sophomore. They went out until Angela left for college.
i'd love to change the world but i don't know what to do so i leave it up to you
So even though Robin and didn't officially meet until late 1985, I had been aware of him since I was 12 years old in 1981. And he had been aware of me since the summer of 1985. Six months after Robin and I began dating, he admitted to me that he had first spotted me at homecoming.
"You what?" I said incredulously. "You remember that?" I thought he was talking about back when I was in sixth grade, peering out the window at Paige Thorne's.
"What? It was less than a year ago. I saw you at Morgan's party that night."
"Oh."
"What were you were talking about?"
I told him about the day I had watched him with Paige Thorne, hanging out in the back with Chris Carradine and Ellen Thorne, Paige's sister. "It's hardly worth mentioning..." I finished.
He leaned back. "I remember that day." He was elated. "That was you? I remember you. I was in tenth grade. You were running around with Ellen's little sister. We knew you were watching us. I can't believe that was you. How fucking perfect." He cracked up. "Jesus, you're young."
I put my hand over his mouth. "Don't tell anyone." I leaned in and kissed him behind his ear. "It'd ruin my reputation," I murmured into his neck.
you looked into my eyes just once an instant flashing by that we were stealing
I am at a loss as to what to do about Robin.
I loved him, you know?
I loved him so much that I ached for him for years. He was my light my life my muse. There isn't ever going to be another Robin, not because he doesn't exist, and not because there isn't someone out there who's right for me.
Maybe that someone does exist, maybe he walks this earth and maybe someday we will be introduced over cocktails at the Central Park Boathouse at the tacky wedding of one of my future co-workers. Maybe he'll have light eyes and a secret smile and a certain hardness about him.
And maybe we'll go out for dinner, and connect on every level, and sit talking until 3 am at the bar in The Mark lobby because the restaurant asked us to move around 1 am because they were closing up. And maybe he'll walk me the three blocks home and we'll go out every night that week and come together in a clash of bodies and sweat and heat a few weeks later.
And then maybe we'll meet each other's parents and a date will be set for a year later and we'll grin at each at the altar.
Maybe it's this lawyer here, with the lazy grin walking back to me now, my scotch in his hand, weaving through the crowd.
But it still won't be like Robin. Not Robin, the man. It won't be like Robin, the feeling.
It's not that he isn't out there, for I cannot presume to know the future. It's that, even if he is out there, and I do find him and end up with him, it's that I won't ever relax that much into to fall so hard again. It doesn't happen twice in a lifetime. Well, it doesn't in my lifetime.
maybe i'm amazed
It's me. I'm going to fuck it up, because I lost the faith. And I so want to be proved wrong, but I'm afraid to wish for more. It costs too much when you lose.
I've caught a couple of glimpses of him on the television these last few weeks. It's easy for me to spot him. I can recognise him by the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. The camera could pan across a milling throng of thousands and I'll still pick him right out.
Hey, Rob?
Sometimes I just try it on for size. I'll be brushing my teeth late at night, and I'll say his name out loud, testing the sound of it, of him, here in my bathroom. Trying to see if it still fits.
somebody fine will come along and make me forget about loving you
With me always Robin.
I'm sick of thinking about all of this. Or rather, thinking about all of this is making me sick. I don't want to think about Robin anymore. My feelings about him are really complicated. I can't get far away enough from the situation to examine it coherently.
It's not just Robin. How I feel about him is all wrapped up in how I perceive myself. He has always been with me. I cannot remember a time that there was no Robin. Even the years before 1981, I feel like it was all practice for him. That every choice I made, every step I took away from my family, towards boys and drinking and finally the drugs was all part of a primrose path that lead me to him. I don't know if I believe in fate, but Robin and I have a million little stories that weave the weird overlap of the paths our lives took until the night we finally connected.
Robin and I are tied together in so many ways that I don't have the foggiest idea which is the thread that will unravel it all. And I keep finding myself pulling these strings, testing his boundaries, walking away and coming back. I've been doing this to him since January. And he's letting me.
Because he knows as well as I do, if we walk away from this now, if we let go forever, we're giving up an awful lot. It's not just the loss of us, it's the loss of all that feeling and hope carried through all the years after we split up.
I guess the real question at this point is not what's keeping us apart. It's what's keeping us together. We keep hanging in, pulling at the threads. Either we'll keep at it until we manage to tug the one that unravels us, or we won't.
is it true you might want a better life think about it baby
"Robin Altemus? Are you fucking insane?"
"Um, no."
"Is he still using?"
"No. He doesn't drink anymore, either. And he doesn't hit me, if that was going to be your next question."
"I didn't think he would hit you."
"Well. It just seemed like you were on a roll."